The problem for a culture built on iconoclasm is that eventually, it will need to create images of its own. Guthrie is yet to consider this because his image war is still virtual. The subject of his static video installation, as well as of the animated statue-scrapping sequence, is the infamous Blackboy Clock in Stroud. The artist fantasises that the offensive figure has vanished but that he alone might still control its afterlife.
But artists have not been the sole purveyors of aesthetic meaning since the Reformation. In Strud, the statue’s mooted removal has stalled in bureaucracy. Lacking the conviction to climb a ladder and destroy the object himself, Guthrie’s posturing smacks of desperation. The project’s subsidiary poems, press cuttings, and morality tales told as quasi-art history are barren adjuncts to the vilified “retain and explain” strategy. Next to the object itself, they give rise to nothing.
