Forward! A tribute to Raymond Mason's statue, 21 years on
It is 17th April 2003 at midday in Birmingham and news breaks of a fire in Centenary Square. The statue known as Forward! has been victim to arson, a 16-year-old boy playing with a book of matches set the fiberglass statue alight, leaving a charred skeleton of resin in the shape of a crowd to stand in the centre of the city.
Born in Birmingham, 1922, Raymond Mason claimed to have always been a sculptor. As a child, he would ‘glue watercolours onto wood and cut them out with a fret saw to make an object of relief’, a skill that would eventually earn him a scholarship to the Birmingham School of Arts in 1937, a place he studied at briefly, under the guise of William Bloye, before enlisting in the Navy. Despite being a native Brummie, Mason’s ties to the city were almost entirely nostalgic. After growing up in the city and staying for a brief time after leaving the Navy, he moved to Paris, where his life and his social circles expanded into the world of Modern art; finding himself enveloped into the same social circles as Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, being encouraged to develop his signature sculptural style.
Mason’s works were distinctive to say the least, cartoonish, garish, some may even call ugly. The city of a thousand trades, in its working-class spirit, undoubtedly permeated through much of his work. Cramped, busy, large-scale sculptures of markets, town squares, crowds of people — the sorts of sculptures complemented by the noise of busy streets that seem almost too loud, too much for the silence and tranquillity of a gallery. Much of his work was commissioned to be displayed in public places, New York, Montreal and Paris, but never in his home city. That was until 1987, when he was approached, on the recommendation of his childhood friend Hilda Brown, by the Public Art Commissions Office in Birmingham to create a statue commemorating 100 years of being granted city status. The statue was to be placed in Centenary Square as part of its redevelopment scheme (which included the erection of the International Convention Centre and Symphony Hall) and was to be opened by the Queen in 1991.
This would have been only the third time Mason had visited Birmingham since moving away. The first being in 1958 following the death of his mother, where he found that much of the city he once loved was being bulldozed over, including the street on which he grew up. This experience forever tainted his hazy memories of the city but inspired him to create the landscape painting ‘Birmingham in Memoriam’. Mason said about his visit that ‘The clouds rolled away and suddenly a great sunset lit up the red-brick city. With emotion, I realised that when that sun sank, the moon of modern times would rise and all would be white concrete’ — a statement which feels indicative of his future work, as well as perfectly encapsulating Birmingham’s affinity for self-destruction under the guise of progress.
By the time the statue was unveiled, the people of Birmingham were somewhat familiar with Mason’s art, with the third retrospective of his work being held at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1989. However, the public reaction was still polarising. Forward!, named after the city’s motto, was a supposedly a celebration of Birmingham’s past and future, including many personifications of its history packed into a 26ft long and 13ft tall mass of polyester resin. The statue was comprised of a cluster of people, representing the different facets of Birmingham’s cultural history and honouring the people who made the city. Towards the visually darker and smaller, tail end of the statue were clouds of smoke, from which rose a myriad of figures, including Joseph Chamberlain and Josiah Mason. They stuck out in all directions, some standing some sitting, we see immigrant families, a Quaker teacher with her students, the lady of the arts blowing a kiss towards the rep theatre. As the figures become more modern they become larger, towering over their past. The most prominent figure is that of a worker, one hand in the air and one on his chest, saluting the city. A figure that is supposed to honour a majority but was harshly criticised for its Soviet connotations.
In Mason’s artistic retrospective, Michael Edwards argues that ‘Forward is not a communist sculpture anymore than Mason himself is a communist or even a socialist, but it does strive for a communist ideal and also celebrates work’ and claims that through the statue he ‘raises both the artistry in Birmingham, in its craft and applied skills to comparison with the usually more prestigious artistry in paintings of say, Florence or Venice’. While it may feel silly to compare a piece of public art nicknamed ‘The Lurpak Statue’ to the likes of Botticelli or Michelangelo, it may be equally as silly to disregard much of the art made by those from Birmingham because it doesn’t fit an aged standard of upper-class elitism. It often feels as though Birmingham is a city constantly striving towards a mirage-like-future, so blindsided by the prospect of redevelopment that it is willing to trade in its history, however significant, for the next big thing. In some ways, the statue of Forward! is a perfect representation of this, in both the symbolism of the art itself and its unfortunate fate. To many, this piece was not a metaphor for the city’s disregard for history but a public space, a small 3D world to explore, to use as a climbing frame, to sit on and eat a sandwich, to test the limits of until that limit is surpassed and it is finally destroyed.
On finding out about the destruction of his work, Mason seemed to take this as a public rejection, a final push to detach from his past in Birmingham, the city that once nurtured him. ‘What matters to me,’ he once said, ‘is not only the subject itself but the extent to which it will be understood by all those who see it’. Like so many artists, he was stuck in a limbo between being loved by critics and hated by the public. A brief look into the online comments about Forward! often talk about how hated this statue was, from its almost militaristic associations to its garish red lined faces, either lighting up or overshadowing Centenary Square, depending on who you ask. The statue was hailed as hideous by the masses with rumours of there being campaigns for its removal, however Mason was not an artist disregarded by all. His work was pioneered by infamous artists such as Picasso and Francis Bacon, and he was awarded an OBE in 2002. Despite all this, his attempt to bridge the gap between low and highbrow art, especially in his distinctive modernist style, was ultimately a failure.
Birmingham’s affinity for regeneration, and by extension the novelty of temporary art, cannot be understated. Despite being an icon of its time, a ‘homage to the humble’, Forward! is not a piece of art widely discussed today, and its legacy lies in only the smallest of spaces; books about the city’s public art trails, online articles written on the day of the arson, and briefly in the theme song to the Cbeebies show ‘Brum’. The fate it has undergone feels not dissimilar to many of the other temporary (whether purposeful or not) art installations that have been forgotten by the public. With such a fast turnaround of art in the city, only displayed long enough to gauge a public reaction, and comment on a fleeting moment in time, it is important to honour the past in order to greater understand the present. Birmingham is not just the city it is now, but a patchwork of all of its people and their creations across time, all of the art they produced, the workers who build towers and their children who will knock those towers down.