Like it or loathe it, public art can divide public opinion like little else. The latest clamours of protest and praise appeared in the T&A yesterday as a £20,000 installation was unveiled by high-rise flats off Manchester Road, Bradford. T&A Reporter JIM GREENHALF looks at the street art phenomenon.

"Not appropriate a health risk absolutely amazing beautiful."

These are just some of the responses to the latest addition to Bradford's public art - Marcela Livingston's large, Easter-egg-shaped sculpture made out of rusting iron and fibre optic lights.

The £20,000 object off Manchester Road, which featured in yesterday's Telegraph & Argus, marks a cycleway and footpath between West Bowling and the city centre. It was paid for by a Government Living Space grant.

It's not the first time, of course, that a piece of public art has caused controversy. The year 1999 was particularly fruitful in this respect. Rick Faulkener's Needle, in Duke Street (£10,000) and Andy Hazell's ten-foot-high light bulb (£14,000) in Forster Square Retail Park both raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging.

The 15-feet silver Needle, intended to commemorate the district's erstwhile textiles industry, was unveiled round about the time that a crown court judge described Bradford as "the heroin capital of the north".

One Bingley woman rang the T&A to register her opinion: "I think it's disgusting to spend £10,000 on it. We have been waiting for three years for double glazing but the Council keeps telling us that it has no money." Another woman, of Quaker Lane, declared: "They have gone too far"

If memory serves, public reaction to Amber Hiscott's memorial to Bradford-born composer Delius caused a bit of a to-do when it was set up between the Victoria Hotel (now the Great Victoria) and the new Crown Court building in 1993.

The £36,000 cost was tough to take for many, especially when the memorial turned out to be a couple of huge metal leaves with bits of coloured glass. Was this supposed to reflect the autumnal sadness associated with Delius's descriptive pieces such as Brigg Fair and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring?

The biggest cuckoo of all, however, was the giant inflatable Santa Claus that Bradford's enterprising Bouncing Back Campaign organisers attempted to fasten to City Hall's clock tower in 1986. That December was particularly wet and windy. The vast red and white Santa did its best to cling to the tower but successive violent gusts of wind tore it loose. It was last seen heading westwards over Sunbridge Road - amid gales of cynical laughter.

Dyed-in-the-wool Bradford loyalists will be quick to point out that God's own city has some noble and uplifting examples of public art.

Indeed it has. The 35 seven-foot-high sculptures of Britain's monarchs - each carved from a single block of stone hewn from Cliffe Quarry - that decorate the exterior of City Hall complement the 15 relief sculptures of the great and the good on the outside of the Wool Exchange.

And in the year that marks the 200th anniversary of the British Government's abolition of slavery, we would do well to mark John Birnie Philip's heroic ensemble at North Parade. This shows the factory reform campaigner Richard Oastler with two children. This bronze, three-tonne statue cost £1,500 in 1869. It used to stand in Forster Square and was then moved to Rawson Square before being shifted to its present landscaped location.

A seated statue of Sir Titus Salt, complete with stone canopy, plinth and railings, used to be just across the road from the front steps of City Hall. But as the volume of traffic increased the memorial to the man who built Salts Mill and the village of Saltaire was transferred, incongruously to many, to the northern end of Lister Park.

The last representational statue to a public figure was Ian Judd's bronze sculpture of playwright, novelist, broadcaster and writer J B Priestley, a splendidly expressive figure that cost £30,000 in 1986.

"Statues have thinned out; we probably do fewer than our predecessors," said the Reverend Geoff Reid, team leader of the Methodist Touchstone Centre.

"The purpose of public art is about celebrating our history but sometimes it's a matter of context rather than history.

"The city centre management team is currently considering four options for something at Darley Street, near the Wool Exchange. One of the options looks like a textiles shuttle."

An artefact with a textiles connotation would certainly please Bingley sculptor Graham Carey.

"The Needle works for some people - the link with the textiles industry - but I don't think it inspires," he said.

"A piece of real textiles machinery could be placed in a central position.

"Public art should ennoble and make people think new things. I don't think what I have seen is likely to do that. An exception is the piece showing two people embracing outside Bradford University."

The sculpture in question is called Reunion, by Josefina de Vasconcellos, which was unveiled in 1977. It is located outside the J B Priestley Library on the campus.

Mr Carey once wrote to the late Henry Moore to try to prevent Bradford from acquiring one of his sculptures.

"Bradford was after a piece of great art' and I didn't think it deserved it because it had pulled down so many great buildings," said Mr Carey. "Henry Moore never donated a piece to Bradford but I am not sure whether it was because I wrote to him.

"You have to pay a good deal of money to get good quality sculpture and Bradford is a poor city. I would agree there is a lot of solid work there but I am not particularly moved by the new work. The Priestley statue is very good. I don't particularly like the Grandfather Clock and Chair (Timothy Slutter's piece in Little Germany).

"Bradford cannot afford to pay the best artists but I think it should consult someone like Fenwick Lawson, a figurative sculptor who has made a statue of St Cuthbert. He's the right person."

Many years ago J B Priestley advocated the creation of a dynamic form of public sculpture in Britain's cities.

He thought great fountains of water illuminated by multi-coloured lights would lift the spirits of people as well as refresh the air of city centres.

Will Alsop's masterplan for the city centre suggested the creation of an enormous lake outside City Hall and extensive wetlands to the west.

A version of the lake, albeit dramatically scaled down on the back of public opinion, is now part of Bradford Centre Regeneration's redevelopment plans for the city centre although the wetlands scheme has been ditched.

e-mail: jim.greenhalf@bradford.newsquest.co.uk

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