Morning:
9°c
First Review
Antony Gormley's One & Other
Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square
2/5
There's little drama in One & Other — surely the most inevitable idea in art ever — as the behaviour of the first three official plinth-people is revealed.
A housewife from Lancashire held up a lollipop sign with the initials of the NSPCC. Every 15 minutes she turned in another direction and stood there stiffly. A serious art critic might write to you about how this human sculpture was offering a minimalist take on the gestural language of placard protest — but I won't. Next came a man in his thirties in a red T-shirt and green shorts who just stood there. Antony Gormley told assembled journalists that, “There's something about him not holding a placard which makes us really look at him.” Perhaps he had a point: the way the plinther had his hands thrust into his pockets and was pushing his pelvis forward might be construed as a symbol of masculinity. The third human statue released several green helium balloons, each of which had been sponsored by donations to a charity.
Gormley's plinth has art-historical lineage — Gilbert and George made their names as living sculptures in the Sixties, and an Italian conceptualist, Michelangelo Pistoletto, has been putting big mirrors in art galleries for decades, so visitors can see themselves as artworks, but, on this morning's evidence, One & Other is little more than a soap box for protests of one kind or another, or a stage for bashful self-display.
And yet this is one work of art that it is not right to dislike. It's democratic and multicultural, a perfect counter-balance to the stale bronze sculptures of colonisers, generals and kings on the other plinths on the Square.
It is that great rarity, a public art work that the public like (Gormley has a track record on this with the Angel of the North). It's of its time: a contemporary art version of a constructed reality show (though Gormley should have a premium rate phone line so we can vote on a winner). It will generate thousands of column inches about worthy political causes and ordinary Britons. You see what I mean?
There is one thing that I really admire about Gormley's fourth plinth. Predictable, unoriginal and boring as it is, this is a work of art that is so politically correct it's impossible to criticise it without sounding like a fascist.
