Stones Against the Sky

I know you have all been waiting breathlessly for the second stop in the Bad Public Art Tour of Sydney and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed as we pull over here in Kings Cross just east of the city centre. Cameras on the ready?

This nine year old piece is one of the more controversial on our tour, and the controversy continues even to this day. Unveiled in 1998 to howls of outrage, sculptor Ken Unsworth’s ‘Stones Against the Sky’ quickly earned the alternative title ‘Poo On Sticks’.

There’s no getting around it. This is a monumentally ugly sculpture. If you have some idea of Unsworth’s other work, you can see what the general object was, but it has to be said that here he has failed spectacularly. In Unsworth’s defense, there was evidently an original plan for the sculpture to be sited among straight-trunked trees, and perhaps that might have mitigated the awful spectacle somewhat. Outside that context, however, it is one of the city’s more miserable artistic tragedies.

I have to admit that I am in general a big admirer of Unsworth’s work. He makes art that is whimsical, challenging and humorous and I would place him halfway along a sliding scale between Andy Goldsworthy and Len Lye. His wonderful ‘Suspended Stone Circle II’, in permanent exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a delightful achievement, and the illusion of the weightlessness of its large smooth river stones is at once impressive and charming.

Sadly though, ‘Poo On Sticks’ is likely to be the most widely encountered of Ken Unsworth’s creations, situated as it is in one of Sydney’s busiest centres. As I mentioned, the controversy over the piece continues. It has in recent times come under threat of urban terrorism ((A group of art students calling themselves the Revolutionary Council for the Removal of Bad Art in Public Places threatened to destroy the work. And no – I am not affiliated with this movement…)) and not too long ago it was clandestinely, and, I believe, with no consultation with the artist, given a drab coat of slate-grey paint (admittedly this does have the effect of removing the resemblance to big lumps of excrement, the boulders having been originally painted a shade of turd brown, but it does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the hideousness).

The moral to this story – when creating works for public display first ask yourself this question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how close is my work to the physical resemblance of bodily waste?”

If you’re pushing 6, start again.

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Photographs ©Ginger Stick 2007 – thanks Cissy Strutt