Trafalgar Square, redux

Further to my post on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, something else occurred to me when I walked past on my way from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road on Friday - having sculptures which are explicitly designed to be temporary means artists have a much wider choice of materials. Model for a Hotel 2007 is made from coloured glass (the artist wanted Perspex; it proved technically impossible) and it must be quite a nightmare to maintain, to keep looking nice. Having to do that more or less forever is a daunting prospect.

Also, the proposed Gormley sculpture would be even less feasible.

And nightingales sang in Trafalgar Square

More from the Guardian - something else to disagree with from Jonathan Jones, in fact.

Trafalgar Square is one of London's noisy, dirty, congested, wonderful hearts, and there are four plinths surrounding Nelson's Column. Three are surmounted by statues of a king (George IV) and two generals (Henry Havelock and Sir Charles James Napier), and the fourth hosts a rotating series of modern art commissions. The original intention was to put up a statue of William IV, but that failed (no money, the besetting curse of art projects) and then nobody could agree which monarch or militarist deserved the honour most.

Jones has promoted a fun new conspiracy theory - the only reason the fourth plinth hasn't been permanently occupied is because dear old Lizzie hasn't popped her clogs yet, and they're Secretly Planning an equestrian statue of her for it. It's total bollocks, of course, but it would actually be quite a nice idea - an equestrian statue of a queen who was never an empress or a militarist.

There's nothing wrong with representative sculpture, and we can't deny people like looking at it - I'm extremely fond of statues of horses myself, even if they have people sitting on them. And just because the poor dear is a queen doesn't mean we should be prejudiced against representations of her. Besides, Jones's alternative proposal is to commission a permanent modern art piece for the plinth, and I rather feel this is missing the point - having pieces displayed for a while is fairly normal in most contexts, and doesn't make them any less worthy than putting one up there permanently.

The point and purpose of Art isn't to be shown off, or for the Establishment to demonstrate how good and modern it is; it's so people can see it. Think of the Fourth Plinth as a taster exhibition.

Personally, I think we should use all four for this - put the poor old king and his generals out to grass, send them off elsewhere. There's plenty of precedent - a statue of Gordon of Khartoum was put up in 1888, and moved elsewhere in 1943. If you can swap Gordon of Khartoum out, you can do it to any militarist you like.

Art supplies

I've just got back from a visit to Atlantis Art in Whitechapel. It's really quite an amazing place, and the cheapest source for art materials I've found in London - stretched canvases at about half the price London Graphics offer them at, and unprimed 10oz cotton duck canvas from the roll at £4.47 a metre. (From a 183cm wide roll, that is.)

Streetmap link.

Late-night London photography

These are some I took at 3am a few weeks ago. I was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge, turned around, and saw the London Eye through the concrete helter-skelter of the South Bank, so I had to go take some photographs. Most of them turned out uselessly blurry (I'm still getting used to this phone camera - a Samsung G800. 5MP, 3x optical zoom, but it has a really long exposure time) but I managed to sort these out to keep.

Oxford Circus near dusk

It's a good thing there are traffic islands in Oxford Street and Regent Street, because otherwise I'd have had to stand in the middle of the street to take these.