Art on Ice

‘The car ain’t in the ice – they’ve just built the blocks around it, innit.’ Sorry Henry Hate, tattoo maestro for the rich and famous, your ice sculpture doesn’t fool the small crowd of bemused yoofs at London Bridge tonight.

Hate’s gigantic ice cube is set against the magnificent backdrop of Tower Bridge, and is glowing all the colours of Amy Winehouse’s ice pop lollies. There’s even a bloody great car engulfed in the middle of this ambitions structure (although not frozen in actual ice, as my fellow spectator helpfully announced).

Earlier today, Hate had spent a few hours carving an intricate ‘tattoo’ on the cube, but tonight the design is lost in this bold sculpture. The spectacle was probably much more impressive when the King of Skin Art was hacking away at the ice blocks with ‘traditional Japanese samurai chisels’. But in the empty darkness, there’s simply no drama to behold – only a fuzzy image over what was probably a perfectly good car, caged in a funny mess of ice.

The installation marks the launch of the new car model, Nissan Cube (see what they did there?), and allows viewers to participate in its display by stepping on buttons around the piece and triggering different coloured lights to shine on it.

It’s an all-singing, all-dancing piece of work – but perhaps lends itself more to the tourist-hugging London Eye illuminations further up the river bank than it does a contemporary piece of art.

On the face of it, Hate was onto a winner with the exciting juxtaposition of his eternal tattoos and the short, melty existence of the ice sculpture – throwing open our preconceptions of ‘shelf life’ in art and whether simple ice can have more worth than a ‘permanent’ piece of work, like a painting or, of course, a tattoo.

Put then they made it into a bit of a light show, and stuck a new car in the middle of it. It’s an interesting spectacle, but we came away feeling empathy only for the poor blokes who had to guard the thing for hours on end. It was, like, well cold in the fields that night.

The Henry Hate tattoo ice cube at Potters Fields has now been destroyed. Here are some images of the demolition in action: