Putting art on a pedestal

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5 April 2012

Tomorrow, a new sculptural tenant moves onto the Fourth Plinth, the pedestal in Trafalgar Square which hosts a new sculpture by a contemporary artist every 18 months and which is Britain's most prestigious public art commission. Marc Quinn's acclaimed sculpture of a pregnant disabled female artist will be replaced by Thomas Schutte's architectural model of a hotel.

The switchover is a long jump from one end of the contemporary art spectrum to the other. Quinn's white marble will give way to coloured glass; a work by a celeb Brit-artist will be replaced by work by a low-profile German one, the first international artist to decorate the plinth; and a sculpture which trumpets its point like an advertising slogan will be replaced by one whose meaning is difficult to pin down and is laced with art theory. There can be no two more contrasting works of contemporary art, and it will be interesting to watch how reactions to the new commission compare with the old one.

Marc Quinn's sculpture of the disabled female artist Alison Lapper was clever, but depending on your taste in art, you will have judged it either brilliantly simple - concisely exposing the aesthetic hypocrisy of our veneration of fragmented Greek nudes and the perceived ugliness of real bodies without limbs - or an exercise in visual sophistry so politically correct that it was impossible to criticise without sounding like a fascist.

Schutte, one may imagine, takes the latter view. When I met him in Dusseldorf, he snorted with contempt when I mentioned BritArt, "I had to deal with Saatchi once," he told me, "And I will never do it again. It was horrible." The YBAs, he said, aimed their art at the "bird-brained".

The German artist's Fourth Plinth work - Model for a Hotel 2007 - is a meticulous and large architectural model of a multi-storey building in the ubiquitous style of contemporary hi-tech modernism. The £270,000 work stands five metres high and is made out of layers of translucent red, blue and yellow glass. It looks like a maquette for a corporate headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, or a seven-star hotel in the Emirates.

Where Quinn's full-length figure seemed at home in the Square - it was a statue after all - Schutte's work will make a glaring contrast. Its layers of reflective glass will reflect light, creating a weightless, three-dimensional colour composition that will contrast with the ponderous neo-classicism of the buildings surrounding the Square.

No question, 53-year-old Thomas Schutte is one of Germany's best artists. He produces a disparate set of works which it is difficult to imagine all come from the same mind. One day he makes towering figures in reflective silvery steel that look like heroic Michelin men, the next he crafts monstrous theatrical puppets which bring the drama of the stage into the art gallery. On other days, Schutte dashes off reams of highly traditional watercolours of portraits and nudes.

Model for a Hotel 2007 comes from a series of architectural models. Two strands of contemporary art thinking, one visual, the other social, lie behind it.

The first is the re-imagining of architecture as sculpture. Just as leading contemporary architects such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind design their dramatic buildings as sculpture, so Schette makes sculptures that use the aesthetics of architecture. But this is not just a formal exercise; his models are prototypes for new kinds of "Utopian" buildings - "parallel structures" in the trendy art lingo - which are sometimes satires on how society is organised, and sometimes suggest solutions for social problems.

Thus Schutte has in the past made "holiday homes for terrorists", "oneman houses" and Perspex gas stations. His ambiguous work always has plenty of layers, several of them ironic: the plinth sculpture can be seen as a public invitation to erect more light-filled airy buildings in London, or a wry attack on the pompousness of 19th-century London architecture, or the opposite, a critique of the beautiful banality of today's prestige architecture. Yet, what it will probably be - for most viewers on a sunny day - is an acrobatic display of unexpected light effects.

We know that big, simple works of art tend to attract huge attention, so it will be interesting to see how much interest there will be in a work as ambivalent as Schutte's. Already the artist has had to deflect one "sensational" interpretation of the piece by changing its name. Back in 2004, it was called Hotel for the Birds. British critics mistakenly concluded it was a modernist bird-house, imagining rows of pigeons perching on its transparent shelves - another plinth idea inspired by the now decimated pigeon population of Trafalgar Square, like Sarah Lucas's masterful but unsuccessful proposal for a Ford Cortina covered in fake bird-droppings in the style of Jackson Pollock. But German art is never as literal as British, and Schutte's birds came from the phrase "for the birds". "It means daft," Schutte told me, "It's architecture for the birds, a daft architectural structure."

The unveiling of a new Fourth Plinth is usually accompanied by much whinging, but the criticisms to be made are the opposite of what most people bang on about. The armies of time-servers who moan about the quality of art placed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square have clearly not spent any time examining what is standing on the other three.

Here we don't find a dynamic figure group by a British Rodin or a seductive classical nude by an English Canova; instead just three abysmal statues of 19th-century historical figures whose murky pasts contain a mixture of colonial repression, lazy governance and sexual debauchery. The question with the Fourth Plinth commission is not whether we should have one, but why we don't knock the old ones down and have first, second and third commission. Neither should one complain, as many do, about the circus that surrounds the event. Britain is one of the few countries where the mainstream press generates discussion and argument around new art. We're lucky to have that, and the Mayor's office (which runs the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group) and public museums should be responding more ambitiously to that public excitement.

Other cities support far bigger public art projects with only a fraction of the media interest. Bang in the middle of Berlin is the Holocaust Memorial, a vast expanse of undulating concrete towers, that evokes a city of anonymous death - where is the expansive monument in London to commemorate slavery, our own terrible crime against humanity?

In New York in 2005, a work by Christo covered the entirety of Central Park. In Berlin last month, at The Festival of Light, a team of lighting designers illuminated the city's most famous architectural structures: clever projections onto the cathedral created the effect of three-dimensional 18-century etching rising up in the crisp, cold Berlin night air, while the old futuristic East German radio tower glowed like Luke Skywalker's lightsabre.

Compared to these projects our plinth is puny, and the attention we lavish on this little corner of Trafalgar Square merely indicates our own parochialness. Instead of plinths, we should be thinking of piazzas, palaces and parks.

Putting art on a pedestal

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