SCULPTURE
Regal art
A nation pays tribute in art and humanistic expressions.
Rachel
Whiteread.
To create this work, the award-winning sculptor poured liquid resin into the
interior of the Queen Mother. Condemned by the Evening Standard's art critic
Brian Sewell, as "an abomination of the utmost abominationalism, or at least
I'm sure it will be when I see it," Queen Mother Interior teasingly challenges
our assumptions about the grandmother of the nation, suggesting that she was,
in fact, made of resin. Deploying the brilliantly subversive guerrilla tactics
so evident in House, Whiteread's inside-out house, and Monument, her
upside-down Trafalgar Square plinth, the work further challenges the prevalent
ideology that people stand upright, by standing the Queen Mother upside down.
It has already won the next five Turner Prizes.
Christo,
Königinmutter-Wrap
Famed for wrapping Berlin's Reichstag building in thousands of square feet of
shiny silk fabric tied together with rope, the Bulgarian-born artist has spent
the last 20 years seeking planning permission to wrap the Queen Mother - a
mission that has been fraught with pitfalls because of her dual status as a
listed building and a site of special scientific interest. In adherence to
Christo's aesthetic philosophy of transience and sensuality, the project will
use the actual Queen Mother, pending approval from the relevant environmental
health authorities. The work builds upon Christo's earlier wrapping of Prince
Andrew in a plastic sheet bearing a picture of a vacantly smiling fool.
Sources close to Prince William say that the heir to the throne considers the
Trafalgar Square proposal "well wicked".
Damien Hirst.
The self-styled "self-styled bad boy of British art" traces the inspiration
for this work to the Damascene emotional experience of "getting really stoned
with Keith Allen in Notting Hill the night before the deadline". Militant
pro-royalty campaigners destroyed Hirst's earlier version, which featured the
Queen Mother herself preserved in formaldehyde, by contaminating it with black
ink, arguing that only the finest gin was an appropriate preservative for a
person of her stature. The Impossibility... therefore features instead the
pickled body of Devon Loch, the Queen Mother's racehorse ridden to so many
near victories by Dick Francis. Francis eventually abandoned equestrianism in
favour of becoming a pseudonym for his wife's bestselling thrillers, but in
Hirst's work the stoic, all-conquering, intrinsically British spirit of Devon
Loch lives on. Odds offered on its chances of winning on the racecourse have
increased significantly since it was immersed.
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