The Londoner: Wollstonecraft outrage ‘shows it’s a triumph’

In today’s Londoner: Bananarama’s Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin high on enthusiasm / Courtney Love loves being able to dissent in London / Ncuti Gatwa misses the bottom of people’s faces 
Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft
Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft
PA
19 November 2020

The chairwoman of the project which commissioned Maggi Hambling’s A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft says she’s still “processing” her feelings following its unveiling, as a crowdfunder for an alternative sculpture gets going.

Bee Rowlatt told The Londoner: “I’ve noticed a big difference in people’s response depending on whether they see the sculpture in real life, or just outraged close-ups in the media. The experience of hanging out and seeing groups of people standing around talking on Newington Green is very different from all the online hatred.”

Hambling’s £143,000 design, which depicts female forms twisting together as one silver mass to hold up a figure of a nude “everywoman”, has been criticised by commentators. 

But art historian Bendor Grosvenor says the outrage is a sign the statue is a triumph.

He told the Londoner: "If people want to put up another statue on a ‘more the merrier’ basis that’s great. But doing so to create a rival to the Hambling statue is a little petulant. The proposed design for the new statue - a quill pen and a pile of books to show that Wollstonecraft was a writer - seems unnecessarily obvious and reactionary. 

“Any clamour for a second statue simply demonstrates the success of the first; more people are talking about Wollstonecraft than at any time since the 19th Century.”    

 “The more derided a work of art when first exhibited, the more celebrated it will become,” he wrote in The Art Newspaper. “People saw only ‘silver tits’ and ‘bouffant pubes’ ... what I like about Hambling’s figure is that it is nude, but not erotic.”

The group crowdfunding for an alternative statue by artist Martin Jennings have raised just two per cent of its £154,000 target.

Bananarama, high on enthusiasm 

Glamour Women Of The Year Awards 2017 - Inside Arrivals
Keren Woodward, Sara Dallin and Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama
Dave Benett

Bananarama’s Keren Woodward and Sara Dallin say in the Eighties  “we used to dance like maniacs... people would end up swinging us round on their shoulders,” making others assume they were on drugs. They were, in fact, “just enthusiastic," they tell the Penguin Podcast. The power of music.

I Love being able to dissent in London 

Netflix BAFTA After Party
 Courtney Love attends the Netflix BAFTA after party in February 
Dave Benett

Courtney Love says she fell in love with London after seeing posters of Nick Cave which said “drunk on the Pope’s blood”. The singer, pictured, explained to NME: “I’m allowed to dissent here, which I haven’t felt comfortable doing recently elsewhere.” Come as you are.

What do I miss? The bottom of people’s faces! 

Newport Beach Film Festival 6th Annual UK Honours
Ncuti Gatwa attends the Newport Beach Film Festival in January 
Dave Benett

Ncuti Gatwa misses a very specific thing from our pre-coronavirus lives: “Seeing the bottom of new people’s faces.” The Sex Education star says while working on set he would get tested three times a week for coronavirus. “The medic that comes here is a lovely guy. We have a chat for about half an hour longer than we need to, have a cup of tea, it’s just lovely. And I’ve never seen the bottom of this guy’s face. I have no idea what he looks like.” Let the mystery end.

SW1A

David Davis has warned his exultant Conservative colleagues “not to throw the baby out with the bathwater” when it comes to the PM’s former adviser Dominic Cummings. He writes that Cummings’s messy departure was “perhaps inevitable, given his aggressive personal style,” but his critique of the state was right. One suggestion Davis makes is for a British version of  MIT — “teaching 48 weeks a year, rather than the 30+ taught by conventional universities”. Count The Londoner out of that one ...

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John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, warned that when “one of Labour’s loyalest of the loyal feels so strongly that she resigns then it’s time voices like hers are listened to,” following the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn. McDonnell was referring to Thelma Walker, an MP for just two years from 2017 to 2019. Lacking momentum.

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