One More Time, Cornelia Parker at St Pancras International (until
November 2015 )

Train travellers at St Pancras station in London this summer may have noticed that there are now two large clocks hung close to each other at the southern end of the station. One, right at the end, is the beautiful permanent clock, which has a white face, gold hands, and a gold rim all round it. The other, which was put up in May, hangs about twenty yards in front of it, facing the same way. It is a working replica of the permanent clock, made by the same company, Dent London Clocks, but has a black face, grey hands, and a black-and-white rim. Whatever is it doing there?

The clock is an installation, conceived by the well-known installation artist, Cornelia Parker, and is called ‘One More Time’. As people walk past it on the platform, looking up at it, it gradually eclipses the permanent clock, supposedly like the moon eclipsing the sun. Like most installation works, it is intended to provoke thought. The artist says, ‘It is conceived to invoke meditative thoughts on the passage of time, life and mortality’. She adds, ‘Everyone is looking at the clock, checking if they are late. The piece will introduce the idea of a parallel frame of reference, that of a slower astronomical time’.

But will it do that? Most installation artists claim to have similarly grandiose purposes. Critics like to say that they are ‘exploring’ a subject such as morality, love, and the environment. But it is hard to find anyone who can say just what this ‘exploration’ has discovered. The installation offers a scattering of objects, or in this case an object put in a supposedly significant setting. The classic example is Tracey Emin’s unmade bed. But it is left to the viewers to have thoughts about it, if they can.

I believe that most passengers will simply wonder ‘Why is that clock hiding the old one?’ I do not believe that they will even think about the moon – and if they do, what will it tell them except what they already know about the moon? Does the artist herself get rewarding ideas about ‘the passage of time, life and mortality’ when she looks up at her clock? I think there is a great deal of self-deception to be found both in the making, and in the critics’ appraisal, of contemporary art.

There are other works of art to look at in St Pancras that are worth a good look at. A statue of the poet John Betjeman, who with his love of Victorian architecture did so much to save the station, stands on the upper level, holding his hat on and looking at the roof. It is a superb statue. It catches perfectly his habitually rather dishevelled appearance – coat blown open, collar scruffy, a knotted piece of string serving as one shoelace, all wrought by the sculptor Martin Jennings in what seems an extraordinary kind of fluid bronze. But even more splendidly it catches his sense of wonderment as he looks at the massive arched roof, with the brilliance of the sky glittering through its network of pale bluish-grey struts. Round his feet runs a quotation from one his poems that matches the scene on high – ‘And in the shadowless unclouded glare/ Deep blue above us fades to whiteness…’ – though it is actually about a seaside sky. He might have looked with equal wonderment at the whole station around him, which is itself a great work of art, with its Byzantine red and white walls, its double lines of arched windows, some round-headed, some Gothic, and now the enormous main hall bursting with the life of the Eurostar.

The other statue in the station, not far from Betjeman, is Paul Day’s massive bronze statue ‘Meeting Place’, which portrays two lovers greeting each other with an embrace, one an Englishman, one a Frenchwoman. They can be thought of as Eurostar passengers. It is a popular statue, but in my opinion too large. One of the woman’s heels, as she rises on tiptoe, is the first thing you notice, and a blow from that alone would be enough to brain you. A bronze frieze below, added later, shows numerous vignettes of different kinds of passengers that would have been seen on the station through the years. The strange thing is that, though the lovers above convey a feeling of happiness, all these passengers appear unhappy or even distraught, as if they had some terrible destination. They are brilliantly sculpted, but one wonders at the artist’s purpose in creating such a pervasive sense of gloom. Perhaps it was to counteract the charge of kitschy sentimentality that some critics laid against the lovers.

As for the new clock, that is apparently due to be taken down in mid-November. It is a fine piece of workmanship, made by the manufacturers of Big Ben. I am sure that a very good use can be found for it. But not, perhaps, in another installation.

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