Scott Lyall

Scott Lyall's Washington Square (1997) is a sculpture about sculpture, based on Henry James' 1881 novella of the same name. James' book is set around Washington Square Park in New York, about two miles south-east of Lyall's Chelsea gallery. Lyall's sculpture is a series of stacked wooden arches, horizontal fences and flat polystyrene slabs in shades of dark brown, shiny red and trendy mauve. Strewn with sand-filled pillows and a fur blanket, it resembles the wooden faux-mattresses in department-store bedding displays: attractive, but not exactly inviting. Accompanying it is a multi-page manifesto in which Lyall ruminates on James, Alexander Calder, fashion models and Poussin. According to the manual, the artwork is a kind of stage-set upon which to arrange viewers, just as Washington Square was the hub of dramatic action in James' book. We are invited to perambulate around and upon this waist-high, designer object, striking poses and casting glances at each other and through the gallery's large casement windows. Most of the time, though, we treat the piece in the same way we would any sculpture: we just look at it.

The arches in Lyall's artwork no doubt refer to the Washington Arch, a Ne0classical structure erected in the Square in 1889 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration. To Henry James, the monument was a useless affectation, a reminder of the creeping verticality that he saw as the end of all that was good about New York. The 'old New York' of James' youth was a series of insular, residential neighbourhoods surrounded by marshland; but by the turn of the century, it was infested with 'skyscrapers', a newly-coined term for the tall, utilitarian shrines to commerce whose (far taller) grandchildren now define the city. Especially irksome were the skyscrapers' soulless rows of glass panes, galling to a literary stylist whose stock-in-trade was a series of carefully composed scenes framed by drawing-room windows.

By taking James as his model, Lyall becomes a kind of radical. This is because part and parcel of James' pining for the good manners and uncrowded streets of his youth was a benign distaste for other aspects of American modernity - such as the influx of immigrants. Unlike his literary contemporaries (e.g. Mark Twain), James couched his prejudices in purely aesthetic terms, which earned him an enduring reputation as both a sympathetic observer (among liberals) and an incisive critic (among conservatives). Thus, in The American Scene (1904), James could be at once impressed by the 'swarming' streets of New York's Jewish quarter, while noting the 'over-developed proboscis' of one inhabitant; and while he cringed at the sight of cast-iron fire-escapes on the immigrants' tenement buildings, he generously deemed the eyesores necessary, as 'bars and swings and perches' for the 'human squirrels and monkeys' within.

By transposing James' laments to our own pre-millennial anxieties, Lyall brings them full circle: the human squirrels and monkeys may now achieve the graceful appointments that once defined James' privileged class, through generations of increasing incomes and via aesthetically democratising retail institutions like The Pottery Barn. Moreover, along with the death of the author (both literal and figurative), has come, in waves of political correctness, technology, and empowerment, a nation of authors. In Lyall's shorthand translation, James' literary Washington Square becomes what the author most feared, or - more accurately - what he couldn't yet imagine. Like a colour-co-ordinated sign prostrating itself before a changed city, Lyall's sculpture implies crass verticality made horizontal once again, but this time with few distinguishing marks. Adding insult to injury, the fixture is assembled, NAFTA-style, out of Canadian materials. (Lyall is a Canadian).

With the same gesture, Lyall seems to suggest that abstraction as an authoritative activity is similarly defunct. He proposes his own abstract sculpture - and like any ambitious artist, all abstract sculpture - as a point of departure, no longer something to be discussed or looked at, but a conduit for viewers to interact aesthetically with the world. (Aesthetically appealing viewers being, apparently, the ideal kind.) If nothing else, his is a well-sited perch from which to watch the glorious sunset lower over New York City. Of course, an Ikea sofa would have accomplished much the same effect, and with more comfort. But just as James' generation dressed their children in starchy anachronistic costume, Lyall's artwork clings to certain aesthetic conventions for tradition's sake, and for the pageantry of it all. Indeed, just such subsidised affectation keeps things like visual art and literature viable in our efficient age.

Conspicuously absent in all of this is the real, grassy Washington Square, an historical novel and living artwork all in one: once a potter's field and hanging ground, then a verdant park and social hub, later a decrepit bus-turnaround, and today a revitalised public space, with children, street performers, drug dealers, and police acting out a daily ritual of conflict and coexistence. Next to it, Lyall's abstracted Washington Square stands as a possible vision of the future: a big piece of stage furniture, a flat cartoon corral with arches, maybe derived from Constantine, maybe from McDonald's. If Lyall's version appears nowhere near as flavoursome as any previous incarnation, it may be a function of the artist's cynicism, or of our own refusal to recognise ourselves in its generic, tasteful strata.