Contested Public Spaces;Trafalgar Square and the Empty Fourth Plinth, the Sincere Performance of

Histories and Identities

Trafalgar Square from the steps of the National Gallery, with Houses of Parliament in view.i

TX868 – Symbol, Myth and RiteJason Bosworth U44146489, STH mail box #107

An Introduction, Performing Sincerity and Identity in a City Square

The Fourth Plinth Project, which takes place on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in

the centre of London, has become an arresting public performance of monumental contemporary

art. While it has garnered a great deal of attention, instigating a profound public engagement

with contemporary art that includes the abject horror and sublime disarming of any who

encounter it, the real power of this event lies in its disruption of the public space which surrounds

it. It is a performance, a teasing play on the very idea of the monumental as an artistic project

and declaration of national identity. For many of its supporters, who include the former Mayor of

London ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone as well as other luminaries from the cultured and political

classes, it signals a shift in the public consciousness. Once we Brits were happy to be subsumed

by the weight of royal and imperial history, but now, well, let’s just say that we’re ready for

something just a bit more now. Few remember the history of Trafalgar Square, and so to a great

extent it is simply another tourist spot in a city crammed with them. Most would probably

recognise Lord Nelson, whose column is the central feature of the Square, but hardly anyone

knows anything about King George IV, let alone has heard of Major General Napier or General

Sir Havelock; the subjects of the other statues in the Square that have stood upon their pedestals

for over 150 years.

So then, is it simply enough to enjoy a controversial and surprisingly successful

contemporary art project that takes place on an accident of history? Of course it is, but I believe

that by considering the functional quality of this performance in the midst of the history-laden

Square as something perhaps akin to a sincere act with a suggestive ritual inclination, it is

possible to see here, at the gateway to power, a radical reformulation of British identity. To

deliberately raise up this project to such a status has, therefore, a particular rhetorical purpose. In

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today’s Europe the various governments’ efforts to mediate complex and multiple identities

within their respective states has come adrift, and in the foggy straits of the future a crisis looms.

I wish to offer a beacon, to disrupt certain productions of national identity by identifying a

conversational spot that has already begun to do so, even if it was nobody’s intention to start one.

Above I called this performance, “a sincere act with a suggestive ritual inclination,” and

by working through Adam Seligman et al’s work on ritual and sincerity I wish to critically

engage the project at the service of this much greater concern with national identity, which is yet

to be successfully negotiated in the British public sphere. However, the scope of the work

requires more than this. Having defined the analytic frame of ritual and sincerity I will endeavour

to read the Square as a sincere declaration of British identity, one that is concerned with the

valorisation of imperial authority. From this historicised position, the reader will be better able to

appreciate the effect of the Fourth Plinth Project, which I will discuss by leading the reader

through some of the works that the fourth plinth has hosted; Alison Lapper Pregnant by Marc

Quinn, One & Other by Antony Gormley, and Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park by Leslie

Johnson. Each of these works, in different and nuanced ways, disrupts the signifying economy of

the Square, intervening in its presumption of a certain normative mode of being-in-the-world

which belies both the history of the Square as a ongoing site of political struggle between the

rulers and the ruled and the urgency of our current situation as country, seemingly incapable of

offering genuine hospitality to the stranger. As such I will be offering a reading of this

incongruous phenomenon, as a playful and transgressive performance that has the possibility of

pointing a way forward through the morass of identity politics in the liberal polis.

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Creating Worlds Between Ritual and Sincerity

Our experiences occur in time, we are within time. It is through our accounts and enactments of

history that we concretise the experience of our time, coalescing public and private memories

such that we create identities and worlds in which we act. This modality of being-in-the-world is

significant; to be within time suggests that any construal of time, and therefore being or identity,

will pass. The creation of worlds in the phenomenological sense is thus to be constrained by the

horizon; one never sees all there is completely, for one’s vision is finite. We occur in time and

are never fully able to comprehend the Whole or the Real, the reality out there which exceeds the

horizons of our histories. While philosophical musings may seem to be somewhat parenthetical

to discussing a public art project, hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation between the worlds of

the reader and the text, suggests otherwise. And indeed, the analytic of ritual and sincerity

outlined in Ritual and Its Consequences requires that we consider how we create time and being

through certain modalities of world creation. The monumental is, after all, the fixing of time;

declaring for all to see that this, here, is Being itself, “We are thus!” The creation of worlds,

always multiple and never consonant with the Real, is therefore of paramount importance.

In the work Ritual and Its Consequences, Adam Seligman et al examine the role played

by two complexly related and co-existent phenomena, ritual and sincerity. The authors assert that

these phenomena have been caught up in the development of human societies, as two modalities

of interaction with reality that are continually re-expressed in a dynamic and ever-shifting

framing of human action. They have fuelled, and continue to fuel, the production of certain

modes and norms of behaviour and society which are taken up into the worlds in which we live.

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Ritual, as one mode of human engagement with the Real among others, offers, “a unique

way of accommodating the broken and often ambivalent nature of our world.”1 In its framing of

action ritual creates a subjunctive universe, an as if worldview that is uniquely capable of

mediating ambiguity and difference in its recognition of our arbitrary creation of an orderly

world through the process of erecting boundaries and establishing categories.2 As a means of

establishing a subjunctive world, ritual creates “order as if it were truly the case.”3 Ritual thus

enacts a shared space or world, one based on the common acceptance of its possibility or

potentiality; that is, we are willing to enter its boundaries or its frame as if it were the case, as if

this was our reality. As such, the subjunctive world has a fundamental illusionary quality, and in

its ritual creation there is an implicit recognition of the arbitrary production that occurs in the

delineation of this world. Through the ritual action itself, meaning is created and sustained in an

“endless work… in overt tension with the world of lived experience.”4 The real world does not

conform to the dynamic of our shared world, and hence the ritually conceived subjunctive world

is always being re-negotiated as we move between ambivalent or chaotic reality and the orderly

subjunctive world. Ritual-based societies acknowledge the incongruence between their

subjunctive world and the greater world-as-it-is within which this society is enacted. At the most

prosaic level, the very fact that rituals are continually repeated is a telling sign:

[R]itual actions involving order and harmony are only necessary among actors who see the world as inherently fractured and fragmented. If ritual participants thought the world was inherently harmonious, why bother with the rituals?”5

1 Adam B. Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi.2 This exposition of ritual, as a means to get at the idea of sincerity, is drawn from chapter one, “Ritual and the Subjunctive,” in, Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 17-42.3 Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 2o.4 Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 28.5 Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 31.

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We know this orderly world is not the case. But the rituals which constitute the subjunctive

illusion, and continually recreate it, allow for us to repeat its reality as if it were the case. Ritual

is thus a repetitive performance driven by its own temporaneity, as an always finite act of world

creation, and so meaning making, that operates in, “the register of the tragic,”6 as the endless

effort to restore the order of the subjunctive is reiterated in its every failure to be Real.

This fundamental dynamic, of the implicit recognition of the un-reality of the shared

world that is instantiated and maintained through ritual reiteration and re-performance by the

society it constitutes, allows for creative play between the non-ritual world or reality and the

ritual frame in which subjects and their world abide. The necessary re-negotiation and re-creation

of this boundary, which marks the division between the world and the Real, is already a primal

factor in its viability. We who share in this world are always moving between reality and this

world, as its finitude is taken up through the canon of practices which circumscribe its presence.

It is the basic tension of the ritually based society, at the point the ritual ends so too does the

world it sustains, as fractured and fragmented external reality impedes upon the order of the

subjunctive. It is the creation of a collective time or memory, one formed around certain

significant practices which supersede one’s own personal time. Even as a finite depiction of the

world, it is a collective experience whose form or pattern is eternally repeated; exceeding the

individual subject and incorporating one into the subjunctive world of society.

This is always the case for worlds. The creation of order presumes both a cohesive

narrative in which time is coalesced and the boundary of that time. However, the modality of

world maintenance, through which meaning and order are continually mediated, has a significant

effect upon the negotiation of this implicit failure of the eternal recurrence of one’s world. By

contrast to the subjunctive reality of the ritually produced world, the sincere world rejects the

6 Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 30.

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illusion of the as if. Rather, its world is. The sincere world is one whose roots often lie in the

failure of the integrity of the ritual world.7 Once a canon of ritual practices is no longer malleable

enough to reinterpret and develop itself in response to external phenomena which challenge the

ordered world these rituals create, another mode of world creation can arise. Predicated upon

denying the illusionary quality of its world, its modes of behaviour and its history are taken to

simply be reiterations of the fundamental state of things. It is a, “search to dissolve boundaries

and so realize an order of totality beyond all distinctions,” and so the sincere world, “involves

erasing the boundaries that constitute any given, real empirical order.”8 It is the “rage for order,”9

whose utopian strivings erase all difference under an ultimate order, without boundaries or

horizons. The sincere world sees the world-as-it-is, and establishes this transcendent stasis within

the immanence of time. History is no longer an account of being-in-the-world, it is the account,

determinate and complete. Furthermore it is sufficient, there is no excess of difference or

ambiguity and the total gaze of the sincere world contains all that is. Thus the primal boundary

between the continually reiterated pattern of the eternal time of the orderly world and the

ambivalent passage of the Real, which always fractures human time, is dissolved. However, this

complete vision, being the total comprehension of reality within the human gaze, will fail. The

boundary between order and chaos will reappear. The future event that supersedes our sincere

production of order, whether from the processes of nature or in the figure of the stranger, will

disrupt that order, exposing its arbitrary and illusionary quality. Without the repetitive forms of

ritual, which are able to recreate order through the recognition of this boundary state, the sincere

time must either destroy the interruption or it will itself be destroyed as its world shatters.

7 This section draws upon chapter four, “Ritual and Sincerity,” in, Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 103-130.8 Quotes, Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 110.9 Karl Mannheim, quoted in Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 111.

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In contrast, the world created by the ritual enactment of the subjunctive explicitly

involves the creation of boundaries.10 To separate out a world implies its edges, its finitude and

the end of its history. The ritually created subjunctive has within it structures which can mediate

this presence. The boundary can be a site of great creativity, as the apprehension of the Real

occurs through the order of the ritually delineated world.11 This site of the boundary is a

both/and, at which the fragmented and fractured world-as-it-is meets the subjunctive world. The

delineating practices which preserve the order of the world will always encounter such moments,

and the repository of the canon has been continually creatively adapted in order to sustain the

primary order of the subjunctive. There is thus a dynamic relationship with the boundaries of the

world, whose power over the world is continually creatively and adaptively diffused through the

canon of ritual practices. Their eternal, though illusionary, invariability can encapsulate the

future or open-ended moment in which the Real contests the viability of the canonically

circumscribed heart of the world. It is a powerful mechanism which facilitates, in terms of an

ideal type, both the recognition of difference and its successful mediation. Therefore, the

expression of a subjunctive world through ritual allows for the mediation of these complex

boundaries of self and society in way that more sincere modes of world creation cannot.

This understanding of the dominant modalities of world creation allows the reader to

appreciate how Trafalgar Square functions within the wider production of a sincere world which

legitimates particular patterns of rule. It is the ideological creation of a particular signifying

economy under the aegis of the ruling class. The Square is an effort to fix time, to create

unassailable boundaries that encompass British history and so produce certain modes of identity

that favour the stasis of ruler and ruled. These are not absolute categories and their movement is

10 This section draws upon chapter three, “Ritual, Play, and Boundaries,” in, Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 69-101, especially p84ff.11 See, Seligman et al, Ritual and Its Consequences, 34-40.

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key to the history of the democratization of Britain. But as a site of the deliberate production of

history and identity, Trafalgar Square, which has become a site of continued struggle with this

dominant patterning of time, stands as the sincere declaration of imperial rule.

The History of Trafalgar Square

The construction of Trafalgar Square in the nineteenth century was not, “fortuitous.”12 Through

an accounting of its history I will offer a reading of the space of Trafalgar Square as a

monumental construction designed to be a sincere emblem of Britain and Britishness. Drawing

on the work of Rodney Mace, it is my contention that Trafalgar Square was intended to

symbolise imperial power and authority, attempting to realise its absolute reign over British

interests both at home and abroad. It was thus a sincere effort to establish a world consonant with

the Real, and so fix time and identity within the monumental public space of Trafalgar Square.

However, the boundary of this space has been continually contested, throughout its history by

political demonstrations and now through the Fourth Plinth Project, whose performance

resonates with this other world of defiant protest.

The monumental public space is a key site of signification in the modern nation state,

through which certain narratives of identity are memorialized by the concrete enactment of

history. These spaces are the fold of national narrative time, through which populations move

and assume a certain inflection of historical identity. Trafalgar Square is no different, “as in any

drama, the stage and all that is on it form an integral and indissoluble link with the narrative.” 13

The narrative of Trafalgar Square is written into its structure and development as part of a wider

programme of improvement to the area around Charing Cross. This began during the Regency 12 Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square; Emblem of Empire (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 15. My account of the history and development of Trafalgar Square is almost solely reliant on this work, being the only one explicitly concerned with the subject. As such footnoting will be minimal, tracking only direct quotations.13 Mace, Trafalgar Square, 21.

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period (1811-1837) and carried on well into the Victorian, with significant improvements still

being engineered during the 1870s.14

But the general tone of these improvements was created by John Nash, whose proposal

for the development of the general area was born out of a report on the state of Charing Cross

commissioned by Her Majesty’s Commission for Wood Forests and Land Revenues in 1812. The

crown owned the land, and had been continually using Charing Cross as both a site of judicial

punishment (which Cromwell also made use of during the Civil War of 1641-51) and for

gathering defensive forces in barracks on the Mews, which lay to the north. This was in order to

protect the seats of power at Westminster (which became the Houses of Parliament) and

Whitehall (which came to house the civil service), as well as the nearby Buckingham Palace,

which was increasingly becoming the main residence of the monarch. Charing Cross was the

gateway to this nexus of power for the general populace (the rulers made use of the nearby River

Thames for their own access). It was, almost inevitably, to become the prime boundary between

the rulers and the ruled, and its more recent history has been one of continued political struggle

as the ‘mob’ resisted the restriction of power forced upon them by the rulers.

As revolution fermented on the continent, notably in France but also throughout the

intelligentsia of Europe, the British ruling class’ fear of the mob grew. There seemed to be an

English Radicalism emerging, coalescing among the middle and working classes, which

threatened the stasis of rule. Events such as the 1780 Gordon Riots (which occurred around

Charing Cross) and the growth of Chartism (a movement for democratic reform) in the north of

England seemed to be heralding an uprising. This fear was compounded by the increasing

presence of the poorest and most destitute residents of the city on the north and eastern sides of

Charing Cross, directly opposite the city homes and clubs of the elites. Such fear of the mob,

14 Consult Cross’ New Plan of London, 1850 (see fig. 1) throughout this section.

which if it ever existed never appeared to manage to instigate any kind of mass movement that

could be called English Radicalism, featured strongly in Nash’s designs for the improvement of

the area.

Mace quotes at length from Nash’s 1812 report, which suggested certain social effects of

the improvement of Charing Cross, and it bears a re-telling. The new streets, whose construction

the plan entailed, would provide, “a boundary and complete separation between the Streets and

Squares occupied by the Nobility and the Gentry… [and the] narrow Streets and meaner houses

occupied by mechanics and the trading part of the community… and the inferior houses and the

traffic from the Haymarket would be cut off from any communication with the New Street [later

named Regent Street].” It was a “Line of Separation,”15 stretching from Parliament to Charing

Cross, which preserved the movements of the rulers unadulterated by the threat of the mob.

Trafalgar Square itself emerged from these plans once they had found Parliamentary

support in the 1820s through the sponsorship of Charles Abuthnot, a confidant of the King. The

Square was to be a thoroughfare which facilitated the ease of the ruling class’ movements

throughout the city. The naming of the Square after the British naval victory against the forces of

Napoleon at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 began a sedimentary process of signification, whose

steady accretions added layers of declarative sincerity to the space, shaping the monumental

aspect of the Square until it resonated with the authority of imperial rule and its eternal triumph

on the boundary of the rulers and the ruled at the gates of power. As Mace writes, the public

memorial is, “the sole and absolute province of the ruling class, who of course decide what will

be recorded and how.”16 As with many others, this is the case with Trafalgar Square.

15 Quotes, Mace, Trafalgar Square, 33.16 Mace, Trafalgar Square, 15.

The sufferance this particular space imposes has at times been too great to bear, as with

the struggle for the extension of the voting franchise away from the lairds and lords of the

country. While an amorphous and shifting movement, it was to have its greatest protests within

the Square. This was much to the horror of the ruling classes, who maintained a significant

military presence in the area from the 1840s through the 1880s, and while it was never fully

deployed the level of anxiety among the rulers that this alludes to is significant. Above all the

watchword of the period rang true, “Deny the Parks and Open Spaces to the Mob.”17 The

Chartists, the Suffragettes, anti-war protestors, demonstrations regarding Irish Home Rule, the

hunger marches of the unemployed, anti-apartheid rallies… Every significant political issue has

come to the gates of power to be heard, to protest at the despotism of home rule or the evils of

imperial power abroad. Battles between the police and protestors continue to this day, notably as

demonstrations were held against the Iraq war in 2003 when one million people marched on

London. The resonance of this space defies one simple narrative, but it is the very dynamic of

this space to assert just that.

Sincere Emblem of Empire, Within the World of Trafalgar Square

My reading of this space both draws on the biographies of the individual’s who came to occupy

three of the four plinths in the Square and makes some intuitive movements in reading the

17 Mace, Trafalgar Square, 158. Sir Ellice in a War Office memorandum in 1865, regarding the defence of the city. His plans directly built upon Lord Wellington’s, whose was heavily involved in the erecting of Nelson’s Column, preparations for 1848 and the feared Chartist revolt, for which he assembled 890 cavalry, 11 pieces of artillery (including three 12lb howitzers), 5,000 infantry and 12,000 reserves (consisting of enlisted pensioners). A further 100,000 special constables were raised in the aftermath of the 150,000 strong Chartists’ march. See, Mace, Trafalgar Square, 149ff.i http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/London/Trafalgar_Square/photo1036729.htm (Date Accessed: 4/18/2010).

totality of the representation which occurs in this public memorial space. This is in order to get at

what I believe is the underlying significance of the Fourth Plinth Project as a disruption to the

wider signifying economy. As such, while certain ideas of spaciality and interpretation influence

my reading,18 it is in part a question of inference as well as listening to the spectre of history.19

So, let us stand in the midst of the Square and contemplate its world.

In the centre Nelson’s Column overshadows the scene,20 reminding us of British naval

triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar, a naval battle which heralded the end of the Napoleonic Wars

and the beginning of massive imperial expansion as Britain came to rule the waves. The four

plinths which surround him transform this memorial into a greater historical vision of British

identity. We of course have Nelson, who represents naval rule and all that this means for the

massive expansion of the British Empire. Next is King George IV, a sign of royal rule and the

eternal authority of the Crown. Major General Napier won his place by putting down the first

Chartist revolts that swept the north of England, and is thus a sign of domestic rule and the

triumph of peace and order under the authority of the Crown and Parliament. General Sir

Havelock represents imperial rule, with his triumph over uprisings in India on behalf of the

Crown’s imperial interests. Together, on the physical boundary of rulers and the ruled, these

statues serve as eternal reminders of this world, being the fullness of British imperial and

domestic authority which triumphs over any who would contest this claim. But, in the north-west

corner, by accident of history,21 the proclamation of this sincere comprehension of reality falters.

18 For example: the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer on hermeneutics in Truth and Method, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on non-metaphysical ontology in A Thousand Plateaus, Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological account of givenness in the work In Excess, and Michel Foucault’s genealogical account of the French Prison system in Discipline and Punish. These works are included in the bibliography, as well as any pertinent secondary literature.19 For a fuller account of the individual statues and the biographies of their incumbents see, “Hero of the Empire,” pp. 48-67, and “Ugly Bronze Images,” pp. 111-133, in, Mace, Trafalgar Square.20 See fig. 2.21 This lacuna in the narrative fabric of Trafalgar Square was caused by a simple lack of funds. Between the government run commission and the repeated efforts to raise public funds (a process which had earlier almost failed to produce a finished Nelson’s Column) time, effort, and any real interest outran the best bureaucratic efforts. See,

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It is this space that acknowledges the history of popular demonstration against the cruelties of

disenfranchisement and the flagrant abuse of the poor and the other unfortunate subjects of

British rule. And it is here that a new world has come to be performed, a performance which

takes up the temporary nature of the legacy of political protests and structurally contests this

space with another monumental creation of history and identity.

The Empty Fourth Plinth, From Accident of History to Site of Disruptive Performance

While the history of conflict within Trafalgar Square has been between the rulers and the ruled in

an ongoing and temporary fashion, the Fourth Plinth Project has utilised the structural failure in

the Square’s declaration of Britishness to push at the boundaries of public art and thereby the

question of the monument and its relationship to history and being. It is an act of boundary play,

creating ‘statues’ which defy the proclamation that Trafalgar Square is dedicated to and exposing

the faults in its totalised ideal of imperial rule and authority. By articulating multiple and

conflicting ideas of the work of art as a public monument an unfolding world emerges, one

which disrupts the concrete act of world creation that surrounds it.

Begun by the Royal Society of Art in 1998, the project sought to, “to refocus attention on

the empty plinth, raise awareness of public art, create examples of the types of artwork that could

be created for the plinth, and help resolve its long-term future.”22 Such was the success that the

government commissioned a report into the project’s possible future as a permanent site of

temporary contemporary art installations. This resulted in the Square being given over to the

Mayor of London, having been owned by the Crown, who, in conjunction with the special

advisory board the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group have guided the project since. This

Mace, Trafalgar Square, 111-12.22 http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/plinth/rsa.jsp. (Date Accessed: 4/27/2010). The following information is also drawn from this web page and the links embedded in it, see http://www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/.

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specially selected advisory body considers proposals from national and international artists for an

installation and then makes a short-list of six projects which are then shown to the public. A

period of consultation follows and then a piece is formally commissioned.

While many interesting installations have appeared on the plinth there are three particular

works that are of especial significance. The first two are in form conventional re-enactments of

monumental sculpture, but each carefully and adroitly forces extensive reconsideration of the

function of the other monumental works which surround them, thus calling into question the

wider sincere world their designers attempted to produce.

The first is Alison Lapper Pregnant by Marc Quinn (2005-2007, see figure 3). This piece

met with a great deal of criticism, as it controversially depicts Alison Lapper, an artist herself,

nude and pregnant. She was born with a congenital disorder which resulted in her being born

without arms and with foreshortened legs, and so our encounter with this piece is one marked by

a certain discomfort. We are confronted with pristine white Carrara marble, used in ancient

Rome and Michelangelo’s David, yet our aesthetic assumptions about classical sculpture are

completely undone.

The work is undeniably beautiful, arresting us with Alison’s passive gaze and bountiful

form. And yet the logic of our analysis begins to intrude upon taboos. We are confronted with

her pregnancy, which the title so disarmingly brings to the fore, and we come to consider Alison

as a sexual adult. We cannot infantilise her. We cannot ignore her vivacious form. We must

encounter her as a fellow human, one who has known and will know the love and desire of

another. So swiftly and so immediately are we left stripped bare at her feet, exposed in our

fragility to our own implicit assumptions about disabled adults. We even realise that as we are

drawn to Alison, we have no other way of talking about her except by acknowledging her

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disability. We are left profoundly aware of our conditioning, and after this fashion the entire

edifice of Trafalgar Square becomes a mockery of humanity. We are forced to see the

weaknesses of these triumphant men, to bear witness to Nelson’s savaged form and to remember

the thousands of dead and wounded that each of these heroes stands upon. We must acknowledge

the ravages reeked throughout history by the hundreds of years of British colonialism and

domestic despotism. Alison disturbs this identity, contravenes it, and surpasses it.

From the boundary she gazes upon the concrete weight of monumental history, her own

position created by the inability of this space to complete its enunciation of a world under the

aegis of eternal British imperial authority. History and identity are destabilised as sincere

categories of world creation, are instead exposed to the vicissitudes of a fragmented and

fractured world-as-it-is. In a more indirect fashion our next performance takes this idea further.

Leslie Johnson’s fibreglass sculpture, Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park (2009-2010, see

figure 4) asks another question of Trafalgar Square. In form it is a more conventional piece,

celebrating a decorated war hero whose efforts during the Blitz won him a place in the memory

of Londoners. Yet in its material the work suggests something else. Strong and durable but light

and flexible, the fibreglass mimics bronze but it cannot be permanent. It has to be anchored in

way much more apparent than with the true bronzes and stone of the Square. This is indeed just

the point. Without such a piece the project is simply an exercise in the vanity of the literati, an

insider deal that expands the fortunes of an already privileged group of artists. But here we see a

play on the effect of a memorial, one appropriately ritualised and incorporated into the greater

themes of the project. For a ritual in its repetition both acknowledges a coherent account of

origins and allows for its negotiation and transformation. Without it, without history, we are not.

To fail to recognise this need for origins, projected but incorporated into the building of an

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identity, we cannot understand the anxiety and impulse for such public spaces as Trafalgar

Square. Every country has one, a sincere declaration of history and identity around which the

people can rally. The Fourth Plinth Project’s ritualised intervention allows for an exposure of the

arbitrary enactment which constitutes Trafalgar Square and all others like it, and creates a public

space within a space in which boundary play can be mediated.

In 2009 Antony Gormley’s work One & Other was commissioned. It was a live sculpture

through which, within 100 days, 2,400 people were each given an hour to stand upon the empty

plinth in an unfolding picture of Britain. From 36,000 applicants these few were chosen in order

to proportionally represent all the regions of Britain. The performances were provocative, banal,

funny, poignant, derivative; but with the passing of each hour another individual, without any

claim to greatness or authority, took their hour and offered another individual’s momentary being

for a public audience. Each time another took to the stage, yet another Briton stood amidst the

history of the Square and asked us yet again to entertain the diversity of enactments of identity

within the nation state. It was important for Gormley that this not be too pre-planned, that a

certain organic movement be allowed to steer the overall performance of the sculpture. But by

refusing to halt for night or for weather, for 24 hours for 100 days the deadened failure of the

eternal declaration of Trafalgar Square was exposed by the repeating shifting of memory in a

monumental sculpture that decentred and de-authorised one final statement. As each plinther

lived for a moment as the Briton, the whole country came to stand there, as region by region we

were acknowledged for a moment, then allowed to take a bow and pass on.

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[Note Rites of Passage and Architecture of Experience as influencing analysis and maybe dredge a quote or two.]

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Bibliography

(Ed.) Arnold, Dana and Ballantyne, Andrew. Architecture as Experience: Radical Change in Spatial Practice. New York: Routledge, 2004.

(Ed.) Buchanan, Ian and Lambert, Gregg. Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Rabinow, Paul. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Edited by Gordon, Colin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006.

Kapferer, Judith. The State and the Arts: Articulating Power and Subversion. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008.

(Ed.) Kingwell, Mark and Turmel, Patrick. Rites of Way: The Politics and Poetics of Public Space. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.

Mace, Rodney. Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.

Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Seligman, Adam B., Weller, Robert P., Puett, Michael J. and Simon, Bennett. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Summerson, John. John Nash. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949.

Summerson, John. The Life and Work of John Nash, Architect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.

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Figures

Figure 1, Cross’ New Plan of London, 1850.ii Map marked to show relationship between the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square while still under completion.

Figure 2, 360° picture of Trafalgar Square.iii From left to right, the empty plinth, King George IV, General Sir Havelock, Nelson’s Column, Major General Napier

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Figure 3iv

ii http://archivemaps.com/mapco/cross/cross.htm (Date Accessed: 4/18/2010).iii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trafalgar_Square_360_Panorama_Cropped_Sky,_London_-_Jun_2009.jpg (Date Accessed: 4/18/2010).iv Unfortunately I have misplaced my reference for this photograph. It is, however, far too arresting to be left out.

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