This year the London Underground celebrates 150 years since its first line, the Metropolitan Railway, was opened in 1863. Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger has joined a long line of artists such as Tracey Emin, Henry Moore and Man Ray who have contributed their work to the tube platforms. The London stations have helped to inspire a vast range of art, design, literature, film and music, from Javier Bardem’s Bond villain being chased through a train by Daniel Craig in Skyfall to Gerry Rafferty’s classic 1970’s song ‘Baker Street’.
Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth is the tube’s largest ever art commission and forms part of the on-going Art on the Underground program. The project involves the installation of 270 black enamel works, one for each station, which are made of enamel and similar in appearance to tube signs. Each tube stop will have its own unique labyrinth design and the entire process will be complete by September.
For Wallinger, this is an unprecedented opportunity for a huge number of people to appreciate his work. Four million people pass through the Underground every day and about a billion people use it each year. The trains also travel the equivalent of 90 round trips to the moon every year. It is quite a different undertaking to his previous projects, which included wandering around in a bear suit in Berlin for ten days and his Turner Prize winning ‘State Britain’ which reconstructed the peace protester Brian Haw’s Parliament Square tent.
Part of the aim of Wallinger’s project is to create order out of the confusion of the tube. He explains that the labyrinth design echoes the daily journeys that commuters make; despite the chaos of the rush hour, almost everyone is following a prescribed route.
The designs also share a resemblance to brains, which Wallinger suggests reflects the state of mind of people travelling on the tube. He has praised the fact that people feel comfortable enough to fall asleep on strangers and evokes an environment of goodwill amongst the passengers.
The works are intended to be unobtrusive, something for people to glance at as they make their way to their destination. From the positive reception so far, it seems as if the project will be a success for the London Underground; the main problem that Wallinger may encounter is indifference, despite the number of people who will be passing by his work.
The Evening Standard newspaper recently conducted an experiment where the famous violinist Thomas Gould spent an hour busking in Westminster station, and only 35 out of 2000 people actually stopped to listen to him play.
However, hopefully the scale of the project will encourage more passengers to appreciate art, even if only for a brief moment on their stressful and cramped commute home.
