200words: fourth plinth

 

A whipped cream carnival floats beyond the parody of a teen movie in which Jeff Koons is shot by David LaChapelle as a bubblegum manga macro cherry popped pop art of post-innocence spaffed up the wall by seaside teats suckling pornified disaster capitalism’s disney-brained thirst trap. 

Modern life is a food fetish, here Heather Phillipson brings drone war to a pie fight: sploshing goop on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend for the retweets. Her Mills&Boon money shot is tawdry emoji urbanism tarting up Trafalgar with ladette girl boss nanny state flex vajazzling the fourth plinth with an anaemic turd glittered for the infantilised tourists below gawping for insta at the camp tousled kitsch turban of a grubby cholesterol cake circus. 

We live in a society of spectacle, distracting ourselves to death, where everything is synthetic and so everything-is-awesome all of the time. While the icecaps thaw, even our prophets’ protests are subsumed by a darwinian memetic race to the bottom of garish glib obscenity. 

2021’s commission is cautionary while being complicit - ambiguously platforming a paean to dribble-down economic bloatware, lionising the liquefaction of all that is solid, morbidly fascinated by our entropic Daliesque melting to grey goo, all the while watched over by machines of the surveillance state and memento mori.

https://web102.secure-secure.co.uk/theend.today/

https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/shorthand/fourth_plinth/

200words: Robert Harbison 1940-2021

“All art is perishable” - so opens the first line of that dogeared minor volume which, in 2008, a godfather pressed into the hands of a wayward godson. The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable was for me then a balm pitched perfectly at the resonant frequency of my convalescence from a built architecture that had become altogether saturated with too much sordid meaning. In I tumbled. Bob’s tone - of calm erudition and sanguine melancholy - lured a pilgrimage through Sebald and Keiller and other peripheral prophets beach combing remnant fragments in the cathedral ruins.

Ever an imposter I went up for my MA in 2011 after the party, in the Turnerian half light of higher education’s broader entropic subsummation by a bureaucratic managerialism. And I went up after Bob, a tugged Temeraire. I did not know him. Not really. Not much beyond his very present absence. But, occasionally we were visited by nostalgic happy reveries - his wiry shock-headed warmly transatlantic accordion chorded avuncular laughter creaking as a ship gesturally. 

He wrote to me exceptionally, once, wry and self-deprecating after one 200words, feeling he had "gone too far" in what he'd said about my "wild" "kaleidoscopic" V&A plywood piece ~ “why,” he asked, should he be the one to “apply the brakes” - a strangely precious email. 

Brigid Brophy had written of Deliberate Regression in 1980 that Bob’s prose had a “pile-up on the motorway manner of writing" - somewhere in that, perhaps precisely in that, touches his allure, and my affection for his earnest enquiry and the resonance I feel still now in my floundering for my own unbuildable redemptive meaning. In all intangible ways I owe some great debt to Bob for furnishing this fragment monger with the pleasure of a synecdochal praxis. 

[08.09.21]