One and Other

If you live in the city, you’re surrounded by statues. Look around you, at the angels and the dragons, at the lions and the unicorns. Clinging onto the corners of buildings, adorning arches, winding sinuously around pillars and porticos, so much part of the architecture that we no more notice them than we would a door or window. No wonder they look down on us.

If you live in the countryside, even the smallest hamlet, then you surround, rather than are surrounded by, statues. Don’t believe me? Go to the church, every village has one. There in the guttering, that chap with the spout in his mouth? On there, right up in the vault of the ceiling, a carving of the priest who underpaid the masons, with his cock up the bishop’s arse or something. Medieval masons may have been master craftsman, but their sense of humour was anything but subtle.


Any town will have a statue of some worthy, normally standing on a plinth, normally looking constipated, which is as close as a sculptor can get to ‘noble’ if he’s not Michelangelo. Still, even if the statue is constipated, the pigeons normally are not.

The Victorians loved a statue. Usually of Queen Victoria. Under the Victorians, Civic Art made its mark on the landscape of Britain, well, on the landscape of its market squares anyway. Like the Romans before them, what the rich and powerful really thought would enhance any spot was a bloody big statue of themselves. This is why there are so many statues of men with beards looking constipated, often pointing at things just out of frame, like bronze or marble catalogue models.

The other way to be commemorated was to die heroically in the service of your country, hopefully leaving behind a country named after you, or the Monarch of the time, and a kill ratio of 1,000 natives to one Englishman.

Times changed and as this century progressed statues of people faded from fashion as abstract sculpture became the civic art of choice. This was for two main reasons. The first was that instead of one person making the decision about the funding and erection (snigger) of a statue of, usually, himself, town councils were now responsible. A body of men and women who didn’t even like one another, let along unify in their admiration of somebody long enough to have them cast in bronze. The second reason was that in the late half of the twentieth century, the abstract embodiment of ideas was popular, especially if that idea was ‘ugliness’ and ‘cheapness’.

All that has now changed. Somehow, statues of people have become popular again. More than that, they are recognised as important. It probably started with Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ when, as a nation, we took one look at something that we were supposed to resent the hell out of and…fell in love. The Angel of the North is probably the most instantly recognisable landmark in Britain after the London Eye, Stonehenge and Big Ben. It will probably remain so until the Kelpie Heads in Scotland are finished off.

Trafalgar Square has some excellent statues. There are the Landseer lions, which are staggeringly beautiful and there’s Nelson himself, of course. Then there’s the fourth plinth. I think it’s a monument to Britishness itself that the fourth plinth has remained vacant, because nobody can agree what to put on it. It took the visionary Mayor of London ken Livingstone to decide to have many temporary exhibits on it instead of a single statue (although one of Ken’s not a bad idea).


By far the finest piece of work to inhabit the plinth to date was the statue of Alison Lapper. It had everything, it was beautiful, with curves like a Henry Moore, it was modern, yet perfectly at one with the rest of the statues on the square, especially at one with Nelson because both were statues of disabled people. It was also possibly the most serene piece of sculpture I’ve ever seen.

For the next 100 days the fourth plinth is occupied by a different person every hour. This is Anthony Gormley’s ‘One and Other’ project, where people drawn from a lottery can stand on the plinth for an hour and do, almost anything really, as long as it’s not illegal (bets on whether we go a week before the first proposal?).

It’s not the first time that ordinary people have been used to create art and it won’t be the last but it is the most important. This is happening right in the centre of Trafalgar Square and will live on in, well, how many tourist images? Millions?

It turns the statue into the statme. People will get on that plinth and if they have something to say they will say it, and if they don’t, well, that’s okay, most statues don’t say much.

The chap I saw seemed to be shouting about something, in full Town Crier’s rig. I don’t know what he was shouting about, I didn’t unplug my iPod (best of ELO, very good) and that, I think, is what it’s all about. As soon as a piece of art goes on display it no longer belongs to the artist, it belongs to whoever is looking at it. The artist may be trying to say something but if the viewer wants to misinterpret it, that’s their prerogative. Which is why you may have people going up there to make a point about worthy causes, but the judgement will be made about their hair or why somebody carrying a little bit too much weight would choose to wear that outfit. Think the human race is not that shallow? Somewhere out there I’m sure ‘Plinthwatch’ has started and I’m also sure that ‘Plinthbabes.com’ has already been registered.