When I got to Trafalgar Square, there was a gorilla on the plinth. Obviously
not a real gorilla. A real gorilla wouldn’t have stayed on the plinth; the
safety net wouldn’t have kept anyone safe from a real gorilla. A gorilla
wouldn’t have been art; it would have been a disaster movie. Unless it was a
stuffed gorilla. Then it would have been a Damien Hirst. No, this was a man
in a gorilla suit. A gorilla suit that didn’t fit. He couldn’t do it up at
the back. Imagine being too fat for your gorilla suit. “Sorry, sir, that’s
the biggest gorilla we do.” Or perhaps he had no one to do it for him.
The gorilla manqué (a phrase I don’t expect I’ll ever have the pleasure of
writing again) stood on the plinth and threw things. A pair of Italians
didn’t seem to mind one bit being splatted in the back by a banana. They
had, after all, come to England, and what do you come to England for if not
zany humour and eccentricity? Up the road, they were changing the guard: a
couple of dozen synchronised men wearing bears on their heads — and that’s
really a great deal more comically obtuse than a solitary nylon great ape.
So what was I supposed to think about the monkey man? Was he a miniature King
Kong? Was he mocking the idea of memorial greatness? Was he an allegory of
extinction and loss? Or was he a drunk fiancé from a stag night, who’d been
put up here by his mates? Was there a Jane waiting at some desperate altar?
A specially adapted JCB cherry-picker beep-beeped across the square to replace
him with a lady in orange carrying a bunch of red roses. The monkey picked
up his used banana skins, the JCB conductor in his high-vis jacket prodded
out one of those long picky-uppy things, and, clambering in, the gorilla
wished the lady in orange good luck. He sat in the JCB looking endangered.
His hour on the plinth was over. Now it was back to being a supply teacher,
or a groom. Or the doorman at the Rainforest Cafe.
The orange lady stepped onto the plinth and shouted, “Hello!” into the wind.
Her orangeness had a Buddhist hippie thing going for it; orange is the
unwearable colour of universal peaceful protest. An artist wouldn’t perhaps
have chosen deep red roses to go with it, and I noticed she had sturdy,
safety-first knickers on.
This is the sort of thing you must think about when you’re going to be
standing on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. When Antony Gormley’s great
democratised lottery project started, I watched the local television
reporter ask him with that sneery, chummy, man-of-the-people common-sense
incredulity that local TV reporters wallow in: “This isn’t really art at
all, is it?” To which Gormley replied, with a straight bat: “Why does it
matter to you?”
In the thin crowd under the plinth, I heard people ask much the same thing. Is
this art? Or, to put it another way, this isn’t art, is it? It’s the wrong
question. The right question is, why does it matter to you? And that, in
part, is what One and Other addresses. I should disclose here that Antony
and his wife Vicken and I were all at college together. Well, not “together”
as such, but at the same time. And I think he is intensely clever, and
talented, though not quite as clever and talented as he thinks he is. I also
think that what he does is beautiful and profound, and memorable, which is
the triple, the trinity, of creativity.
This project seems to be a natural extension of one of his first works, Field.
What is depressing about the art question is that art itself has been
answering it for more than 120 years. It has been modern art’s primary
concern, and for people who have Andy Warhol prints in their loos to still
be asking, “Is it art?”, as if that were an intelligent question, is
immensely depressing. You just haven’t been concentrating, have you?
The day after the plinth performance began, the memorial for the 7/7 bomb
victims was inaugurated. No smug young TV reporter or watching banker asked,
“Is this art?”, but it plainly fulfils all the criteria. It was made by an
artist, it’s unique, it has an aesthetic, and no practical application, and
it looks very like a lot of other things that are art, but it’s a memorial,
and therefore excused art. But if it were deconsecrated, if its memorial
duties were taken elsewhere, would it then become art, and would it be worse
as art than as a memorial? Look at Trafalgar Square, at the other creations
here. No one asks if Nelson is art, but if someone put a gorilla suit on him
they would.
“Is it art?” is a question asked by the culturally insecure, those who need to
know that the bag they carry their opinions and prejudices in is a real
Louis Vuitton. Here is a simple rule: art isn’t anything. The purpose of art
isn’t to be art; it’s to move, to be inspiring, depressing, exciting, to
manipulate, to realise feelings and thoughts that are too subtle and deep to
put names to. It could also make you laugh, comfort you, distress you and
give you a stiffy.
On the other hand, the purpose of wallpaper is to paper walls. Don’t mistake
craft for art. Art may use craft, but that’s not what makes it art. The
proof of art is the same as the proof of pudding: it’s in the consumption.
You’ve got to feel it to know it. And if you want to know if something is
art, look at the way other people feel it. We view art differently from the
way we look at anything else. There are four sorts of art: good art and bad
art, successful art and unsuccessful art. Successful art is not necessarily
good art, and unsuccessful is not necessarily bad.
The woman in orange shouts at us groundlings. She is here to draw attention to
female genital mutilation. Aha, of course: the big knickers. She pulls on a
T-shirt that says “Mali”, and shouts: “This is for the 3m women who will be
cut this year in Mali.” She takes out a curved pruning knife and, with a
symbolic flick of the wrist, beheads a rose and flings the petals into the
wind. Whether the girls of Mali would think a rose petal a good swap for
labia and clitoris, no one asks. She then takes off her T-shirt and shouts:
“Who would like Mali? And throws it to a fat American in a baseball hat, who
gives it to his wife.
