I’m interested, not in putting up a sort of monument to somebody, but to making the city more beautiful. And I’m not really afraid of using the word function in sculpture — I believe sculpture should be functional.
- Helen Escobedo
In consideration of Helen Escobedo’s statement towards sculpture and its functionality, the potential opens for considering what those potentials might be. In pairing that statement with formal outcomes and actions that might be understood as function, the conceptual function is framed In the question Conland articulates, “…What or whom [controls] the meaning and content of the work, and how much does its meaning derive from this new time and space realisation?”
I am standing at the base of a sculpture constructed fifty years ago, formally, it has stood the test of time, but “how stable is the content of the work and where does its meaning lie?” Escobedo envisaged something rather different in its completion, with “curvilinear cambering elements” to be added once it was erected, this never happened with a suggestion from Jim Allen to Escobedo, explaining the work did not require them. The mood or “theatre” of the scene (A scene to look out from, and a lack of theatre as the clambering elements were not realised.), the textual references [plaque stating the sponsor], the site (Fred Ambler Lookout, or the characters invoked either through authorship of staging (Helen Escobedo, Jim Allen, Auckland City Council, et al.)
Signals embodies collaboration and connections that allow the work to exist as a beacon of hope for collective action, or the physical relation to a site or place, looking out from within while on the periphery, a place to play and be near the sea while continuing to exist within a city space that is in a continual state of change. Signals conception was to mark a moment in this constant.
To mark Tāmaki Makarau's centenary as Auckland City, four international artists arrived in Auckland in 1971 to contribute to the International Sculpture Symposium, hosted by the N.Z. Society of Sculpture and Painting Ltd. Helen Escobedo's sculpture Signals was one of five works commissioned. (The fifth being Wind Tree by Michio Ihara, constructed in 1977, a possible replacement work for Tom Burrows’ Gasworks, which was removed that same year.) Looking North out of over Tāmaki Makarau's port and the entrance to the Waitematā Harbour, Signals is located at a site between the field and carpark of the Fred Ambler Lookout, located on Gladstone Road, Parnell. Standing at 11 meters in height, the sculptures gaze looks beyond Maungauika, squinting past the offing of the Hauraki Gulf toward the horizon of the South Pacific and the western shores of Mexico. A line of site unwavering, unforgiving, its gate staunch and foreboding.
This sculpture has been present while the city has moved into the contemporary moment. I now standing below, as a witness, connected as the figure who is looking to the potential function Escobedo speaks of. In the same same year of Signals construction, the sponsor Comalco (N.Z.) Ltd opened the aluminium smelter plant at Tīwai Point, there are also wild cats that populate the site. This frames the sculpture in a particular way, it has seen the progression of a city, and exists now to instigate a critical lens to be placed on what it might mean to exist as a form created from particular materials and now defined by a ever shifting but static context.
Four Shapes for Four Spaces, 1972.
5:23-5:35 (Escobedo talking on 'function')
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/four-shapes-for-four-spaces-1972/overview
(Accessed 21-10-20.)
Correspondence between Jim Allen and Helen Escobedo.
International Sculpture Symposium 1971, Archive date range: 1969-1981
E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Accession no: RC2010/5