Saint George’s Dragon - Sculpture
St George’s Square
Saint George is a symbol that at different times galvanised English and Christian publics; the dragon signified otherness — that which is not included within a given public. Saint George’s Dragon is a provocation that places an icon of alterity at Guelph’s geographic and ideological centre. Together St George and the dragon, exemplify the paradox of public space. Saint George’s Dragon is a wide spiralling wood walkway that ascends as a ramp from the Square to six feet above in one rotation, and then descends to the ground again over twelve rotations, forming a flattened hourglass, concave in its upper half and convex in its lower half. It functions as a gathering space — in the upper section it forms a space for conversation where attention is focused inward, in the lower section people look outward toward an existing stage and surrounding streets and shops. The space is paradoxical in its form, a single shape with two opposed points of view. Bruno Latour asserts that all things are assemblages, strange and monstrous hybrids of diverse elements. Not least among these monsters, society itself is made up of the most complex compositions of different people and groups. 2 What this social monster needs is places that can assemble its various parts — people, their desires and their matters of concern. Saint George’s Dragon is designed to catch and assemble the heterogeneous elements of the city in its winding coils.
Guelph’s St George’s Square was established in 1827 to cement bonds between John Galt, the city’s founder and a primary land developer in Upper Canada, and the English Crown. Saint George was born in Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey. He was a Christian soldier in the Roman Army, later canonised for destroying images of Roman gods. During the Crusades Saint George was put to a new use, miraculously appearing to lead Christian soldiers against their Muslim rivals in the Holy Land. The story of the dragon emerges at this time, serving as an allegory of the threat to Christianity from outside. 1 St George’s Square is loosely shaped like a St George Cross, cut diagonally by Wyndham Street in the north-south direction and by Quebec Street from east to west, producing four irregular quadrants. It is the heart of Guelph’s downtown, gathering people from all walks of life. In the summers its four corners are used for public events — concerts, dance performances and films. It is also a political space that has been the site of demonstrations in support of affordable housing and lower tuition, and by Occupy Guelph. The square, physically cut by streets and socially segmented, with each quadrant claimed by different publics, is a space that some citizens fear and bypass to avoid the people who assemble there or the police that patrol it. It is also symbolically framed by finance, with a national bank on each of its corners: a space where the lineaments of global capitalism meet small town Ontario in the form of security and surveillance, financial markets and the general precariousness of workers. The concentration and complexity of the square makes it an exemplary site to test a programme of public engagement.
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2 Bruno Latour. ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’ in Making things public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, editors. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. p38
1 Jerry Broughton. ‘Saints Alive / The Iconography of St. George’ in Iconoclash , Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, editors. Karlsruhe: ZKM / Center for Art and Media and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. p155-157
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