Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews a retrospective show of the belligerent memorials of sculpture Michael Sandle
The MICKEY Mouse who guest-stars in Michael Sandle's elaborate, ghoulish sculpture A Twentieth Century Memorial isn't the sweet, fun-loving rodent he used to be. His head is scarred, blackened and furrowed; he seems to have gone blind into the bargain.
Mickey's charred head sits on top of a human skeleton, which slumps against a pile of cushions. As if all that weren't bad enough, Sandle's Mickey appears to have fallen victim to some form of psychosis. He sits behind a threatening, larger-than-life-size machine gun, primed with ammo and cast in gleaming bronze. Sandle has placed the whole ensemble on a circular stage, littered with further, disturbing details, most notably a trio of decapitated Mickey Mouse heads, grim, silent witnesses to Sandle's troubling mise-en-scène — the Three Blind Mice in person.
It is ten years since A Twentieth Century Memorial has been seen in this country — Sandle unveiled the piece at the Hayward Annual in 1978 — but it has lost none of its potency. It remains, in its singular, eccentric way, one of the most powerful and striking works to have been pro¬duced by any British sculptor in recent times.
There are a few hints, in Sandle's early work, of what was to come, but most of the sculptures that preceded A Twentieth Century Memorial have not stood up well to the passage of time. Crocus, from 1963, is one of the more arresting — a wall-hung demon in glistening black fibreglass, with a gas-mask for a head and various other un¬pleasant accoutrements.
It is the first in Sandle's long-line of anti-he-roes, figures who have surrendered their identity to the armour that encases them, that have been swallowed up by their own efficiency as killing...
