IT’S all over. The last person to take their place on the Fourth Plinth, in Trafalgar Square, has been lifted back down by cherry picker and the art work has come to an end.
It’s 100 days since Antony Gormley’s One and Other began, and 96 since I became the 151st Plinther.
Cue lots of yawning from friends and colleagues, who are surely tired of me talking about the hour I spent as a living sculpture.
So here’s the abridged version: applied online, shocked when chosen at random, went to London, took a 3ft penguin, felt nervous, got on cherrypicker, got on plinth, made origami birds for hour, dropped them off plinth to children, parasol blew off plinth (nobody injured), got off plinth, wrote lots about experience and bored my friends.
My hour of fame over, I watched the first weekly round-up programme on Sky Arts (I was upstaged by a girl dressed as a fox carrying an umbrella, and didn’t make it on), made the effort to watch any other Liverpudlians taking part, then gradually lost interest.
Or at least I lost interest in watching people’s antics on the plinth, people’s reactions to it are a different matter.
As the Daily Post’s arts editor, part of my job is to review, commentate and generally judge other people’s creations.
Now the tables have turned and other people are judging an art work I was part of.
Boris Johnson loved it, calling the plinthers’ contributions “the bold, the beautiful, the thought-provoking and the bizarre”, Wirral-born Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey wasn’t sure about it, and comedian Arabella Weir was offended.
Shifting uncomfor-tably on the Sky Arts sofa during the first round-up show, she looked physically affronted by One and Other’s claim to artistic integrity. Along with the 2,399 other plinthers, most of whom I have never met, I have been criticised as an attention seeker (unfair), praised for my courage (also unfair) and accused of being obsessed with reality TV (even more unfair).
Bizarrely, having signed up to something that was about 2,400 individuals doing their own individual thing, I have become a victim of generalisation and reduced to a statistic.
According to the One and Other project team, I’m one of 590 people in their 30s (unsurprisingly the largest age group was of 20-somethings) and one of 1,190 women.
I’m also defined by what I’m not – not the same age as the majority of plinthers, which is 39.
We’ve also been divided into categories – activists, creatives, promoters, communicators and contemplators.
Not sure which I fit into – creatives, maybe, as I made something that I then gave out to passers-by, or contemplators as I sat quietly while working on the birds rather than promoting a cause or giving a performance.
When you look at the piece hour by hour, you get a different picture.
One girl dressed as a giant pigeon, a man read out a statement on behalf of a prisoner on Death Row, someone made a statue out of bread, an 84-year-old woman signalled by semaphore from her wheelchair, and there were 2,396 others.
It was Big Brother for people who would never watch Big Brother, but it demonstrated that, when you give a cross-section of the nation an identical brief, they’ll all find a different way to fulfil it.
Was One and Other art? I’m finding it hard to decide.
But it was certainly a great idea that enlivened people’s imaginations and celebrated individuality.
READ more of Laura’s columns at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/lauradavis
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