Uninspired: a monument to emptiness

One day in 2007 I was sat in a taxi that stuck in traffic on the Quays in Dublin which pulled-up alongside that amphibious tour bus/boat thing that tourists pay to get soaked in, the driver of which was giving-off about the spire in O’Connell Street.

“Do we like it? No we feckin’ don’t,” he informed his already rain-soaked passengers.

‘Some ambassador’, was my first thought, followed quickly by ‘Why does anyone dislike the spire? There’s nothing to it – at all.’ Immediately I recalled a conversation during which someone defended the spire from its detractors on the simple grounds that it is already there and that those who hate it rarely propose an alternative. Fair enough that seems like a reasonable, if somewhat shallow and limited, argument, I thought.

Indeed, much of the criticism of the spire at the time of its erection was, frankly, of the misinformed I-just-don’t-like-it variety, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate reasons to question the thing.

The main problem with the spire is its meaninglessness – it is literally a monument to nothing.

Conceived as a device for urban regeneration, the spire has all of the hallmarks of officaldom and dreary public art, not artistic genius. It’s hard not to imagine that the anti-graffiti device on its base masquerading as a pattern isn’t actually the grubby fingerprints of the army of bureaucrats that delivered it before gorging themselves on the fiduciary placenta of a government handouts. In days gone by we would have selected some noteworthy individual and built a statue to them. Indeed, O’Connell Street is already littered with the effigies of significant characters from Irish history and the spire, or Monument of Light to give it its correct title, sits on the former location of the Nelson Pillar that was removed by freelance demolition experts in 1966.

Today we can no longer agree on anyone to whom a monument might be dedicated. Nelson’s out, obviously – and thankfully – but in what is regularly described as a post-nationalist age there is no figure from modern Irish history that we could all agree to celebrate with a statue. A combination of a growing wariness that historical figures are not infallible, the, mostly positive, effects of globalisation creating less a less inward-focussed culture and, frankly, a dose of toxic revisionism have rendered most of Ireland’s national heroes at least potential zeroes.

Mythological figures are somewhat less problematic but suffer from being unbearably twee and backward-looking and so Dublin is left with… a shiny, pointy thing. This is by no means a solely Irish phenomenon. Witness the nonsense the surrounds the ‘fourth plinth’ in London, home to mind-crunchingly stupid temporary sculptures that are more yawnsomely political than they are artistic.

But that doesn’t mean better attempts couldn’t be made. The ‘Wheel of Belfast’ is a pretty poor copy of the London Eye ferris wheel, not even Blackpool tower to Paris’ Eiffel, but in a city where iconography and iconoclasm clash head-on new monuments to anything in particular are always going to be problematic to say the least. Unlike Dublin’s spire, however, at least the Wheel of Belfast is an experience, allowing passengers to get an eagle-eye view of the city.

Recently the Siptu hadquarters, Liberty Hall, were transformed into a temporary work of, if not quite art then at least entertainment, called the Playhouse’ that was wildly popular with the public. Mirroring previous experiments and pranks by computer hackers, notable Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, the Playhouse was certainly both an aesthetic feast and a wonderful spectacle. The Playhouse used multicolored LED lights to project out low-resolution drawings and messages, supplied by the public, on the four sides of Dublin’s most well-known modernist building.

Do not mistake the spire for abstract sculpture – its essential quality, whatever its supporters may say, is blankness. It is an empty and meaningless monument to nothing onto which we are asked to project our own interpretations.

Perhaps it may be of some value to view it as a feat of engineering prowess, something that might be worth celebrating in its own right, like an Eiffel Tower for Dublin. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, however, the spire is neither functional nor does it remind us of anything much. Gustav Eiffel’s creation affords views all across Paris and although its real purpose is to be used, rather than looked at, in all its austere steel lattice and bolted glory it reminds us of the titanic struggles and leaps forward of the industrial age. That age is now behind us and the key political goal of our era seems to be one of arresting development in the name of saving us from ourselves. Little wonder then that we can’t come up with a meaningful monument, abstract or figurative.

Meanwhile, the spire has made its way into Dublin’s ‘corporate’ identity. Well, I’m sorry to say it but if you need to hire marketing experts and graphic designers to give your city a brand then your city already have a identity problem. The truth is, I don’t feel strongly about the spire either way, and I know of few people who do, but I am uneasy with what it represents: nothing.