The Plinth That Was Never Filled

Trafalgar Square was laid out in the 1840s to commemorate a naval victory, and it is full of the apparatus of commemoration. Nelson stands on his column. On the plinths around the square stand George IV on horseback and two Victorian generals, Henry Havelock and Charles Napier. The fourth plinth, in the north-west corner, was built in 1841 to a design by Charles Barry for another equestrian statue, intended to be William IV. The money for it never arrived.

It stood empty for more than a century and a half. Proposals came and went, and the reason none succeeded is instructive: once a space is reserved for a permanent public honour, every candidate is a verdict, and nobody could agree on the verdict.

In 1998 the Royal Society of Arts proposed something else: use the plinth for temporary contemporary works. The first, in 1999, was Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo, a life-size figure of Christ with his hands bound and a crown of barbed wire, standing at the front edge of a plinth built for a horse and rider. Against that scale he looked tiny, which was the point. Bill Woodrow followed in 2000, and in 2001 Rachel Whiteread made Monument: a cast of the plinth itself in clear resin, set upside down on top of it, so that the pedestal held its own transparent reflection instead of a hero.

The Greater London Authority took the plinth over in 2003, and since then a commissioning group has chosen a new work every year or two. Shortlisted proposals are shown to the public as models and the public is invited to comment, but the group decides. The commissions have included Marc Quinn's marble of the artist Alison Lapper, pregnant, in 2005; Antony Gormley's One & Other in 2009, which put 2,400 members of the public on the plinth for an hour each, round the clock, for a hundred days; Yinka Shonibare's Nelson's Ship in a Bottle in 2010, later bought for the National Maritime Museum; and Michael Rakowitz's The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist in 2018, a reconstruction of a winged bull from Nineveh, destroyed by Islamic State in 2015, made from about 10,500 empty Iraqi date syrup cans.

Put this beside the two previous chapters and something becomes clear.

Tilted Arc failed because it was permanent and imposed. The people who had to live with it had not chosen it and could not wait it out. The fourth plinth removes the first condition. A work that leaves in two years can provoke as much as it likes, because nobody has to live with it for ever. The argument about it becomes a conversation rather than a siege.

The statue argument turns on honour, and on the impossibility of agreeing whom to honour. The fourth plinth sidesteps that too. It does not ask the city to decide who deserves to stand above it for ever. It asks a different question every couple of years, and the answer is allowed to be provisional.

Samson Kambalu's Antelope, unveiled in 2022, shows how much the arrangement can carry. It restages a 1914 photograph of John Chilembwe, a Baptist preacher who led a rising against British rule in Nyasaland the following year, standing beside a European missionary. In the photograph Chilembwe wears his hat, in defiance of a colonial rule that Africans should not wear hats in the presence of white people. Kambalu made the missionary life-size and Chilembwe larger than life, and set them in a square built to celebrate victory, across from generals who fought Britain's colonial wars.

There are limits, and they are worth stating. Temporary art cannot do what a memorial does. A memorial promises to stay, which is the whole of its value to people who are grieving, and a rotating commission cannot make that promise. The fourth plinth works because the rest of the square does not change: every temporary work is read against Nelson and the generals, and without them it would be a sculpture on a pedestal and nothing more. Whiteread herself has since argued that the plinth should be left empty, which is a reminder that the absence was always part of the work.

But as an answer to the question this book has been asking, it is the best one anybody has found. Who has to live with public art? On the fourth plinth, nobody for very long, and that turns out to be what lets it be brave.