London’s real underground art scene
London’s underground is first and foremost a transport system moving tens of thousands of people around the city each day – but it is also a visionary patron and promoter of contemporary art
WORDS YOLANDA ZAPPATERRA
CARRYING MORE THAN A BILLION PASSENGERS A YEAR, with 249 miles of track criss-crossing below the city, the Tube is a supreme feat of engineering – as well as an integral part of London life. Amid the welter of commuters, free newspapers, footsore shoppers, pushchair-wielding mums and garbled public announcements, there is a more unexpected presence: art. Once you start looking, it’s everywhere, from the covers of the free pocket-sized maps (currently sporting a rash of bright, psychedelic spots designed by polka-dot obsessed Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama) to the very fabric of the stations, with their tiling, posters and digital screens.
Unbeknown to most, London’s Underground system is a vast platform for contemporary art. Curating the artworks is Tamsin Dillon, head of Transport for London’s Art on the Underground programme. For a decade, she and her team have overseen a programme of pieces and installations that don’t pull their punches and aren’t obvious crowd-pleasers, but are thought-provoking, unexpected and engaging. They have to be: as Dillon points out, the chaotic setting is a far cry from a conventional gallery space. ‘It’s an incredible place, but it’s a challenge as well,’ she says. ‘The projects have to compete with so many other things, and there’s an awful lot to take into account.’
Indeed. Aside from the tricky task of pleasing her paymasters, various funding bodies, advisory committees, the art world and, of course, the public, there is the cherished art and design legacy of Frank Pick, who worked at London Transport in various roles between 1906 and 1940. Pick was a visionary, a modern man who saw the importance of a cohesive design strategy across London’s Underground system, down to the last detail. It was he who commissioned an elegantly legible typeface for the Underground (still in use today, with minor modifications), who asked Harry Beck to redesign the Tube map and who, ‘after many fumbling experiments’, set up standardised sites for advertisements and posters on the tickets halls, platforms and miles of corridors.
While Pick was a resolutely practical man (‘the test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish’), he also took an enlightened approach to art and design. ‘Art on the Underground has always been cutting edge and forward thinking,’ says Dillon. ‘Everything Pick commissioned and implemented reflected contemporary thinking, from the posters of Man Ray, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Paul Nash to the architecture of Charles Holden – who designed the London Transport building at 55 Broadway and a number of stations – and the sculpture of Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Henry Moore.’
Pick’s resolute modernity was the cornerstone in a belief that thoughtful contemporary art could – and should – be an inherent part of the user experience on a transport system. Although he left London Transport in 1940 and died a year later, Pick’s legacy lived on: in David Gentleman’s platform-length mural (1979) at Charing Cross Road station, say, or Eduardo Paolozzi’s swathes of technicolour tiles at Tottenham Court Road station (1984). It also lies at the heart of Dillon’s present-day programme, which over the years has engaged transport users with a huge array of artworks and community projects, spanning film, performance, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, writing and sound.
The programme’s breadth might seem to place it poles apart from Pick’s idea of total design, but conceptually it couldn’t be closer. Dillon and her team give artists the opportunity to respond to the network and invite them to make work that creates an interesting engagement with the space. The intention is that the resulting work enhances the Tube user’s journey and promotes London as a city of culture – all of which continues the work Frank Pick began some 80 years ago.
Dillon’s projects have evolved far beyond her first venture in 2003, in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery: ten bold, large-scale self-portraits by Cindy Sherman, shown on billboards at Gloucester Road station. It drew a wealth of positive coverage, as did ‘I WE IT’, the text-based work by Mark Titchner that followed it. Titchner’s piece was an early example of something that would become a favourite motif for participating artists: playing with the fact that messages – in the form of advertising or information – lie at the heart of the network. ‘Many of the artists are interested in putting messages out that raise questions around what’s being said and not said; about who’s speaking and who has the right to speak in a space like this,’ explains Dillon. ‘A lot of the artists recognise that the programme is supported by London Underground, so they perhaps see it as a corporate programme and deliberately make work that plays with that relationship.’
In recent years, projects have engaged with staff and transport users alike in increasingly innovative ways. In 2009, Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller’s ‘What is the city but the people?’ had Piccadilly line drivers using quotations from Gandhi (‘There is more to life than increasing its speed’) and Sartre (the pithy ‘Hell is other people’) in their onboard announcements. In 2010, Dryden Goodwin embarked on ‘Linear’, a 60-strong series of pencil portraits of Jubilee line staff. Each is accompanied by a short film of the drawing being made, which is available to watch online.
Over on the Central line, meanwhile, Michael Landy’s current ‘Acts of Kindness’ project invites travellers to submit accounts of kind acts they have experienced or witnessed while travelling on the Tube, from proffered pocket-handkerchiefs to help with heavy suitcases. Its motif, a red paper chain figure, has even been incorporated into the trains’ design. ‘We discovered that the Central line’s entire fleet of trains was being refreshed, which gave us the opportunity to put a story into one carriage per train, but also to incorporate the figures into the design of the carriages,’ explains Dillon. ‘Now, two seats in each carriage have Michael’s artwork woven into the fabric.’
The range of artists who have participated in the project is enormously impressive, running from school groups and fine art graduates to eminent contemporary artists such as Gary Hume, Liam Gillick, Cornelia Parker and Pae White. ‘Artists are really interested in the London Underground’s history and the way that it has always worked with world-class artists,’ says Dillon. ‘They want their work to be seen by as many people as possible, and they recognise that putting art in front of people who don’t necessarily look at it on a regular basis is going to have an impact on them. Some projects polarise opinion quite radically, and that’s always very interesting. There’s a feeling in the world that contemporary art is difficult and challenging, but there’s a growing audience for it as people are prepared to look harder and spend more time with it.’
In all this, there are echoes of Frank Pick’s vision of the Underground as a place for culture, a means of broadening travellers’ horizons as well as a mode of transport. For him, the Tube was a thing of beauty and inspiration. ‘Underneath all the commercial activities of the board,’ he wrote, ‘underneath all its engineering and operation, there is the revelation and realisation of something which is in the nature of a work of art…
It is, in fact, a conception of a metropolis as a centre of life, more intense, more eager, more vitalising than has ever so far been obtained.’ What he would make of Gandhi on the tannoy or a seven-metre panda head at Gloucester Road remains a matter of conjecture – but we’re inclined to think he’d approve.
ART ON THE UNDERGROUND 2012
Some of the specially commissioned work you can see around the tube this year
CENTRAL LINE
‘Acts of Kindness’ by Michael Landy celebrates everyday generosity and compassion on the Tube. The artist, above, has invited passengers to send him stories of kindness that they’ve seen on the Underground. He has selected some to place in stations on the Central line and on trains themselves.
TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD
Although the rebuilding of the station is not due to be completed unil 2016, this year French artist Daniel Buren will create a new artwork for the Oxford Street entrance and ticket hall. It will take the form of a colourful series of large diamond and circle shapes fixed to the station’s internal glass walls.
KING’S CROSS
‘Full Circle’ is a two-part work created for King’s Cross station by Norwegian artist Knut Henrik Henriksen. The work is situated at the end of two new concourses, one for the Northern line, the other for the Piccadilly. The works are intended to reflect the architectural style and language of the station.
STRATFORD
‘The Stratford Gaff’ by artist Matt Stokes draws on the East End’s rich history of popular entertainment. Visitors to the station will see a long wall displaying portraits and playbills, designating an area for entertainment. Here three large screens will show performances, each lasting just a few minutes.
GREEN PARK
‘Sea Strata’ is a new work of art for Green Park station by John Maine. It covers the walls and floor of four above-ground station buildings. ‘I imagined the four as outcrops with strata linking across from one to another,’ he says. He explores the natural composition of the stone, incising it with fossil remains of marine creatures.
CHARING CROSS
‘Threads’ draws inspiration from the expression ‘travel expands the mind’. Young people from the Brent Youth Inclusion Programme joined photographer Nadia Bettega on a week-long journey round the Tube. The resulting portraits are displayed at Charing Cross Underground station.
LONDON BRIDGE
‘Linear’ by Dryden Goodwin is a collection of 60 portraits of Jubilee line staff. The pencil drawings are each accompanied by a film of the portrait being made. The works can be seen at exhibition sites at Southwark, London Bridge and Stanmore. All 60 films can be viewed online at www.art.tfl.gov.uk.
