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Taking the plinth
Michael Jackson, a pop star who once floated a giant statue of himself down the Thames in one of the most hubristic PR stunts ever, died just before the beginning of Antony Gormley’s One And Other project, in which randomly chosen members of the public get to be living statues in Trafalgar Square for one hour at a time.
If you felt like it, you could analyse the hell out of this overlapping of cultural events. It’s old fame (enduring, extraordinary, the preserve of a privileged few, based not just on vanity but on some kind of achievement) passing the baton, once again, to new fame (fleeting, ordinary, available to everybody, based on little except desire for attention for its own sake). Michael Jackson is perhaps the ultimate example of an icon of old fame - a hugely talented man who, despite being written about and photographed more than almost anyone else more than the planet, remained an enigma until his death. Private to the point of paranoia and megalomania, he was not someone most people could ever imagine relating to. Like a statue, he was a symbol on whom we could project whatever feelings we liked.
I always thought there was something terribly tragic about those giant Michael Jackson statues - built to promote his already grotesquely overhyped HIStory - in the gap between what Jackson seemed to think they represented (that he was, truly, the King of Pop) and what they actually represented (how utterly out of touch with reality this belief was by the early 1990s). He got widely mocked for it, and deserved it, but I still felt sorry for him. How isolated, how wrapped up in yourself - how lonely, above all - would you have to be to think it was a reasonable way to behave?
Perhaps because I was at a formative age when HIStory came out, I’ve always been sceptical of statues, ever suspicious that the lives that inspired them weren’t quite as heroic as the statues make out. Perhaps this is why I like Anthony Gormley’s idea so much - it’s the permanance of statues that bothers me, the fact that they continue to stand there, regardless of what new, potentially compromising information we find out about the lives behind them. The Gormley project seems to question all of that - in putting a different person on a plinth every hour, it acknowledges the way we constantly have to shift our perception of the world, depending on what new information we have. Most of the media coverage has made much of the fact that the people on these plinths are ‘ordinary’, the suggestion being that they are unimportant. That feels condescending to me - surely they are all extraordinary, in their own way? They just shouldn’t necessarily be elevated above everyone else permanently, just for a little while. And why, arguably, should anyone, no matter what they’ve achieved?
One and Other has captured people’s imaginations for all kinds of obvious reasons - in its references, in the pop cultural trends it is tuned into, it is as ‘right now’ as contemporary art gets. It’s a bit like Twitter, updated throughout the day (predictably, it has its own Twitter page). It’s reality TV on a plinth. It’s a bit like Britain’s Got Talent (celebrating the eccentricities of ‘ordinary’ Britons - or, arguably, exploiting the eccentricities of ordinary Britons). It’s a bit like Big Brother too - there’s a 24-hour TV feed where you can look at who’s up there, whenever you like.
It’s divided the critics, some of whom are very sniffy about Gormley (partly, you can’t help suspecting, because he is popular). Last time I read about it, Adrian Searle in the Guardian thought it was an admirable piece of public art, and the best thing Gormley has done, but Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph was bored already - which was a bit rich, given that he was simultaneously chastising the media for its shallow, excitable reaction to the project while being just as shallow himself, judging a piece of art designed to last for months after only nine hours.
Meanwhile the Scotsman’s critic, Duncan Macmillan, loftily dismissed the whole thing as a vanity project, a way for Gormley to ‘consolidate his place in the media’, which seemed to miss the point entirely. Surely Gormley’s intention is to question the vanity inherent in building permanent statues of anybody. And surely he is also taking his own ego out of the picture, more or less - the meaning and importance of the artwork depends on the people who stand on the plinth, not him. If anything, I thought he came across as rather humble when the Telegraph interviewed him about the project earlier this year, saying he was ‘calling into question everything I’ve done. Is this sculpture or isn’t it?’
I’d say that question has already been answered - as Adrian Searle points out, there is a long tradition of living sculpture, so what Gormley is doing isn’t exactly new. What is new, and interesting, is how exposed those people are up there - not in an art gallery, not in a house on a television, but out in the world under an open sky - and therefore how vulnerable the artwork is to anything the outside world chooses to throw at it. His living statues seem not bigger, but smaller - fragile, like life, like fame, like the idea that our perception of anything can or should be solid or permanent.
Andrew
