21 March/22 March 2020 ★ FTWeekend 13Flying in the face
of convention
Heather Phillipson| She doesn’t have a gallery and
finds art fairs unpleasant.Caroline Roux meets the
next artist to crown London’s Fourth Plinth
T
he plan was that, from next
Thursday, a new piece of
public art would be coming
to the currently de-tour-
isted zone of London’s Tra-
falgar Square. There, on top of the
Fourth Plinth — itself left bare after it
was built in the mid-19th century, when
funds failed to materialise for a dashing
statue of William IV — visitors would
find an outsized fly drowning in a huge
dollopofcream.
Its creator, the London-based artist
HeatherPhillipson,saidshewouldn’tbe
aroundtocomment.“Generally,assoon
as my work goes up, I retreat, I run. I
don’t hang around to see how people
react,”sheremarked.
As it is, Phillipson — the 13th partici-
pant in this project, which since 1999
has seen artists including Rachel
Whiteread and Antony Gormley crown
the pillar with a temporary artwork —
will have to wait to do her disappearing
act. On Thursday t was decided to holdi
fire on the changeover, and Michael
Rakowitz’s winged beast — a replication
in tin cans of the one that guarded the
gates of Nineveh from 700 BCE until Isis
destroyed it in 2015 — will stay in place
asLondoncrawlstowardsshut-down.
While all the previous artists have
responded to the masculine and martial
qualities that hang in the air here (the
other three plinths hold two generals
and a king), Phillipson’s particular
enemy, it turns out, is an invisible virus
— and what has already been a long
storycouldgetquitealotlonger.
Phillipson,a42-year-oldwho’sknown
among her peers for nerve-jangling
installations but is no celebrity, first put
forward her proposal for the plinth in
2016, which she describes as the year
shelosthersenseofhumour.
“First Brexit, then Trump.It felt like
living in a state of emergency,” she says.
“Humour requires some kind of critical
distance and I didn’t feel capable of it atindustry, which is also unbearable.”
A passion for animals, and the fact
that humans are animals too, is never
far away in her work. “I’m deeply
invested in our relationship to non-
human animals and how we consume
and exploit and cuddle up to them,” she
says. “For me, the decision was easy. It
wasaboutakindoffellow-feelingforliv-
ing creatures, other ways of co-existing,
removing myself from a whole sicken-
ing infrastructure for the sake of the—
animals,andfortheplanet.”
In her poetry, she has pointed to ani-
mal cruelty and animal love — as well as
the inconvenient truth of having to buy
fish-based cat food for a stray that
turned up at her door. She touches on
sex and the body,food and menstrua-
tion, politics and gender politics, oftenin urgent rhythms that make you want
tomutterthemaloud.
“It’s not autobiographical,” she says of
her poetry. “If I use the first person, it’s
as a device, to become other, inside
whatever worlds I’m activating. Every-
thing comes from something I’ve
observed, but it travels a long way from
its source.I follow the trails wherever
they lead, through multiple digressions,
until, by the time it stops, perspective
hasshiftedmanytimes.”
For her installations, she begins with
two-dimensional collage, then endeav-
ourstokeepthingslow-impact,working
with recyclable materials (the dollop of
cream is layered polystyrene). She sees
the use of found objects as a kind of
hijacking, or hacking: “Existing images,
music, words and objects come with
their own histories and references. I’m
picking them up in tweezers purging,—
debugging, rerouting and, maybe,
reprogrammingthem.”
Phillipson grew up in north London,
butherfamilymovedtoaremotepartof
ruralWales when she was a teenager. “It
was difficult, challenging,” she says.Her
experience of feelingalien and rudder-
less, she says,still feeds into what she
does now. Likewise, a weekend job in a
record shop that led to DJ-ing and full
immersion in the then flourishingrave
scene. (The imagery, the beats and the
confidentially deadpan prose that
weave through her installationsbear
witness to a world deconcretised, by
altered states, music and the dawn.) Yet
she also has a PhD in practice-basedClockwise from
main: maquette
of ‘The End’ for
the Fourth Plinth;
‘Mesocosmic
Indoor
Overture’ (2019);
‘The Age of Love’
(2018); Heather
Phillipson in her
Hackney studio,
photographed for
the FT by Toby
Coulson —Courtesy of
the artist and James Jenkins;
Mathias Völzke; Jonty Wildethat moment. I wanted to make my own
news. I wanted to make a monument to
hubris and impending collapse.” Her
sculpture—whichspeaksofgoodthings
gone wrong, of decay, of lost hope — is
called “The End” (of the party, the
world? She’s not a prescriptive type) but
surely there’s still a sad little laugh to be
had at the sight of something so celebra-
toryabouttoslideoffitsmoorings.
Yet it is quite at home in her armoury
of allusional devices. Phillipson is an
artistic pluralist who works with words,
music, moving imagery and found and
made objects. She played the piano and
violin virtuosically as a child, and as an
adult has won awards for both her
poetryandherfilms.Inherinstallations
every part of her practice comes tum-
bling together,as sound, vision and
objectsoverlapinrealtime.
In fact, the single sculpture made for
the plinthis atypical ofPhillipson’s
work,though that fly surely has plenty
of meaning: the magnification of a tiny
beast into something huge, dominant
and ultimately doomed by its stupidity
or greed. In 2018, at London’s Glouces-
ter Road Tube station, for example,
travellers were surprised to find an
unlikelymise en scène unning along 80r
metres of disused platform that largely
focused on eggs. There was a huge bou-
quet of them, and fried ones emitting
vaporous little cartoon farts; some
passed by on a computer-game con-
veyor belt, as others were being brutally
penetrated by a nail.“A gibbering ome-
lette!” exclaimed a line of handwritten
words. “A compulsion to be unre-
strained orces my practice into thef
extreme conglomerations that become
myexhibitions,”Phillipsontellsme.
Some of these egg-based histrionics
emerged from her passionate veganism.
“I was brought up vegetarian,” she says,
“but, 17 years ago, I decided to switch
to a vegan diet. As a vegetarian I
realised I was still complicit in the dairyThe Fourth Plinth — previous highlights
fine art from Middlesex University.
Phillipson works on her own in a
small studio in Hackney, east London,
and is part of a coteriethat includes
other prominent but outlying artists
such as Ed Atkins. She is the only artist
invited to the Fourth Plinth to date not
to be represented by a commercial gal-
lery. “I like, and need, to not feel con-
strained,” she says. “This way, no one
guides me in responding to opportuni-
ties or relationships, or mediates that.
Though the flip side is that it often feels
very precarious. It’s hard to survive
financially.” In the case of the Fourth
Plinth, it also necessitated some serious
fundraising and sponsorship, since
oftenan artist’s gallery will oblige for
suchahigh-profilegig.
In2016Phillipsonwasinvitedtostage
an artistic “intervention”at the Frieze
Art Fair in New York. She littered what
seemed to be dog carcasses and faeces
throughout Frieze’s architect-designed
tent. “You might walk past one part of
the series, then, on the other side of the
tent, another, and another, then realise
it was all one thing,” she says. “These
repetitions and disruptions werea
counter-perspective to the fair’s struc-
ture, which is generally about single
works, confined to booths, transac-
tional. I’m most interested n forces andi
dynamics, in trying to put moments of
flight into systems.” Needless to say, she
did not stick around. “It was total cos-
micoverload,hypersaturation.”
The Fourth Plinth stands in complete
contrast to a fair or indeed a gallery.
“Visitors aren’t primed, they don’t
arrive ready for critical artistic engage-
ment, it’s just there.” Participation will
be invitedvia an app that will bring
images to your phone from a drone —
another instrument of war — overhead.
“You can use it or ignore it. I’ll set up a
system, but it’s dynamic.Who knows,
the most critical engagement might
comefromthepigeons.”K2013: Katharina
Fritsch’s blue
cockerel sculpture
‘Hahn/Cock’
In Pictures Ltd/
Corbis via Getty ImagesM2010: ‘Nelson’s Ship in
a Bottle’ by Yinka
Shonibare is a scale
replica of HMS Victory,
which commemorates
the Battle of Trafalgar
Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesK2005:
‘Alison Lapper
Pregnant’ by
Marc Quinn is a
portrait of the
disabled artist
when she was
eight months
pregnant
Dan Regan/Getty ImagesI 15: ‘Gift 20
Horse’, by Hans
Haacke, is the
skeleton of a
riderless horse
with a London
Stock Exchange
ticker attached
to its leg
Mary Turner/Getty ImagesMARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 17:32 User:matthew.brayman Page Name:WKD13, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 13, 1