I’ve never been convinced that Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth public sculpture project, in London, is a marvellous thing for art – it is a completely outdated way of displaying sculpture that modern art specifically and, I thought, finally rejected a long time ago.
When the Italian shit-canning artist Piero Manzoni created his 1961 work Base Magica, consisting of just an empty plinth with two footprints on it, he was making a joke that was already old. The idea that statues need a “magic base” to set them apart from real life is a pre-modern convention that 20th-century artists gleefully subverted. Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 piece Bicycle Wheel mounts a bike wheel on a kitchen stool: it clearly demands to be displayed on the floor, part of real life and not separated from it. Setting the whole ensemble on a plinth would be silly. Putting Carl Andre’s horizontal array of bricks Equivalent VIII or anything by Richard Serra on a plinth would be equally ludicrous, not to mention physically impossible.
It’s no coincidence that Rachel Whiteread, the best and most serious modern artist who has ever made a work for the fourth plinth, created one of its least effective sculptures. Whiteread’s transparent cast of the plinth itself was an awkward compromise between the new and the old that quickly lost its ghostly quality when pigeons perched on it. If it brings out bad work from good artists – while giving the maximum acclaim to the artistically old-fashioned statue that was Marc Quinn’s portrait of Alison Lapper – is the fourth plinth really such an effective way popularise avant-garde art?
The fourth plinth does not challenge artists to create new ideas of what art is, but instead asks them to adapt to a traditional style of display. Why? No wonder so many commissions, such as Katharina Fritsch’s big blue cock, have been banal and pointless (once you’ve said “cock” the joke is made).
The relentlessness of this series of commissions, its boundless appetite for fitting the square cube that is modern art into Trafalgar Square’s round hole, is changing art. It is making sculpture’s history go backwards. Young artists appear to be getting more plinthy in the way they think; their imaginations are increasingly well suited to a setting that was created for an equestrian statue in 1841.
I like the two latest commissions, a homage to destroyed art by Michael Rakowitz and an apocalyptic dessert by Heather Phillipson. The first is an ancient Assyrian mythical beast built from date syrup cans. It represents an ancient masterpiece in the Mosul museum that was smashed by Islamic State, while the cans symbolise a local industry wrecked by the Iraq war. This sculpture deals with the current crisis in the region and its causes. Admirably, it mourns destroyed art but doesn’t pretend we can replace it with an exact simulacrum.
Phillipson’s The End is a tottering still life representing the doom of civilisation; a giant swirl of cream is topped by a cherry, an insect and a drone. As in the still-life paintings in the National Gallery next door, we see corruption about to rot loveliness, except the drone is more sinister than the fly and the creamy dessert is sickly and decadent.
These works have valid points to make and do so pithily. That’s a good, sensible use of the plinth. Yet they don’t exactly push the avant garde forward. There are no piles of bricks here. A hundred years after Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as art, where is sculpture going?
Well, backwards. The Victorians, once they got used to the idea of food cans as an artistic material and someone explained what a drone is, would have had no real difficulty with these sculptures. They are representational art whose content is more important than their form. Very moral, very 19th-century.
Forty years of this, and art will be back in the stone age. The ultimate plinth art will be an equestrian statue of a monarch, and we will be so beaten down by then that we will hail it as a modernist masterpiece.
.jpg?w=600)
