Tomorrow morning Rachel Wardell, a 35-year-old housewife, will step onto a
hydraulic lift in Trafalgar Square and will be hoisted onto the empty plinth
near Nelson’s column. There she will stand for an hour begging for funds for
the NSPCC.
“I’m a stay-at-home mum with two young children,” she said. “But I wanted to
be able to represent mums who aren’t normally a feature of major artworks -
to show my kids now, and when they are older, that you can do and be part of
anything, no matter how ordinary you are or feel.”
Wardell, who lives in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, will be followed by Jason Clark,
a 41-year-old nurse from Brighton. Although he has previously posed naked in
Selfridges, the department store, for an art photographer called Spencer
Tunick, Clark thinks he will “probably” keep his clothes on this time. He is
keeping quiet about his precise plans for now.
Following him will be Jill Gatcum, 51, a consultant from London, who intends
to release a balloon for charity for every minute she is on display. “My
friends have sponsored a balloon each. There’ll be a card with the name of
the charity and I’m hoping people who find the balloon will also donate to
that charity,” she explained.
They are among the sane participants in what may prove to be one of the
strangest displays of public art for years: 2,400 people, chosen at random,
are going to stand on the plinth - one every hour for 100 days – doing
whatever they like. It is the brainchild of Antony Gormley, the sculptor who
is perhaps most famous for his giant Angel of the North artwork.
Gatcum’s well-meaning display pales beside the Paramount Importance of
Friendship and Love - a “living sculpture” planned by a 49-year-old artist
called Mark Jordan. “If you can imagine a near-naked, middle-aged, 6ft 2in,
tattooed skinhead, sitting in a child’s paddling pool on top of a
seven-metre high plinth in the heart of London, bathing in a gallon of fake
blood that has been mixed with a symbolic amount of real blood that has been
taken from his closest friends and family, then you have pretty much got the
picture,” he said.
Helen Marriage, director of the arts production company Artichoke which is
managing the event, says participants will not be allowed to do anything
illegal. “Apart from that, anything goes,” she said.
Thus Oliver Parsons-Baker, 26, an aquatic scientist from Birmingham, plans to
highlight the importance of clean water by dressing up in a “poo costume”
for half his time. He then intends to change into a fish costume to
illustrate the dangers of overfishing.
A Newcastle mother plans to knit, surrounded by woollen flowers; a Blackburn
accountant will read from the Bible; a writer from Smethwick, in the West
Midlands, will recount the events of the poll tax riots of 20 years ago; a
man from Hampstead, north London, will dress as a cross between
“multi-cultural Britain and a pre-Raphaelite painting”.
Responding to Gormley’s view during preparation for the event that he would be
“very upset if somebody didn’t take their clothes off”, several people plan
to do so - including Rachel Elliott, 27, a glass artist from Edinburgh.
“I’m going to make some glass beads while I’m up there using my blowtorch and
- depending on the crowd - I’m hoping to take my clothes off,” she said.
“Having said that, some of the entrants I’ve heard about are a little boring
so I hope someone’s jazzed it up a bit before my turn.”
Indeed, with 2,400 people searching for ideas, there is not only the risk of
the bland but also the identical.
“I was thinking about standing completely still and kind of subverting the
idea by actually looking like a statue,” said Suren Seneviratne, a
22-year-old fine art graduate from Goldsmiths College London.
“But then I saw that the bloke two hours before me was doing the same - so now
I’m dressing up as a panda with a big banner showing my mobile number so
people can phone me for a chat.”
THE project has been oversubscribed since it was announced, although it is
still possible to apply to take part. There are more than 15,000 applicants
waiting for spaces in September and October, with participants chosen at
random (although with regional allocations) by computer.
It has clearly caught the public imagination. But is it art?
The Tate gallery refused to comment - “I’ve asked everyone here and they’ve
got nothing to say,” sniffed a press officer. Michael Daley, director of the
ArtWatch UK campaign group, dismissed Gormley’s plan as “dotty and
intellectually bankrupt”. Internet wags have already dubbed this the
Gormless Project.
Francesca Gavin, the art critic and author of Hell Bound: New Gothic Art, said
she had expected this sort of reaction.
“Antony Gormley is a controversial figure in the art world,” she said. “Lots
of people don’t like his work but the public love him. He’s very antielitist
- very much against the conceptual art that dominated the 1980s and early
1990s and was almost wilfully inaccessible.
“This plan for the fourth plinth is a little like the pre-Raphaelite painter
William Holman Hunt packing up his religious paintings and taking them on a
tour of the country, or the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 when crowds of
people queued to look at the empty space where it had been - it’s making the
public reaction an artistic thing in itself.”
She points to other works such as flashmobs - which began as an internet prank
but became more like public art when hundreds of people working with the
American performance group Improv Everywhere froze in Grand Central Station
in New York for five minutes - as examples of “new secular spectacles”. She
said: “People are looking for emotional experiences to replace religion.”
Could the plinth project go horribly, amusingly wrong and leave the
participants exposed, 20ft up, to public ridicule?
Previous attempts to involve the public in art have had unintended
consequences. Last year Wafaa Bilal, the Iraqi artist, locked himself in the
back room of the Flatfile Gallery in Chicago for an artwork called Domestic
Tension. He invited internet users to chat to him or choose to fire a
paintball gun, which was positioned in the room, at him.
He was delighted by the size of the response - servers handling the site’s
traffic routinely melted down - but was disconcerted to find how many people
chose to open fire. With an average of 1,000 shots a day, Bilal was on the
receiving end of 60,000 paint bullets from 130 different countries and the
room he was in was completely splattered.
THERE have been concerns that the plinth will become a magnet for similar
behaviour and even the artist can see trouble ahead.
“It’s not exactly hanging, drawing and quartering,” Gormley warned, “but it’s
got a bit of the stocks about it. There’s a public square with a body that
isn’t allowed to leave. This is a serious commitment.
“Your life in this hour is being bound into a social contract which links you
with another 2,399 people and you have to fulfil that commitment. It’s a
real bond. And, barring a heart attack or some serious epileptic fit, you’re
going to have to stay up there.
“I can imagine that during the weekend afternoons, for example, people will
regard the person on the plinth as fair game – for a bit of repartee, at
least. How that works will be part of how you respond to this extraordinary
situation.”
Some of those preparing for the plinth report that the paper-work contains
additional restrictions – including a ban on any kind of weapon – that seem
to be all about preventing someone committing suicide in public on the
plinth. The organisers have also arrangeda huge safety net to catch would-be
jumpers. In addition, eight stewards will be on 24-hour watch at the foot of
the plinth.
There has been concern that performers could attract the sort of crowds that
flocked to mock the American David Blaine when he suspended himself in a
transparent box next to the Thames for 44 days in 2003. For Gormley’s
project, the Metropolitan police are “planning a very visible observation”,
a spokeswoman said. “The square is private property, owned by the Greater
London Authority, so we’ll only intervene if asked or to prevent a breach of
the peace.”
The Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group – which selected Gormley’s proposal as
part of its series of works to make use of the plinth – believes everything
will turn out for the best. “Antony found a way to depict the way modern
Britain looks and sounds and fears and hopes,” said Ekow Eshun, artistic
director of the ICA and chairman of the group.
“It’s also about embracing the unknown. Artists are usually control freaks,
wanting an absolute say over every tiny detail. This was the first
suggestion that has pushed the fourth plinth close to performance.
“It’ll change every hour, every minute, as people move and alter what they do.
I suspect that even if someone applied with the original intention of
barnstorming, once they get up there they’ll find it is strangely isolating
– you’rea long way away from anyone else. It’s going to make people very
introverted.”
On the other hand, all those participants, naked or otherwise, are going to be
exposing themselves to a global audience. The plinth is going to be streamed
around the clock on the internet and on television. No one knows whether
that will spur people towards introversion or exhibitionism.
Elliott, the glass artist planning to go naked, paused for a minute and then
laughed: “I’m still planning to turn up, do my thing and to hell with anyone
if they try to stop me.”
