Where are today's heroes?
Josie Appleton believes the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth project is wrong headed
The Fourth Plinth
Commissioning Group has retired to seek private sponsorship for the next two temporary statues, Marc Quinn's white marble sculpture of a pregnant disabled artist, and Thomas Schatte's Perspex model, 'Hotel for the Birds'. The group could probably do with a break, after its choice of winners was greeted with a brouhaha that would do the Turner Prize proud.
When the Royal Society of Arts' Prue Leith initiated the fourth plinth project some ten years ago, she thought that it would be fairly easy to find a statue somewhere to fill Trafalgar Square's gap. Numerous public consultations, three committees and (soon to be) five temporary statues later, the question looks more complicated.
It is difficult to think of a less auspicious moment over the past 160 years for embarking on this project. Ours is an age that lacks common values, strong ideologies or popular heroes, and is suspicious of all forms of authority. One public consultation suggested such luminaries as Batman and Winnie the Pooh for the plinth, and gave Tony Blair the same number of votes — one — as Idi Amin. And if Nelson's Column marks the self-confidence of Britain's 19th-century elite, the fiasco of the Millennium Dome suggests that New Labour isn't going to be building columns any time soon.
The RSA soon decided that old-style monuments were passé, so initiated a programme exhibiting works of contemporary art, beginning in 1999. Yet rather than leaving traditional monuments behind, the temporary artworks have focused on critically assessing and undermining them. Mark Wallinger's 'Ecce Homo', a small figure of Christ, his eyes closed, perched on the edge of the plinth, was set up to contrast with Nelson's elevation and purposeful gaze. Stefan Gec's model of Tomahawk cruise missiles used wood harvested from the same forest as that used to construct the ships that fought the Battle of Trafalgar, and aimed `to explore the concept of victory and its commemoration in the 21st century'. Marc Quinn's piece is in this vein, but seems to be storming in where others have trodden more carefully. Working in the white marble of classical statues, he represented somebody who would be seen as the diametrical opposite to the classical hero — saying that the piece will add 'some femininity' to the square's 'triumphant male statuary', especially the 'phallic male monument' of Nelson's Column.
It is odd to make such a show of bashing Nelson today, given that he was buried so long ago, The British elite pretty much stopped building triumphant statues after the first world war, when the imperialist confidence and assumptions of the 19th century fell away. London's 20th-century monuments tend to be much more ambivalent. Sir Edwin Lutyens's first world war Cenotaph on Whitehall has blank sides rather than heroic figures, and was described by one historian as 'an embodiment of nothingness'. Meanwhile, the bust to the second world war admiral Lord Cunningham in Trafalgar Square's north wall shows him with an uncertain gaze and hunched shoulders. Britain's imperial past is a dead horse that nobody could revive however much they wanted to.
Attacking a long-gone tradition perhaps helps to disguise the ideological vacuum of the present. Rather than presenting our values and leaders on the fourth plinth, we can just snub our noses at the military figures of the past. Quinn isn't really proposing new popular heroes in the place of colonial generals. Whatever her personal victories, the artist Alison Lapper is being held up primarily as a poke in the eye for 'triumphant male statuary', rather than as someone whose achievement we should all look up to.
Instead of engaging with the passing public, fourth plinth artworks tend to either ignore or provoke them. In the first batch of statues, Rachel Whiteread made an inverted cast of the plinth in resin, turning the base into a self-contained, private monument. Whiteread said that she wanted to create a 'quiet moment for the space' away from the 'general chaos of central London life' — a chaos that presumably includes all those passing people. Thomas Schiltte seemed to be more comfortable connecting with the pigeons than with the public, and offered oblique explanations of the work, saying that it 'reflects the architectural importance of London and the historical buildings around Trafalgar Square', as well as being 'at the same time, a commentary on the present'. Quinn's piece, meanwhile, is almost provocative, rebuking the public for their assumed prejudices about disability. 'Now I'm up there, 15ft — you can't avoid me any more,' said Lapper, as if the aim of the statue is to shock us all out of our narrow-mindedness.
Indeed the whole motivation for the fourth plinth project could be seen as largely provocative. Rather than attempting to represent popular ideals, the project sees its role as sparking debate and reaction. A spokesman for the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group told me that 'whatever you put up there will make people passionate, mad, move them. That's a good thing.' The aim is to get people talking about 'what public monuments are for, what public art does, what Trafalgar Square is for'. This is debate for debate's sake. The ambition is no longer to decide on a permanent statue for the plinth; instead it is to envisage a constant series of rotating artworks, `continually generating new comments'. It is as if the group just wants to spark public passion and emotion, without particularly caring about its content. Given this, it's hardly surprising that the programme is generating Turner Prizestyle responses.
Debate about the use of public space is all too rare, and the fourth plinth project has at least opened up these issues. Few people would have heard of Trafalgar Square's generals Havelock and Napier, or thought about what we might put in their place. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil wrote in 1926, most public monuments are 'like a tree ... one would be immediately struck by their disappearance, but one does not look at them and one does not have the slightest idea whom they represent'. But merely bashing the past and provoking the present is likely to hinder rather than help public debate. Instead of embarking on years of chatter about 'challenging' statues, we could try to decide upon new heroes and ideals for our times. If not Nelson, then who?
Josie Appleton is culture editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com) and author of Museums for 'The People'?
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