July-August 2010

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Just in case you’ve been quarantined with swine flu or distracted by something trivial like the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I am here to tell you that Antony Gormley’s long-awaited contribution to the empty Fourth Plinth has finally arrived in London’s Trafalgar Square. With One & Other, Britain’s Greatest Living Sculptor has invited the Great British People to occupy a space ‘normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals’, becoming ‘an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity’.

Every hour for 100 days without a break, a different person is making the pedestal their own. All 2,400 of them. If you are selected, you can use your time on the Fourth Plinth in any way you see fit. So long as you are aged 16 or over and living or staying in the UK, you can apply to be part of an ‘unforgettable artistic experiment’, complete with branded badges and postcards.

This is Art for the Masses, and the fact that Starbucks did not submit for a temporary franchise outside the National Gallery has to go down as one of the missed point-of-sale opportunities of the decade. Not that the National Gallery would have supported its bid. Asked what he made of Gormley’s latest extravaganza, director Nicholas Penny dryly replied: ‘As a historian of sculpture it seems to me to have more to do with theatre than with sculpture. Therefore I leave it to theatre critics to decide. I have seen only one or two of the performances. Or non-performances.’ On this evidence, I think it’s probably safe to assume that Penny will not be seeking to add his name to the final tally of prospective, celebrity-hungry plinthers.

In an introductory video on the project website that verges on the histrionic – this ‘astonishing living monument’ is about nothing more or less than the ‘democratisation of art’ – Gormley asks whether we can help him make ‘a portrait of the UK now using … this little plinth as the lens through which we see what the UK is like now’. ‘It really doesn’t matter in the end who gets up on that plinth,’ he confides. ‘I think it’s more this process of asking ourselves what do we care about, how would we express that, what would we do if we have this hour in the most public place in the whole of this land to ourselves, one at a time, one hour each, making a project … that is a portrait of the UK now.’

When he finally exclaims, ‘I’ve got an idea. You can make it real’, Gormley sounds remarkably like Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical fictional character Ali G promoting his parliamentary manifesto for Staines. And if you don’t want to volunteer yourself, you can always play your part ‘by telling others about it, or by experiencing it online or in the Square itself’.

I have no idea who these volunteers are, but to a man and woman they know that Pop impresario Andy Warhol sold them short with his quota of fame. Here, 60 minutes is theirs for the taking. The live webstream presents the intrepid plinthers heroically isolated against the ever-changing London sky yet One & Other has turned the Square beneath their feet into a tawdry Hogarthian circus of gawpers, snappers, Schadenfreuders, groupies, pranksters, bouncers, ‘heritage wardens’ and crew, undermining the dignity of all those who come within its compass. Any integrity the work might have had on paper was instantly lost when it acquired material form. Like grovelling public apologies by expenses-greedy MPs, some things are best left undone.

One & Other takes its formal and philosophical cues from Mark Wallinger’s millennial contribution to the Fourth Plinth. Thankfully, Ecce Homo made the ‘every person’ point far more succinctly, and without the shovelled-on grandiosity. Certainly One & Other is popular, but this is the Antony Gormley of Angel of the North and Blind Light fame. And certainly One & Other has attracted a huge amount of press attention, but arts journalists are an inherently lazy bunch whose desires are sated by the drip-drip-drip of PR agency and gallery press releases rather than authentic investigative zeal. Anything by the established names – you can list them on two hands – immediately attracts the oxygen of publicity so somebody like Antony Gormley only has to sneeze for it to make the front pages. No wonder Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Arts stepped up to the media plate with such alacrity.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Antony Gormley has made some astonishing work. With its network of cast-iron figures spread out along the foreshore at Crosby Beach near Liverpool, Another Place merits repeat visits, but these figures, which use the artist’s body as subject, tool and material, are multiplying across Britain like a rusty rash.

One of the latest iterations gazes forlornly from a corner of Lincoln College in Oxford, where comparisons have been made with other roof-level statues nearby, such as the eye-catching muses gracing the pediments of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building. However, the fact that the artist’s cast-iron clones can be made to fit any site and any circumstance is a testament to their inherent mediocrity, and the dull actuality of One & Other is nothing more than a fleshy, flatulent extrapolation of that mediocrity.

Gormley has assumed from Henry Moore the mantle of Britain’s most ubiquitous public artist, but he has little of the sculptural intelligence of his predecessor and none of his understated wit. ‘If you're not in the draw,’ warns the Fourth Plinth website, ‘you can't win a place!’ I didn’t think that art still had the power to shock, but I am truly shocked by One & Other.

Is any of this worth worrying about? Does Gormley’s latest publicity-driven creation warrant such an animated response? I suppose society gets the art it deserves, but surely it deserves better than this. One & Other has transformed Trafalgar Square, with its potent political history of genuinely popular expression, into a tedious, televisual parody of Speakers’ Corner. In attempting to empower people, Gormley has belittled their legitimate aspirations. He is clearly out of his conceptual depth in SW1 and the Fourth Plinth exposes his artistic limitations with unblinking harshness.

Paul Bonaventura is the senior research fellow in fine art studies at the University of Oxford

One & Other
6 July - 14 October 2009
Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London
An initiative of the Greater London Authority jointly funded by the Mayor of London and Arts Council England. Produced by Artichoke in partnership with Sky Arts

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