Observations on the Fourth PlinthAuthor(s): Thomas WeaverSource: Log, No. 11 (Winter 2008), p. 130Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765188 .

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Thomas Schütte, Model for a Hotel , 2007. Fourth Plinth, London. Photo: Thomas Weaver

Observations on the Fourth Plinth

Jeffrey Toobin once wrote that the OJ Simpson murder trial was an event more American than any other in its graphic combination of sex, race, drugs, sports, and pets Ça neighbor's dog had first dis- covered the bodies ). The Fourth Plinth project in London's Trafalgar Square appears similarly designed to

envelop itself in everything that

England holds dear - unfin- ished, monumental, lopsided, elegiac, and surrounded bj pigeons. As the architectural

equivalent to Dickens' The

Mystery of Edwin Drood, everyone wants to have a go at

completing it. Fuelled by the success of the Tate's own

rolling art project (the empty Turbine Hall is a space that has long had its own curator ),

every public venue in London now seems to invite its own cycle of artistic interpretations. And like the Tate, the Fourth Plinth commissions alternate between celebrations of absence and presence: Rachel White- read's plinth on top of a plinth was briefly followed by a wax Ç and ever-present ) David Beckham, which in turn was succeeded by Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper Pregnant - a statue defined by its lack of arms and legs. The current

sculpture, German artist Thomas Schütte's Model for a Hotel, returns to reference its immediate, physical context in

providing a multilevel, colored-

glass platform for the square's flocks of circling birds. As the latest installment in his long series of architectural models

for imaginary buildings, the

piece makes knowing allusions to Russian constructivism. While much can be said about the nuances of its architectural simulacra alone, the project appears to work best in tandem with the church of St. Martin -

in-the-Fields, which backdrops Schütte's hotel on the north- east corner of the square. Currently silhouetted by its own series of scaffold platforms, the

repair of this church, as with all the Hawksmoors in other

parts of the city, shows that restoration, like art, is part of the same unfinished, and yet ongoing, completionist English project. - Thomas Weaver

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