Shock and Horror As Girl (25) Is Polite

If you saw my appear­ance on the 4th plinth on Thursday of last week then you’ll know that I didn’t exactly stick to my plans. If you didn’t see it — and I am pretty sure that you didn’t — then here’s what happened.

Ori­gin­ally I’d planned to wear a hand stitched bag over my head and read a book as a pas­tiche on Rene Mag­ritte’s The Lov­ers. I’d decided to do this because it’s bor­ing to sit in one place for an hour and I had no idea what to expect so I was going to do what I usu­ally do in that situ­ation and take a book. I like books. The sack was my mother’s inspir­a­tion and took me 3 hours to sew together dur­ing which time I repeatedly stabbed myself in the hand with pins. The whole idea was to pro­mote the concept that if you don’t read more you may well die stu­pid and alone which I think is a fair point.

How­ever this is not what happened and here is how it didn’t happen:

For starters by the time I was being wheeled onto the plinth by a team of art stu­dents in a fork­lift I had been awake for roughly 23 hours, 12 of which had been spent on a bus driven by a lun­atic. Another 5 were spent sit­ting huddled in a corner of Tra­fal­gar Square watch­ing mice run up the steps of The National Gal­lery and a drunk Rus­sian guy being beaten up by teen­agers so both Ryan and myself were at this point what you would call ‘fuck­ing knackered’.

Pre­vi­ous to this we’d been sit­ting in a portacabin for roughly 90 minutes. Although really it was two portacab­ins stacked on top of each other to which I’d been told to report to to be inter­viewed and sign a lot of forms hand­ing over my like­ness, time and soul to the SkyArts Chan­nel who now own me. Obvi­ously the fact that this was neces­sary wasn’t men­tioned in any of the com­mu­nic­a­tions I’d had with the One and Other people before­hand but 23 hours and 478 miles into some­thing prob­ably isn’t the appro­pri­ate time for moral objec­tions. For future ref­er­ence I will try to remem­ber that everything requires paper work of some kind and object before it’s too late.

Of course the sign­ing of doc­u­ments was part of an inter­view pro­cess where a girl who looked about as tired as I did asked me some ques­tions and took some pho­to­graphs of me. Any­one who knows me knows I dis­like both of these things — answer­ing ques­tions about myself or being pho­to­graphed — but it had been me who’d volun­teered to make a spec­tacle of myself in the first place. In those cir­cum­stances I will quite affably talk crap about my life and pre­tend I am com­fort­able with cam­eras. Besides — the people man­ning the portacabin were super lovely des­pite the fact that night shift sucks and they were shar­ing an enclosed space with two people who had been trav­el­ing for sev­eral hours and smelled terrible.

It was the cabin full of art stu­dents (whose names I have all for­got­ten because I am a ter­rible per­son) who poin­ted out just how Klan-esque my hand stitched head bag looked. Of course it had already occurred to me but there’s some­thing about a middle class person’s facial expres­sion when faced with some­thing they find poten­tially dis­taste­ful that always encour­ages me to drop the sub­ject or change my plans espe­cially if I am too tired to bother arguing.

Like I keep say­ing on all my job applic­a­tion forms ‘I am highly flex­ible and adapt­able to change’ so the bag was out from this point onwards.

Still in was the giant book cover with ‘Read More or Die Stu­pid’ prin­ted across the front of it and my copy of See­ing by Jose Sara­mago (which in hind­sight was prob­ably the wrong choice — it’s a bril­liant book and all but per­haps some­thing a little bit … easier to read might have been bet­ter). These things would still be in for around 15 minutes into my shift after which time I gave up which may seem cow­ardly and lack­ing in con­vic­tion but let me explain what happened.

I think before I got up there that I didn’t really under­stand what was going on with Ant­ony Gorm­ley and his Plinth because it can be pretty hard to visu­al­ise the point of a piece of art without hav­ing had some dir­ect exper­i­ence of it. Whether or not I got the point of it had even been a ques­tion asked in the earlier inter­view which I had hemmed and hawed through because I was a) exhausted and b) hadn’t really got­ten what exactly was going on clear in my head. I had not had a clear answer.

Of course I could quite eas­ily spin off some of the opin­ions other people had had about it — Charlie Brooker for instance call­ing it Big Brother: The Tate Mod­ern Edi­tion — and say whether or not I dis­agreed with them but really I was hav­ing some prob­lems grasp­ing the point of the trees because of the entire bloody vista of the forest.

But what happened to clue me in was I got up there and I real­ised some­thing very import­ant — watch­ing someone read a book is pretty bor­ing. Of course I didn’t real­ise this on my own. Rather I had an audi­ence of heck­lers and onlook­ers who ever so gently prod­ded me towards re-valuating my idea of what the hell I was doing 8 meters off the ground in cent­ral Lon­don at 4am on Thursday morn­ing. I was being pub­lic art.

Now I’m not an art historian.

I have never been to an art col­lege apart from to look around Duncan of Jord­anstone’s very well stocked sup­ply shop.

You could maybe loosely cat­egor­ise me as a critic in that some­times I don’t like a par­tic­u­lar bit of art by someone and then voice my opin­ion on it.

But really I know just about fuck all about art. Which is why the fol­low­ing explan­a­tion is prob­ably incor­rect and largely inco­her­ent but stick with me. This is going to be like watch­ing mon­keys learn how to use tools.

As far as I could see it, from a lump of hewn rock bordered by some nicely caulked edging, the point of me being up there was largely to interest the pub­lic. Because that’s what pub­lic art does.

You turn up some­where like Tra­fal­gar Square and you look at the art payed for to impress upon people the world stand­ing and per­son­al­ity of the town that it now lives in. I was like one of the massive Lions (which are hella cool by the way) or any of the myriad of other sculp­tures strewn about Lon­don — I was sup­posed to be some­thing you travel to look at it, form an opin­ion of and then leave after hope­fully spend­ing some money on refresh­ments or other things in the local area.

That’s what pub­lic art does — it improves and enriches the area it’s in. That’s it’s job. It is hope­fully pretty and improves the eco­nomy of the sur­round­ing area.

Of course I can’t claim to have been par­tic­u­larly good to look at or smell and I don’t think you could call me majestic or breath tak­ing. But I was, after my ini­tial mis­take of bor­ing people to death, polite and hope­fully enga­ging to the people who stayed to look at me.

(Of which one man in par­tic­u­lar bares men­tion­ing — we were too tired to think of ask­ing for his name or con­tact details but he was charm­ing, cour­teous, help­ful and over­all a good laugh. We may not know your name Erotic Pho­to­graphy Dude, or EPD as we now call you, but we will remem­ber we met you. Rock on.)

All in all I’m glad we went to Lon­don des­pite the hor­ror of both bus jour­neys and the throat infec­tion I know have thanks to broken air con­di­tion­ing on the return trip. I’m glad I manned up, accep­ted the place and spent the money to get there.

It wasn’t exactly an amaz­ing jour­ney of dis­cov­ery and I am pretty much done with talk­ing about it after this art­icle is fin­ished — any­one who wants to know how it was can read about it here or make up their own ver­sion of events in which I battle ali­ens for the future of the planet and return home to Dun­dee a hero.

We ate sushi and were tired, grotty and grumpy.

It was fun and I did learn some­thing from it.

I learned that Ant­ony Gorm­ley under­stands pub­lic art bet­ter than nearly every­one and I am grate­ful to him and all of the other One and Other staff for the experience.