Back in 1994, when a businesswoman, restaurateur, and RSA chair named Prue Leith wrote in the Evening Standard that the long vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar square should be filled by public suggestion, her proposal was met with difficultly. Some saw it as an act of “meddlesome pointlessness”. The vacant 16 by 8 foot mount in Trafalgar’s northwest corner had stood vacant for almost 150 years. Why bother with it now? Leith wrangled her with through a bureaucratic swamp that included negotiations with the Victorian Society, the Georgian Society, the Fine Arts Commission, the English Heritage, the Westminster Public Art Advisory Committee and the Armed Forces a number of others to gain permission to put contemporary art on the plinth. Along with the way – advised by a special report considering both public and critical opinion – it was decided that the Fourth Plinth (now with a capital “FP”) would become a site for temporary contemporary art: a rotating platform for newly commissioned work to be decided upon, in part, by the public.
It took five years to get the plan levied, but in 1999 Mark Wallinger unveiled Ecce Homo, a life sized sculpture of Christ that commented quietly on the bravado of outsized statutes nearby. A year later Bill Woodrow’s Regardless of History surmounted the space – a bronze bust bound to the plinth by the roots of a dead tree; commenting, in part, on humanity’s struggle against nature. Next came Rachel Whiteread’s understated Monument: a replica of the Plinth cast in clear resin, inverted, and plunked on top of the original. She called it “a pause in the city, a place that felt very quiet.”
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