Many words have been written after the end. I liked this article.
Bringing an end to 100 days on the Plinth
Evening Standard 14.10.09
Eventful: the Fourth Plinth has seen many characters
Plinth people: Jill Gatcum releases balloons
Plinth people: Amanda Hall builds a Gormley statue from bagels
So farewell then to the doctors and taxi drivers, the housewives and lorry drivers who have enjoyed their 60 minutes of fame on theTrafalgar SquareFourth Plinth.
At 9am this morning medical photographer Emma Burns, 30, became the last plinther - as they are known - to return to earth and Antony Gormley's extraordinary living monument, One & Other, drew to a close after 100 days of recitals and protests, dancing and nudity.
In pictures: 100 days of the Fourth Plinth
Gormley himself never had a bird's-eye view of Trafalgar Square, having been rejected four times in the public ballot for places and feeling it was against the spirit of the venture to insist on a slot.
Next month the ordinary men and women will be superseded by the more conventional inhabitant of British plinths - a dead white male of military note, Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park.
Yet Gormley, 59, is content to see his project come to an end as, he insisted, it had defied critics to change Trafalgar Square for ever.
It had been far more than a simple spectacle, he said, but showed that everyone could be involved in making art.
"It's been a monument built with people's lives. It has been an absolutely huge achievement. I don't say that in a self-congratulatory way but I am happy because we have done it."
The critics have, largely, hated it. Ben Lewis, in the Standard, called it "predictable, unoriginal and boring".
Jonathan Jones, of The Guardian, pointed out that the sheer size of the plinth immediately worked against human-scale residents.
"If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no one can hear what they're saying."
"Whatever the carpers say, I think this has been a very valuable experiment in the expansion of public space," said Gormley. "It was asking who can be represented in art.
"Since the 16th century and probably earlier, art has been about pride, privilege and self-promotion for the very wealthy. But I don't think you will be able to walk through the square without remembering these [ordinary] people now."
The point was not one individual or another but the combination.
"It has to be seen as a whole rather than in bits," he said. And several institutions are less dismissive of the project than the critics.
The British Library is battling with the technical problems of archiving the One & Other website through which thousands around the world watched proceedings.
The Wellcome Library has agreed to take the collection of photographs and interviews recorded before each plinther ascended.
"It's about 1,800 hours of interviews. There's an enormous amount of material. And 600,000 blogs. It's a lot of stuff," Gormley said.
John Cassy, the director of Sky Arts, which organised the live streaming and broadcast regularly from the square, said they were convinced from early on it would be extraordinary but no one could have predicted the scale and speed with which the project took off.
More than 720,000 people watched online - a huge figure for an arts website - with 7.5 million page impressions.
Thousands more watched its programmes and others caught it for real in Trafalgar Square.
Not just Britain fell for the exercise. Gormley flew back on Monday from China and even there people knew of the project. "Someone said: 'My friend was on the plinth on Tuesday and we watched it,'"
Gormley said. "The friend was there in the middle of the night and no one was necessarily looking as she wrote this poem in water on the top of the plinth with her calligraphic brush. But they were watching in China."
He is already turning to new ideas. He has a bid in for a giant Olympics project, is preparing for a major show in Australia and his largest ever work inSingapore.
Event Horizon, the bodies that decoratedLondon's roofs and walkways two years ago, opens in New York in March.
Today, Emma Burns, a Liverpudlian now living in Darlington, used the final hour of the people's plinth to remember the victims of the Hillsboroughfootball disaster.
"From thinking nobody would notice to being the last person up is a bit more serious," she said. "It's an honour really."
Sky Arts will broadcast a plinth retrospective on Friday at 7pm.
Plinth by numbers
2,400 participants - one an hour, for 100 days.
The youngest plinther was 16, the oldest 84.
332 students and 112 artists took part (but only one taxi driver, one psychic and eight policemen).
160,270 tweets were made about One & Other;
459 came from London, 173 fromScotland, 63 fromWales, 53 fromNorthern Ireland.
1,210 participants were men and 1,190 were women.
More than £24,000 was raised for charity through plinthers' performances.
The Naked Plinth
Gormley said he "would be very upset if somebody didn't take their clothes off" on the plinth.
Simon, a 49-year-old from Yorkshire, got naked only to be told the police were demanding he put his pants back on.
A complaint was made to police when male participant, Justin Howell removed his clothes at 2pm on a Sunday.
Police chased Gunter when he jumped naked from the plinth and ran across Trafalgar Square.
Naturist Lady Godiva, riding a rocking horse in just a pair of boots, answered questions from the crowd on nudity.
Susanna M aimed for modest nudity when she posed atop the plinth as if sitting for a portrait.
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Richard Bacon's show: 2 hours 12 mins into recording
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00n7gdz
RadioYork: Jonthan Cowap 1hr 42mins into recording
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p004nqyj/Jonathan_Cowap_14_10_2009/
