Comment from the Field: Resistance on the Plinth: The Why of It

Abstract

I am sitting in the basket of a cherry picker, draped in an ancient white bedspread, being driven forward on a JCB. Through the thick fabric I see spots of bright light and the amber of the vehicle's warning strobe. We begin to rise and I am pitched into that moment when they close the plane door and there is no going back, only a hundred times magnified. So up we rise and rise, high above the plinth, before coming in to land. Freaky, freaky, says the previous plinther as the wrapped figure draws closer. Spotting the wheels of my chair, she subsides into mortified giggles. The cherry picker docks at the plinth and she welcomes me with a Hello under there, whatever you are. I am wheeled backwards down the slope of the basket and onto the plinth, except that-oops-running out of time, I have not briefed anyone on how this should be done and immediately plunge into freefall, arse over tit. I lie there in a white shroud, my legs in the air, a foot away from a two-and-a-half storey drop. Now there is no going back. The One & Other project was announced a couple of months earlier. Taking place on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, home to temporary works of art, sculptor Antony Gormley set out to create a living monument that captures modern Britain. For one hundred consecutive days, 2,400 people would spend a solitary hour on the plinth. In a public space bordered by military and valedictory monuments, there was something about the ordinariness, smallness, and aliveness of a diversity of people redefining the space that touched me. In the words of Gormley, Maybe we'll discover what we really care about, what our hopes and fears are for now and for the future. While I lacked both the exhibitionism and courage to be a part of any such thing, we needed to make sure disabled people got up there. So I told my friends, put out a few notices, signed up my own name. When I was picked in the monthly draw, my bluff was called. One & Other arrived at a time when I had spent fourteen years deliberating on and two years creating Resistance, a touring installation about the Nazi campaign against disabled people and its contemporary relevance. It coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the start of Aktion T4, the little-known first phase of systematic mass murder by the Nazis, which targeted disabled people and became the blueprint for the Final Solution to wipe out Jews, gay people, gypsies, and other social and political groups. Disabled people's resistance was pivotal in bringing the episode to a close. And, even as I longed to lie down on the plinth and gaze up to the stars, I knew this was a moment that would never present itself to me again and it had to be well used. I meet my marketing mentor, Ros Fry, and we mull and wrangle over what I might do, until ... oh, how did we get here, because suddenly, in a throw-away comment, we have an idea. How about going up in Nazi uniform? And we laugh, because even as we know it is beyond outrageous, beyond bold, it is also crystal clear that this is it. As a wheelchair user, I will bring together two potent and contradictory images-the swastika and the wheelchair, like repelling magnets- and they will be displayed on all that the plinth represents: elevation, preservation, triumphalism. On the Internet, I find a photograph of a young Asian man, wearing a brightred t-shirt, a large swastika on his chest.1 The image hits in three almost instantaneous blows: first is the swastika, then the man's skin tone, and then the contradiction. In the blink of an eye, it shifts the ground from under me. He stands facing the camera, smiling. And it is all-everything about it-instantly wrong, almost an inner-ear, out-of-balance sensation that keeps me questioning long after I have torn myself from the screen. How easy it is simply to equate the swastika with evil and stop at that, but how much more intriguing it will be to take an image that represents one thing and, by changing its context, transform its meaning and use it to confront itself. …