the Fourth Plinth: better you than me

“reality TV on a shtick”

Living people as art? How daring! How post-digital!

A spirit of mass participation? How inclusive!

Making of the people a living monument in “a space normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals, in an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity”?

With a CCTV camera trained on them, for security. That’s art in the service of reality, that is. Plus live guards, though I gather they aren’t part of the art.

To recap for those of you who haven’t been following our story. I’m talking about the famous empty (now “Fourth”) plinth in Trafalgar Square, whose current installation was competed for last year and won by the artist Anthony Gormley. It seems only yesterday that London’s rooftops were speckled with dozens of life-sized plaster casts of himself. I didn’t mind those though, as they were at least made objects, and it was interesting the way they scanned the horizon, and were mathematically placed.

However, as of today, there will be a person standing on the plinth every hour, for one hour each, for 100 days. It’s very inclusive: “If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like – to demonstrate, to perform, or simply to reflect,” says the website inviting people to apply.

Is it really just me who thinks that sounds patronising? Here is the artist’s statement from the official website:

“Through elevation onto the plinth, and removal from the common ground, the body becomes a metaphor, a symbol… In the context of Trafalgar Square with its military, valedictory and male historical statues to specific individuals, this elevation of everyday life to the position formerly occupied by monumental art allows us to reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual in contemporary society. It could be tragic but it could also be funny.”
Antony Gormley

Yes. It could be tragic, or it could be funny, and we don’t know yet. Because we’ve never had an opportunity to watch people before. With stunning originality Gormley decides the best way to watch those little specklike things is to take them out of their environment and let them demonstrate, perform or maybe even reflect for an hour in completely artificial surroundings. It’s like a cross between reality TV and Speakers Corner.

O, George Orwell, O William Golding, O even Ayn Rand, and there was me sneering at you all through my teens. Intellectually unworthy and fashionably fascist, maybe, but also prescient. Then again, could she have been prescient if there hadn’t been so many idiots reading her books? The fact is, we don’t see people as people any more. We see them as little specks. And everything that happened during the twentieth horrible century – and everything that’s happened so far this – just encourages us to speckify each other even more. Even Facebook. Even Twitter. Fun and all that, but what are people now, really? Status updates. Avatars. Virtual. (Remember when that used to mean, colloquially, “almost”?) They need an hour on a plinth to come to life. Ad I can talk; I’m writing this on a blog.

My family even had a family feud last week on Facebook, spread over two people’s pages: mine and my sister-in-law’s. It was never resolved. The subject was, if you can believe it, Michael Jackson. It wasn’t even as exciting as a good old 4th of July bust-up on the front lawn, babies crying, beer cans flying, Lenny revving up his Harley off those cinderblocks once and for all – but why could we not even have it in private messages? Because it wasn’t really real. It was about how one chooses to align to the cultural signifiers. Empty; emptier than a cooler box on the 5th of July. Sadder than Cousin Lenny’s cinderblocks.

The upshot is that my brother and I now seem to be off each other, but it’s not really us, it’s just our avatars.

Have you noticed how everyone, on Facebook, is just a little bit the same?

So of course now London is treated to this weird Hegemony of The People, fitting everyone into a mould (now there’s an idea: where’s Rachel Whiteread when you need her?), this ersatz egalitarianism envisaged by Anthony Gormley and a deciding committee, wherein all of humanity can be embodied by absence of substance. So that in fact the way he gets one man to stand in for “humanity” is to take something away from him, by making him a fake version of himself. And people are lapping it up.

And Gormley, artiste of randomness, orchestrates the whole spectacle.

Take the great photographs (say, because they are “of” “real” people) of the most extreme situations, war, famine, the Great Depression. You have a couple of images of those in your head now? Good. What do you see? People, not needing to be “in an image of themselves”, because they are themselves, representing the whole of humanity precisely by possessing (being allowed by the photographer) so much of it. Deeply, not on a plinth. Real emotion, real personality, real achievement, real overcoming of real difficulties. Oh, this really is pernicious. And we don’t even get it.

So, pour nos jours, anodyne post-Blairite reductionism makes of a nice lady in a big white T shirt a meaningful synecdoche (what a Zeitgeist word that is – as if it really wasnlt meaningful unless it “stood in for” the whole lot; it can’t just be itself!) for the seething hordes that are, in reality, anything but the same. This really is art for the Big Brother generation. Why, did you see that there’s even a camera trained on them the whole time? And the Guardian culture page is asking people to “document” each one with photographs posted up on Flickr. It’s not art. It’s a celebration of the conditions of surveillance.

Look at those two grinning away there at the top. Oh, I’m sorry. Just look. The gurning Gormley. I’m sorry but I do think his face says it all. And he, the artist  I mean, hasn’t even had to make anything. It’s just a gigantic project management exercise, filling in forms, ticking the boxes, getting the funding, doing the risk management and meeting insurance requirements, health & safety, scheduling the people in… I heard his file was this thick.

N.b. Speaking of the Fourth Plinth, I was a huge fan, if that isn’t too ridiculously 2009 a word for it, of Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo. Now that was a man.

And also n.b.: this made me laugh. In the comments of the piece in the Guardian someone has written, “What a shame Boris didn’t put an end to all this nonsense by putting up a statue of a military hero from WWII, completing the set.” Admirable simplicity. Maybe, if we wanted to be inclusive, some hero of the Blitz, who could represent the whole of humanity.

Standing up for tigers everywhere.