The Fourth Plinth: creating and contesting national identity in Trafalgar Square,2005–2010

Introduction

Urban public places have long played an important role in the life of nations. As stages for rituals, locations of national monuments, or sites of protest or resistance, they have helped to construct, reproduce or transform narratives of national identity. In part, this has occurred through the materialization of national history through statues of heroic figures or monuments to important national moments. In some cases, these symbolic structures become so familiar that they can almost disappear into the urban background as the meanings ascribed to them by previous generations dissipate. ¹

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone has suggested this is the case for the statues in Trafalgar Square. In 2000, before a major refurbishment of the space, he admitted that ‘I think that the people on the plinths in the main square in our capital city should be identifiable to the generality of the population. I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did.’ ² A process of lost meaning, framed as ‘forgetting’, has occurred as the role of the imperial figures in the square, and what their activities might have represented about the nation and the empire, fades from public memory: as Darwent says, ‘for all its marble and bronze, Trafalgar Square is an homage to forgetting’. ³

However, even as knowledge of specific names and deeds has faded, the representations of the national past in Trafalgar Square continue to condition the space around them. The evidence below suggests that even ‘forgetting’, to the extent that it happens, does not lessen the relevance of the Square for revealing and generating narratives of national identity. Even if most visitors to the Square haven’t a clue as to who its statues represent, those representations still play an important role in contributing to narratives of contemporary national identity. In part this is because more modern interventions into the space cannot avoid a relationship with the existing monuments in the Square, as well as the Square itself. While this may seem an obvious point, it is the reason why contemporary artworks in Trafalgar Square continue to generate narratives of national identity, even when they also comment on other aspects of society, or even on the value of art itself.

Although Trafalgar Square has consistently been the setting for national events, its role in contributing to discursive narratives of Britishness has only been examined by a few scholars. ⁴ This article looks at one small part of the contemporary history of the Square, the scheme of public artworks installed on the Fourth Plinth since 1999. Below, I will discuss four of the artworks that were installed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth from 2005 to 2010, based on research focusing on media commentary across the major British dailies, both broadsheets and tabloids. In doing so, I will explore how these interventions into the space of the Square both commented on British national identity and how they were conditioned by the site itself.

National identity, history and place

This analysis is framed by an understanding of national identity as a discursive process encompassing many different modes of belonging. Anderson’s ⁵ seminal notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ provides a good starting point. Anderson explored some of the specific ways in which national ‘imagining’ is generated and promulgated, identifying ‘print-capitalism’ and the categorizing power of the ‘map, census and museum’ as important aspects of the creation of unitary national identities. In doing so, his main focus rested on the ‘top-down’ processes that built a coherent national narrative out of a set of colonial bureaucratic and economic structures. However, his focus on how communities are imagined shows how national identity can bridge the gap between long-term historical processes on the one hand, and their tangible and immediate personal effects on the other. The structural aspects of national identity, focusing on national territory, myths and memories, legal rights and duties, the economy and ‘a common mass public culture’, has been linked to pre-modern ethnic cultural forms. ⁶ In this conceptualization, the nation has ‘objective characteristics constitutive of a national identity independent of individual consciousness’. ⁷

These ways of understanding national identity appear to help explain the ongoing significance of Trafalgar Square. Its name, its Victorian statuary, its layout – with fountains designed in part to help control the numbers of people who could gather there – and its position in a larger central London landscape of imperial power ⁸ all point to a monolithic and powerful version of the British nation (and Empire). Hobsbawm and Ranger’s ⁹ discussion of the ‘invention of tradition’ highlights a similar process, discussing how powerful groups work through national social and political structures to serve their own interests by ‘developing ideas, values and symbols that unified people across lines of language and ethnicity’. ¹⁰ They identify the important role of the numerous public monuments, including war memorials, towering statues and public buildings that reflect narratives of national power.

These definitions bring together different aspects of the nation which are all on display in Trafalgar Square: the importance of a process of ‘imagining’, the role of mass cultures, and some of the mechanisms by which national narratives are created and reproduced. However, they all concentrate on structure and emphasize an ‘objective’ cultural form of national identity, thus implying that such identities are fixed and agreed by all members of the political community. As Graham Day and Andrew Thompson ¹¹ put it, these theories treat ‘the nation as a sociological reality … a real and unified group’, thus side-stepping the possibility of fluidity, contest or multiplicity. Özkırımlı’s ¹² reaction to the notion of the ‘invention of tradition’ is to acknowledge the constructed nature of specific cultural attributes, or traditions, of nations, while pointing out that nationalism is constructed in many different ways. Here he departs from Hobsbawm, in arguing that while nations hold real and deeply felt meaning for people, they are dynamic, changing and self-reinventing, based on ‘culture … that is not a passive inheritance but an active process of creating meaning, not given but constantly defined and reconstituted’. ¹³ Bhabha similarly suggests that flexible and multiple narratives comprise national identity, and claims that membership of the nation ‘must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new “people” in relation to the body politic [and] generating other sites of meaning’. ¹⁴

Other work has addressed the question of the extent to which national identities can be multiple or flexible by focusing on issues of cultural reproduction, discourse and narrative, including non-elite groups’ relationship with the nation. ¹⁵ While this scholarship still links the production of national symbolism to the processes of modernity (such as industrialization), its main concern is how and by whom this symbolism is constructed and reproduced. These accounts also recognize the ‘fluid and dynamic nature’ ¹⁶ of national identity, and stress the contests and tensions that define it. Calhoun, for example, turns to Foucault’s notion of a ‘discursive formation’ to help capture nationalism’s complexity and dynamism, defining nationalism as: ‘a way of speaking that shapes our consciousness, but also is problematic enough that it keeps generating more issues and questions, keeps propelling us into further talk, keeps producing debates over how to think about it’. ¹⁷

Implicit in this formulation of national identity is the quotidian nature of the process by which it is reproduced. Billig ¹⁸ likens this to a flag hanging limply on a pole outside a government building, a symbol of the nation, but one that passes almost unnoticed in everyday life. Edensor’s stance to the quotidian is more active, arguing, like Özkırımlı and Bhabha, that popular conceptualizations of the nation are significant in reproducing it:

[National culture] is constantly in a process of becoming, of emerging out of the dynamism of popular culture and everyday life whereby people make and remake connections between the local and the national, between the national and the global, between the everyday and the extraordinary. ¹⁹

Cohen’s ²⁰ notion of ‘personal nationalism’ draws these points together, arguing that any study of national identity must take into account both the intentions of the producers of national symbolism and ritual, as well as how their audiences read these rituals. Thompson ²¹ similarly argues that the actions of individuals must be considered in studies of national identity, and that ‘nations and national identity are used by people to position themselves in relation to others’. This framework, then, is built on the relationship between the institutional and official on the one hand, and the vernacular, personal and quotidian on the other. National identity relies on both perspectives to reproduce itself, in a process that includes contingent histories and memories.

Scholarship on the contingent quality of the sites in which these processes occur, especially in terms of historical imaginings, resonates with ways of thinking about national identity as discursive, progressive and multiple. Here, Nora’s ²² notion of lieux de mémoire is useful: sites of national memory where the past is explicitly, if selectively, evoked and represented. Hoelscher and Alderman ²³ describe such sites as ‘spaces explicitly designed to impart certain elements of the past – and, by definition, to forget others’. Thus conceptualized, lieux de mémoire foreground only some aspects of the past, demonstrating a tension between official history, or a ‘representation of the past’, and vernacular or popular memory, ‘a perpetually acting phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present’. ²⁴ Nora’s identification of these two aspects of place speaks to the power of institutions to shape national narratives, as well as the resistance, adherence or even indifference to these narratives by the public. Lowenthal similarly identifies the uncertain relationship between the nation and its past, recognizing that national narratives can both include and exclude, and that nations ‘must draw sustenance from their past, yet to be fully themselves must also put it away from them’, ²⁵ while Halbwachs stresses the fluidity of history, describing it as a process of remembering that reconstructs and reproduces the past in light of the aims of the present. ²⁶ Through a process of collective memory and memorialization, nationalism collapses time and space – and past and present – into a single narrative located in a single place.

The arguably ambivalent relationship between the past and present, the official and popular, and the perspectives of creators of place and its users, helps make place a useful category of analysis for exploring narratives of national identity. This is especially true for those sites rich with symbolism of the national past, yet still subject to quotidian contemporary use. The large body of scholarship on the relationship among place, monuments and artworks, memory, history and national identity explore the potential of such sites thoroughly. These approaches coalesce around a range of issues that overlap somewhat with the literature on national identity discussed above.

For example, the flexibility (or otherwise) of national narratives, and their capacity to incorporate a range of perspectives, has been a consistent focus of geographical research that examines the negotiation and politics of the form, ²⁷ location and symbolism of public artworks. Johnson’s recent analysis of the politics and social impact of a monument to bomb victims in Omagh, Northern Ireland, for example, used the development of a memorial artwork to chart the process by which a community developed a common narrative about the bombings, including the treatment of perspectives that did not fit within it. Given the nationalist nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland, this process was necessarily bound up in questions of national identity, as well as those surrounding community, remembrance and the peace process.

On a larger scale, Till’s research on Berlin ²⁸ and Kincaid’s on Dublin ²⁹ tackles city-wide processes of remembering and forgetting the past through the urban built environment. Kincaid explores how sites with national symbolic content become important to contests over national identity, using examples drawn from Dublin’s built environment:

Any attempt to alter the built environment will also change the way the past and the future are perceived. Geography is history. The physical landscape bears the traces of the past, and all alterations to the built environment are a direct means of rethinking and determining which memories survive and which are thwarted or suppressed. ³⁰

So what is the role of a place such as Trafalgar Square in this framework? I suggest that Trafalgar Square can provide examples of the discursive process of national identity creation and reproduction outlined above. The Square’s symbolic role as a site of national history, its ongoing use for both the quotidian and the spectacular, as well as its location at the centre of a larger ‘landscape of power’ that takes in government, finance and cultural institutions, make it a unique subject for studying the means by which national identity is discussed, imagined and reproduced, and how different histories are either commemorated or forgotten.

Creating and contesting national identity in Trafalgar Square

As an intensely used urban site, Trafalgar Square performs many different roles. It is one of London’s most popular tourist destinations, but it also hosts festivals, protests and the everyday routine movements through the city of thousands of people. Its fixed, material environment provides a flexible place for many different uses and stances towards to site, and it has meaning as both a representational space and one of quotidian use. Despite the links to the past implicit in its statues and layout, it does not seem to matter that the Square itself is not very old. It was built in the early 1840s, with the finishing touches – the lions at the base of Nelson’s Column – not in place until 1867. Nelson’s Column was completed in November 1843, and the main statues appeared between the 1840s and the 1880s, when the statues of George IV (1843), Charles Napier (1856) and Henry Havelock (1861) were installed on three of the Square’s corners, and later a statue of Charles George Gordon, best known for his ‘martyrdom’ in Khartoum, Sudan in 1885. His statue stood between the Square’s fountains, but was moved during the Second World War and later relocated to Embankment Gardens near the Thames.

The plinth in the north-west corner of the Square was not filled, even though it had been intended for an equestrian statue of William IV, which was never commissioned. ³¹ The Plinth remained vacant until 1999, when the first of three works commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce was installed. These works were intended to generate discussion about what an appropriate and permanent modern artwork might be for the Plinth. However, the artworks generated such public interest that a new committee was formed to consider the best use of the Plinth, and it decided to use the space to display ‘an ongoing series of temporary works of art commissioned from leading national and international artists’. ³²

When Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London in 1999, he appointed a new Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group to select artworks for the site. In 2012, the Group included arts administrators, broadcasters, an artist and a Principal of a major engineering and urban design firm. According to the publicly available material, for this Group, the Fourth Plinth program is foremost about using public space to engage with the arts; it is ‘part of the vision for Trafalgar Square to be a vibrant, public space and to encourage debate about the place and value of public art in the built environment’, ³³ rather than an explicit project of debate on national identity. The process for commissioning an artwork sees the Group select a shortlist of artists who are asked to provide a maquette of their installation, from which a winner is chosen. In the most recent selection process, the Commissioning Group invited public comment on the maquettes prior to the announcement of the installations chosen for display in 2012 and 2013. However, beyond this, there was no public reference to the process by which the winners were chosen, or the role that public opinion played in this process. This method of selection gestures towards the role of ‘elites’ in shaping national symbolism as discussed above, and the potential for the relationship between the official and the popular to shape narratives of national identity.

For example, even though the Commissioning Group appears to focus primarily on the value of the installations as contemporary artworks, for the public and the artists themselves, the sculptures have prompted a much wider discussion about British national identity, history and modernity in the context of Trafalgar Square. It would appear that that the site itself, with its national symbolism, popular history and central urban location, means that the artworks cannot avoid commenting on British national identity. In the remainder of this article, I turn to the public and media reaction to four installations since 2005, demonstrating how media discussion of these artworks regularly revolved around national identity.

Conclusions: the Fourth Plinth, national identity and contested space

Trafalgar Square’s prominent position in the landscape of London, its history of public use and its ongoing status as a highly popular destination for visitors to London all contribute to its significance as an important metropolitan public site. Both the history of the use of the site – for protests, demonstrations, celebrations and other national events – and the representations of historical figures and events in the Square have helped make it into a national lieu de mémoire. As such, a subtle contest between different versions of the nation has played out within its confines. This has been evident in events such as the Poll Tax Riots in 1990, the use of the Square by female suffrage organizations before the Great War, and even the public commemorative vigil in the Square following the London bombing on 7 July 2005. ⁶⁶ This contest, however, has also been evident in the official and media discussion of the Fourth Plinth scheme.

Much of this discussion concerned the relationship between the Fourth Plinth installations and the other statues and monuments in the Square, framed explicitly in terms of national identity. The existing structures in the Square have been treated as symbolic of an official, top-down narrative of the nation, while the Fourth Plinth artworks were seen to augment, challenge or complicate this masculine and imperial story. In treating the contemporary installations as inextricable from their local environment, many commentators gestured towards a framing of national identity as discursive, multiple and complex. However, the built environment also limited this discourse, in some cases forcing the ‘official’ into a contest with the ‘vernacular’. ⁶⁷ Overall, however, media commentary on the Fourth Plinth scheme demonstrated how Trafalgar Square catalysed the discussion of Britishness, and also helped to illuminate some of the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary British national identity.

Over its history, Trafalgar Square itself has become subject to tighter and tighter regimes of control. By 2008, during a six-month period when I visited the Square repeatedly, the types of events for which it could be used were tightly controlled by the authorities in charge of it. In practice, this has seen the Square used for a program of official multicultural festivals throughout the year, including Chinese New Year, Eid, Diwali, Hanukah and others. For Livingstone and the GLA, the Square appeared to have a very clearly defined role as a ‘multicultural’ space, and this policy points to an overall official emphasis on urban cohesion that had come to dominate the official narrative of Trafalgar Square by the time the Fourth Plinth scheme began. This demonstrates official attempts to transform the narratives that the Square represents, even as its statuary and memorials remain more or less the same. It also reinforces some of the themes of this article that I have explored through the Fourth Plinth, namely, that the scheme works to reveal multiple narratives of national identity, showing how these narratives operate in tension or cooperation with each other. Trafalgar Square also demonstrates the ongoing salience of historical narratives to shore up contemporary versions of national identity.

Finally, the Fourth Plinth scheme also points to the way that visibility in the Square is used by various national groups as a practical demonstration of visibility in the nation. This issue of visibility can be expressed in terms of contest or tension, as with the controversy over the statue of Sir Keith Park in 2009, whose brief stint on the plinth was cast as a struggle between the traditional forces of ‘proper’ history and the ‘funkapolitan’ cadres of modern art enthusiasts. However, it can also be more subtle. One & Other, for example, sought to make Britain itself visible through a composite portrait of its residents, and was lauded as a democratic response to contemporary questions about national identity, although some commentators criticized it as vacuous and reflective of a Big Brother culture typified by fame-hungry narcissism. ⁶⁸

Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was well received in the media coverage, perhaps because it did not shy away from the ambivalence of the history that the site represented. Instead, this artwork sought to incorporate many different narratives into a playful and visually-arresting installation. For some, his sculpture respected the history of the Battle of Trafalgar and reminded viewers of the symbolism of the site itself. For others, including the artist himself, it represented a celebration of contemporary Britain’s multiculturalism and the cultural vibrancy that this engendered. In terms of national identity, the significance of his work was that it did not force the range of narratives germane to the Square into a contest with each other, but instead presented them as inseparable, highly visible facets of modern British national identity.

Recognizing the ambivalence and multiple cultural and historical narratives within his work, in one interview Shonibare summed up his sculpture as ‘a monument to live, and let live’. ⁶⁹ Overall, the value of the Fourth Plinth in illuminating some of the complexities of national identity lies in the way it can draw together and make visible multiple narratives at the same time. By engaging with questions of what and who should be represented in the Square, the public was asked to consider issues of national visibility for a range of groups, framed by a built environment that is suffused with official versions of national history. The Fourth Plinth shows how a site such as Trafalgar Square can be re-imagined, demonstrating its ongoing relevance as a lieu de mémoire in which British national identity is made visible, re-created and subtly contested.