Final Prisoner

A panel of art experts trooped through a musty London warehouse last week, handing down their judgments with clipped finality: "No. No. Terrible. No. Yes." Propped against packing cases for their decision were 274 survivors of the 3,500 models entered in the biggest sculpture contest ever held. The stakes: $32,000 in prizes, offered by an anonymous donor for a monument honoring The Unknown Political Prisoner (TIME, Feb. 9). When the experts were finished, the $12,670 grand prize went to Britain's Reg Butler, 39, a shaggy-haired architect turned sculptor who made his first real splash at last summer's Venice Biennale.

For his Unknown Prisoner, Butler chose something between abstraction and realism: a forbiddingly cold and empty structure, rising like some futuristic television antenna, with three grieving women looking up from beneath. Butler thinks that his symbolism suits a monument far better than any standard, realistic figure. Says he: "You must avoid the reaction, 'Oh, poor chap, he does look thin.' And if I made a statue of a god, it would be a big man or a small man with a big tummy or a flat tummy. So to make an image, I conceive a prisoner who is invisible. The prisoner is in the cage, but the cage is empty. The cage has become the monument, just as a crucifix has."

If Butler's symbolism made sense to the modern-minded jury, it brought outraged howls from conservatives, who wanted something a little warmer and more human. To most it looked like the same sterile brand of impersonal abstraction that so disappointed U.S. critics when the American regional prizewinners were announced two months ago. Then, only two of the eleven finalists bore much resemblance to flesh & blood; at London, all twelve top prizes went to abstractionists, among them three Americans.

This week, with Butler's prizewinner on display at London's Tate Gallery, its reedy symbolism was too much for one infuriated young spectator. He snatched up Butler's fragile Prisoner, crushed and twisted it beyond recognition. Sculptor Butler, who had spent eleven months modeling his creation, took the assault with poker-faced calm. Barring snags, he said quietly, he could build a new one, exactly the same, in two or three days.

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