Woke on a Pedestal: How the Fourth Plinth Became a Shrine to Ugly, Agenda-Driven Art

‘Mil Veces un Instante’ is a monolith to aesthetic non-conformity.

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The Fourth Plinth has become a revolving platform for the kind of ‘art’ that makes you wonder if the pigeons gathering nearby are actually the real connoisseurs. What better way to complement the statues of British icons than by hoisting up a giant blue chicken, a gargantuan emoji of a thumbs-up, or a skeletal horse?

I like to imagine what the great Kenneth Clark would have had to say about the Fourth Plinth if he were making Civilisation today. (Although the BBC would never make Civilisation today.) Perhaps he would comment that where once we celebrated the eternal, the heroic, and the universally inspiring, now Western art is little more than a playground for the transient and self-referential whims of social trends. Or perhaps he would speculate whether Michelangelo, Raphael, or Bernini could ever have imagined that the standards of public art could drop to such a depth that we are asked to contemplate not beauty, but merely ‘statements' — and poorly made ones at that.

If Clark were to review the Fourth Plinth, I feel sure he would have agreed that this year the public spectacle of our collective confusion has outdone itself. The finest minds of contemporary art have awarded the prized spot to ‘Mil Veces un Instante’ by Teresa Margolles.

The 15th artwork to be installed on the Fourth Plinth is a creation of plaster casts of the faces of 726 trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people and a tribute to Margolles’ friend, a transgender woman named Karla, murdered in Mexico in 2015.

While it identifies as a sculpture, it looks more like an undergraduate papier-mâché project trying to pass its final exam in diversity studies — an egg box of plaster-cast faces which resemble death masks.

There is something oddly self-defeating about this sculpture, which is ensnarled to the uniquely modern idea that a person is whatever gender they say they are, for without make-up or wigs, without feminine vestiture, these faces are — upon zooming in — quite clearly the faces of men. This was not the ‘own’ it was supposed to be.

‘Mil Veces un Instante’ is hot on the heels of the equally ghastly ‘The Wake’ which looks like nothing more than a poo emoji. Both are examples of modern public art which is ugly on the eye and designed to shame our values in one way or another. In this case, the quasi-religion of gender identity is literally being put on a pedestal for us. Peasants and morons of London, bow down before the sacred pantheon of woke sainthood, the trans priests of progressive piety. Pay homage to the egg box of identity politics, for it shall lead you into the promised land of perpetual grievance and moral superiority!

‘Mil Veces un Instante’ roughly translates to A Thousand Times in an Instant — presumably because we need to be reminded of just how frequently the elites of art and civic spaces topple all standards of public taste. But if you’re tempted to ‘do a Colston’, and dispossess Trafalgar Square of this monolith to aesthetic non-conformity, you may be pleased to learn it will last somewhat less than the normal two years. The plaster is designed to degrade with the elements over that period of time. This is supposed to be a good thing, it is a feature not a bug.

This does beg the question — as it deteriorates, will it get better or worse? On one hand, we’ll be closer to being done with it, and on the other, its appearance will worsen, if such a thing is imaginable.

This decay seems fitting, though. ‘Mil Veces un Instante’ is itself a totem to decaying standards in the art world and — perhaps — on a broader level, in civilisation.

While I took a terrible liberty in imagining what Kenneth Clark would have said, we need only recall what he did say in that excellent television series Civilisation, when he commented that civilisation ‘requires confidence – confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers.’

It is self-evident that such confidence in our society, lives, beliefs, and mental powers is decaying painfully, in front of our very eyes. In this sense, ‘Mil Veces un Instante’ is genuinely provocative, if not in the way the artist intended.