Fourth plinth

As I sat down to write this article, an artist friend phoned me to deliver a pithy but convincing defence of public art: it exists, he said, to extract high culture from its supposedly elitist setting, making it visible to an audience who might otherwise feel excluded. This made me think back to my own formative encounters with the art world in the late 1990s and 2000s, most of which I owe to public commissions in the northeast of England. At that moment, a Newcastle-based commissioning body called Locus+ was in close dialogue with some of the world’s best artists: they had Douglas Gordon set fire to a grand piano and Chris Burden sail a model ship from the Fair Isle to Newcastle. They enabled Fiona Banner to melt down a Tornado warplane and reconstitute it as a giant bell.

The Revd John Chilembwe – whose statue now adorns Trafalgar Square – is notorious for the church service he conducted beneath the severed head of William Jervis Livingstone, a Scottish plantation manager with a reputation for mistreating his workers. The night before, Chilembwe’s followers had broken into his house and chased him from room to room as he tried to fend them off with an unloaded rifle. Eventually, they pinned him down and decapitated him in front of his wife and children. It was the most significant action in the 1915 Chilembwe rebellion, a small, short-lived affair in an obscure corner of the British Empire today known as Malawi. It says a lot about our times that a figure with Chilembwe’s record should be vaunted with a public statue.