It’s just been announced that a sculpture depicting colonial defiance is one of the two winners that will next occupy Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth.
According to the BBC News website, Samson Kambalu's Antelope
restages a Baptist preacher, John Chilembwe, and a European missionary, John
Chorley. Chilembwe is wearing a hat in defiance of the then-colonial rule that
denied Africans the right to wear hats in front of white people. On the plinth,
Chilembwe is larger than life, Chorley is much smaller next to him, “elevating the
African’s story and revealing the hidden narratives of under-represented people
in the British Empire”.
I for one am sitting on my hands and looking the other way.
I am now sufficiently fed up to declare publicly what I’ve
felt since the first time BLM thugs took to our streets in defiance of Covid
regulations designed to keep us all safe, including NHS staff and transport
workers of all colours. This raking over of the negative aspects of Britain’s
past is wrong. Divisive. Unbalanced. Counterproductive. Inflammatory.
Politically motivated. Democratically unsound. And many times, Inaccurate.
What good can come of such exercises, other than discontent and of course division, when we have made such good progress towards equality, coalescence and mutual contentment. There’s more to be done, but this in-your-face-at-expense-of-all-else strategy is simply pissing people off, including many people of colour.
I mean, if Antelope were a great work of art for art’s sake, worthy of a stint on the plinth above other entrants, then fine. But it’s not. And the losers are the more worthy artists who lost out and the general public who have been cheated out of something better. The work has about as much (hackneyed) imagination as the boring sculpture of Lady Diana, unveiled this week. Both are seen-it-got-the-T-Shirt pieces. Neither of them push any boundaries in concept, design or (to the general public’s eye) execution. Two big yawn-fests.
So what were the alternatives that might have been chosen for the fourth plinth? Firstly the other winning artwork, Teresa Margolles's Improntas (Imprint), features casts of the faces of 850 trans people, most of whom are sex workers, arranged round the plinth in the form of a Tzompantli, a skull rack from Mesoamerican civilisations. While the Trans issue is also one of those in-your-face debates that is lop-sided and tiresome, at least Improntas tackles the trans-issue from a different perspective, merging different concepts, and the execution is fascinating.
But then there’s GONOGO by Goshka Macuga, a giant rocket that “encourages people to look beyond their immediate surroundings and up to outer space”. It’s a rocket pointing upwards. Get it?
On Hunger and Farming in the Skies of the Past 1957-1966 by Ibrahim Mahama “recreates a grain silo partially built by Eastern European architects in Ghana in the early 1960s in a towering structure filled with living plants.” I think I saw something like this at the Chelsea Flower Show a couple of years ago, with a cleverer title.
Paloma Varga Weisz’s Bumpman for Trafalgar Square is a bald man with bumps all over his body sitting on a log. The official explanation is, “a figure inspired by the German Wundergestalt tradition and the spirit of German folklore.” Hmmm. Not very explanatory at all. So I googled a few things and have pieced together my own commentary. Wundergestalt means ‘miraculous shape’. Oh – Kayyy. ‘Gestalt’ is also a psychological term that means an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. Now that’s more intriguing. Taken from a gallery website where Weisz has previously exhibited I found that by “often removing figures from their original context, Varga Weisz appropriates both well-known and fancifully idiomatic tropes and reconfigures them as a constellation of archetypes that elucidate representations of femininity, history, and the grotesque. It is in a strange time/place where her practice resides; the twilight liminality of dreams and realities where the known and the unknown meet and feel estrangingly akin to each of us.”
Is that a fact! I compared this verbal diarrhoea with a report I once wrote for a local newspaper about a new art gallery in small-town America. I’m not an artist, so I reviewed the gallery and its exhibits through a visitor’s not art-establishment eyes. My editor loved it. My friends loved it. The gallery curator loved it. The artists loved it. How wonderful, they said, that someone who knows about art can write about it for those who can’t. Ha! That’s the way to do it. Had Weisz asked me to write a brief explanation for her bumpy man, she might have won.
Finally, The Jewellery Tree by Nicole Eisenman “recreates the household object on a monumental scale, with Lord Nelson's medals, a fife and drum and a plastic coffee lid”. The concept is great. The design spot on. But the actual execution, the part most people care about, is crap.
If I had been on the final judging panel, my votes would have gone for the trans thing and the bump fella (subject to me writing the explanation). But before casting my vote I’d have asked to see what works had been rejected, on the grounds that they couldn’t have been any worse than the shortlist, and the reasons for their exclusion might just have been political.
And I bet that had Antelope been the work of a white person, i.e. a ‘privileged colonialist’, it would have been disqualified: cancelled because of cultural appropriation.
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