Smash hit

It was funny. Who’d have thought you could get a laugh out of female circumcision? She has a lot of Africa to get through, and lots of roses to behead. The crowd are hungry for clitoridectomy T-shirts, wave their hands for T-shirts. (The T-shirt is the crossover between culture and politics: the personal pull-on billboard of conviction.)

Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery and a man whom I would bet a Poussin doesn’t own a T-shirt boasting anything more than a polo player, took the opportunity of the interest in Trafalgar Square last week to say that he’d like the busy road put back outside the National

Gallery, as a cordon sanitaire, a ha-ha, between high art and hoi polloi. Hee hee. We are, he sighed, ruining the classical loveliness of the square. There are so many events here, so noisy, so smelly, so many people climbing on the lions and the pediments. This is, of course, the problem with classical monumental cityscaping: it makes people look so uncouth, de trop; we are merely human litter — and that, in no small measure, is the point of building monumental cityscapes.

This place is supposed to make you feel small. Its grandeur and its scale are a fist to the populus and two fingers to the French. The Georgians demolished Nash’s square, which in its turn had replaced a medieval market of shops and streets. This square was made as a stone seal of civic imperium to convince a burgeoning, displaced and quarrelsome population of its duty, to remind citizens of the great and the noble, who had created their empire and their riches.

Can you name the men who share the square with Gormley? This is the arty version of naming the seven dwarfs or the Marx brothers. Of course, swottily, I can. Henry Havelock, hero of the siege of Lucknow; died before he ever got home, of the shits. General Napier, a man who was disliked in life but not as much as his statue has been disliked in death. He captured Sindh, and probably never sent the apocryphal telegram (“Peccavi”). George IV, sculpted by Chantrey, he of the bequest; and, behind him, busts of first sea lords: Jellicoe, Beatty and Cunningham. Behind them, in front of the National Gallery, James II, the worst king we ever had, dressed absurdly as Julius Caesar and sculpted by Grinling Gibbons, and George Washington, given to the people of Britain by the Commonwealth of Virginia; having sworn he’d never set foot in England again, he stands on imported, republican, Yankee dirt. And to the south, on an island, facing Admiralty Arch, is the best statue in the square, arguably the best statue in London, certainly the finest equestrian one: Charles I, by Le Sueur. He surveys Whitehall, where he lost his head, Westminster and up to the palace.

No one would dare ask any of these stern bronze grandees if they were art. They are here to inspire the ancient, civic duty of pride, excellence, self-sacrifice and gratitude. But mostly, they’re here to remind you of your place. Which is on the ground. This is the first great failing of having living people on a plinth. The living don’t belong. They are too small. Monuments are big, because that’s how we show achievement. The great and the heroic are bigger than human, because they’ve achieved more. On Gormley’s plinth, humans seem even more insignificant. For a start, they’re difficult to see, cut off at the waist by the elevation. They don’t offer you a sense of diversity, or the nobility of the ordinary man. They don’t have a communist heroism. It just shows you how very, very ordinary we are.

And the art the lottery winners make of themselves is gauche and clichéd. Watching the webcam, you see a succession of people awkwardly broadcasting worthy causes, doing party turns, auditioning simple dichotomies or visual puns. It’s been pointed out that there is more than an element of reality TV about this process. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a rather small and sterile accomplishment. What the constant stream of lottery winners proves is that art is not made by chance, or by the ordinary, but by people who are extraordinary. Art is not what you’ve seen before; it is something you’ve never imagined. And only very few manage to make it. The rest of us pastiche and plagiarise.

The woman collects her rose stems, to be replaced by a man who begins to read the Old Testament. He clears the small crowd before he finishes the first verse, and he underlines the truth: not about God, but about this plinth. It isn’t a plinth: it’s a pulpit, a complaint line, a soapbox, for wind-blown agitprop. You need to be dead to fill a plinth. You need only a grievance for a pulpit. This is Speakers’ Corner come to Trafalgar Square, which is what marchers have been doing for a century.

So, individually, this is unsuccessful bad art, but for Gormley it’s probably unsuccessful good art. And, in the nature of art, the piece becomes very good indeed when there’s nobody there. An empty plinth with the ridiculous, nannying and ugly wings of a safety net, the beeping JCB, the guards with high-vis jackets, the permanent Portakabin containing a sitting room for minders, PRs and organisers, says something about the timidity of our society, the obsession with danger, the constant worry about chance and bad luck, the feeling that we need to be protected from everything and every possibility. That we might fall from the plinth and hurt ourselves.

We are failing to live up to the square. Havelock didn’t need a safety net, nor Napier; even Charles met his fall with nothing more than an extra vest, so as not to shiver. Nelson, way up there, on his pillar, doesn’t need a risk assessment or a safety harness, and he has only one eye and one arm. As ever, Gormley has created something contemporary and important: a memorial to health and safety.

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