Well, what would you put there? Now that Nelson Mandela has found a home in Parliament Square, there is no clear front runner. Margaret Thatcher, perhaps? Tony Blair? Jeremy Clarkson?
Such is the awful dilemma that has faced the British ever since ever since King William IV died in 1837, carelessly leaving insufficient money to fund his own statue and, thereby, Trafalgar Square’s infamous fourth plinth empty.
Vacant for 150 years, the plinth has been occupied periodically over the last ten since the Royal Society of Arts began a series of commissions. It is now subject to a shortlist of proposals for 2009, including works by Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin.
The shortlist has, inevitably, proved controversial (The Telegraph called it “beyond parody”), and not simply for aesthetic reasons. The plinth, its occupants, the shortlist, and even the decision process itself go right to the heart of who we think we are today.
Public art is a supremely sensitive cultural barometer, nowhere more so than in
The debate over what should go on the fourth plinth ignited in the late ‘90s and in 1999 the Royal Society of Arts unveiled the first of three temporary occupants, Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo. Since then the plinth has accommodated, successively, Bill Woodrow’s 21-foot high statue of a tree, Rachel Whiteread’s resin cast of the plinth itself upside down, Marc Quinn’s 13-tonne marble torso-bust of a pregnant Alison Lapper, an artist born with no arms and shortened legs, and, most recently, Thomas Schutte’s Model for a Hotel 2007, a five metre high architectural model of a 21-storey building made from coloured glass.
The recently announced 2009 shortlist includes Anthony Gormley’s One and Other, in which 8,760 volunteers, “representing a cross section of the citizens of the world”, will take turns to stand on the plinth for one hour, night and day, throughout year, and Jeremy Deller’s The Spoils of War (Memorial for an unknown civilian), which, according to the artist is “not an artwork, but the remains of a vehicle that has been destroyed in an attack on civilians in Iraq.”
There is much that could be said about each of these. Wallinger’s Jesus, for example, looked tiny, vulnerable and bland amongst the giants of the 19th century, in so doing appearing to mock their self-importance. Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant presented us with the fact of physical disability, something rarely seen in public sculpture (Nelson excepted) and in so doing confronted us with our oft-hidden prejudices. Jeremy Deller’s offering does a similar thing, exposing the ghastly cost of war, whilst Tracey Emin’s Something for the Future (a small group of meerkats on the empty plinth) is intended to be “a symbol of unity and safety”.
Whatever we think of these offerings, whether we like or deem them appropriate to this most notorious of stages, they are clearly about something: our vanity, our prejudices, our follies, or, in Anthony Gormley’s piece, our sheer, ordinary humanity. It is only, however, when we compare them with the other statues that grace the Square, and indeed those in nearby
Trafalgar Square plays host to a number of other figures. Apart from Nelson himself, and his attendant lions, there is James II, George Washington and the Second World War First Sea Lord Admiral Cunningham. More famously, the other three plinths have George IV, Major-General Sir Henry Havelock and General Sir Charles James Napier on them. For its part, Parliament Square has statues of Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, Jan Christian Smuts, the Earl of Derby, Benjamin Disraeli, George Canning and Nelson Mandela.
Now, it would be naïve to assume that all these people were universally loved even as their statues were being erected. George IV, for example, was a notoriously profligate, debt-ridden, obese, adulterous, relationally-dysfunctional, dandyish monarch, of whom The Times wrote, “there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king.” Such peccadilloes aside, however, the very fact that these individuals were elevated in the way they were suggests they embodied virtues that the general public respected, admired and aspired to, virtues around which they might congregate.
We may not admire them today. Indeed some – Napier, for example, once said that “the best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed” – may revolt us. But that is not the point.
The difference lies not in the content of those virtues but in their very existence. Who, today, in
How, then, do we respond? Not, it seems, by trying to imitate the past but by recognising that the fourth plinth should serve rather different ends to the other three. The original ambition of the Fourth Plinth Project was “to raise the level of debate about the nature of public art today… to excite and interest the public with important works of art which they would not otherwise see.” When expressing the final decision of the Fourth Plinth Committee to recommend an exhibit which would change each year, Sir John Mortimer, its chair, said the plinth should celebrate “the spirit of our time” and become “a showcase for high quality British and international sculpture”. In other words, the sculptures were to be about themselves. The medium had become the message and, in the absence of any common consensus of what to celebrate, we decided to celebrate the act of celebration.
It would be unfair, however, to claim that the fourth plinth sculptures were simply exercises in aesthetic masturbation. They are about something: primarily us. Mark Wallinger’s Christ asks questions of our humanity by making a statement of His. Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper does a similar thing through her. Anthony Gormley’s offering is very obviously about our mere humanness, as, in a rather more contentious way, is Jeremy Deller’s burnt out car.
In the absence of heroes, admired figures of inspiring virtue, we “celebrate” ourselves. No pomposity here. No elitism. No hierarchy. No 15-foot high, cast bronze monuments to a politician’s or general’s vanity. This is a stage for ordinary, life-sized human nature, for the people, warts an’ all.
It’s arresting and, in its own way, admirable. But there is a problem. In the 19th century, when most of the statues in
Whatever ends up on the fourth plinth in 2009 will be paid for through the National Lottery and decided by The Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, “a panel of specialist advisors appointed to guide and monitor a programme of contemporary art commissions from leading national and international artists”. The people paid, not that they knew it, and other people decided for them.
There are faults with the 19th century model, not least that public subscription often gave the haves had rather more say than the have-nots. But such dangers can be circumvented, say by capping donations, thereby giving the public, not a committee chosen to represent them, the decisive say on who goes there. I wonder if they would choose any of the current offerings.
This article first appeared in'The Difference Magazine.'
