Asian Public Art News: Lapper's tenure on the fourth plinth ending

Strong article in the Guardian complaining about the Alison Lapper Pregnant piece which has been on the "fourth plinth" in Trafalgar Square for a year-and-a-half. I'm sorry to miss seeing it in person, this is one of those works about which everyone has an opinion without having seen it. One nice thing about this article by Brendan O'Neill is that it attempts to bring its materiality -- size, presence and the color of the Carrera marble -- into the discussion of its meaning and impact.

O'Neill's argument is strong but one-dimensional - the piece celebrates a person for what they were born with, not what they have done, "a 13-tonne celebration of the distortion wrought by nature on a woman's body rather than that woman's contributions to public life and society...[it] celebrates what nature, in all its arbitrariness, does to humans rather than what we do to shape, lead and transform the world around us. In this sense, it captures the deeply conservative nature of the identity agenda".

Living in Southeast Asia, I'm alive to the sad and deeply conservative power of the identity politicians, and I think O'Neill's point is an important one. But it is one-dimensional: there's no historical consciousness. While continuing celebration of the bodies of variously differently distorted humans (and nature distorts all of us no?) on Trafalgar Square really would be a deeply conservative practice, celebrating one, and for a comparatively short time, is clearly not a conservative act, and does achieve some of the "opening" that Alison Lapper says she was looking for in agreeing to pose. As one commenter said, we are marking a moment in our development as a society when we can "bear to look", and celebrate her beauty and power.

And O'Neill just quickly avoids the big question of celebrating individuals in public art: The problem in holding fast to a public that can evaluate or even recognize the contribution of people to society. I mean, Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier? Should the US be building statues to Dick Cheney? (still, my favorite move out of this dilemma was Mostar's decision to build a statue of Bruce Lee - "Out of all the ethnic heroes and those who have a material interest in acting as victims, we have chosen Bruce Lee. Now they can rack their brains trying to decide whether he is Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), Croat, or Serb...")

The Guardian's commentors on this article are a pretty class act - it's a good dialogue. For example I had missed the fact that Trafalgar Square already has a statue of a disabled person on it. The opposition that Artist Marc Quinn's work presents -- boring white war heros vs disabled woman artist -- clearly works to erase Lord Nelson's own disability.