THIS ERIC GILL STATUE AFFAIR AIN’T LIKE COLSTON (NOPE, NOT AT ALL)

For those who haven’t heard yet, this week a man attacked a statue outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House. At least ostensibly as a protest against the artist’s child abuse. And it’s true that Eric Gill abused his own daughters. Among others.

So soon after the Colston verdict, the tabloids lost no time in making comparsions. The Mail referred to him as an “activist” in their headline, one of their favoured smear terms. It is possible, I suppose, that the guy embarked on this after reading their reports, and assumed it really was open season on statues. If so, he’s soon to be disabused. But it will be the Mail and their ilk to blame for feeding him that disinformation, not the Colston jury.

It’s conceivable this was a far right stunt, a tit for tat. Should that prove true, provoking a prosecution would be the point. So they could say “see how the law favours the woke mob over us,” and all of that. They have a near-obsession with pedophilia which reeks of guilty conscience, they like to stick it to the BBC, and they have tried to put the two together before now. Some reports say the man graffiti’d ‘Noose all pedos’, and seemed especially exercised about chopping off the child’s penis, like that was the main cause of offence. If this is correct, we’ll most likely find out.

But either way, comparisons to Colston’s overdue bath are bogus. There’d been longstanding opposition to that statue in Bristol, a multi-racial city. And it came down in the midst of a large anti-racist demo, at a time Black Lives Matter events were going round the world. The cops picked out four people from the crowd because that’s what they always do, not because that’s a reflection of what happened. And when you live in a society as atomised as ours, building human community has its own value. While the Gill statue was attacked by precisely one man, plus an accomplice. You don’t get to chant “whose streets, our streets” when there’s two of you.

Furthermore, the whole idea of the Colston statue was that you’d look up at it and see a great benefactor, a man whose sharp mind and industrious nature had won him wealth, which he’d kindly bestowed on the people of Bristol. The fact that this stash of cash was based on slavery, on the wages he didn’t pay people, was figleafed. I reckon even I could get rich if I had a whole bunch of people working for me for bugger all. That statue was there to obscure history, which pulling it down revealed.

Gill’s work was often eroticised, and he used his daughters as models while still children. There’s no neat dividing line to be drawn between his art and sorry life. But, crucially, he was not a sculptor because he was an abuser, the way Colston was a bigwig because he was a slaver.

And there’s no public debate over Gill the way there is Colston. no-one is saying “child abuse may be bad by today’s standards, but that was back then”. I mean, if they wanted to be consistent, they would be. But they’re not.

Now me, I’m interested in British Modernism and the awkward truth is that Gill was a great artist. If a London gallery gave a show to him, provided his abuse wasn’t shield away from, I think I’d probably go. And it most likely wouldn’t be shied away from. Two recent(ish) London shows on Gauguin, at the Tate and National respectively, highlighted his sex tourism. (Art appreciation is a thorn bush of this stuff. The recent death of Ronnie Spector has reminded us just what a complete creep Phil was. While there’s no denying the value of the music he made.)

But when a statue’s outside a public building, there’s little opportunity for context. Art, some of us like it. But that doesn’t mean aesthetic quality trumps political concerns. Art isn’t above life, but part of it.

So, you may be asking, do I think it should come down?

The question is misconceived.

These things get framed the same way that dodgy police behaviour does, as bad apples, exceptions to the rule which must be weeded out. But Britain’s current wealth stems from the British Empire, which was built on slavery and colonialism. The only forms of brutality it didn’t use were the ones that hand’t been invented yet. For example, female slaves were commonly raped with impunity by their ‘owners’. The notion of assembling a shopping list of statues and artworks that need coming down, in strict preference order, fails to comprehend this. The problem is structural and endemic.

And ultimately I agree with Gary Younge, the right answer to the question of who should get a statue is no-one. Even people I admire. It smacks of heroism, of the discredited Great Man theory of history. We don’t just have different Heroes Galleries to them. We don’t think like them at all.

If there was a groundswell of local support to this statue going, I guess I’d go along with that. As someone-or-other said recently, solidarity is a verb. But without that… well, it’s not exactly a priority, is it? Aren’t living, breathing people more important than lumps of stone and bronze? Tory cuts have closed women’s refuges and denied legal aid to domestic violence victims. Cops have attacked women’s vigils. We all know this. Opposing all that somehow seems more important right now. Something to try next time, two shouty blokes with a ladder?