Katharina Fritsch takes a sip of her mint tea, leans in close and - in a voice full of mischief - says: "I think the English have a great sense of humour. I know they like to play games with language. They like their double meanings. So I wanted to play around."
The German artist, bleary-eyed in a London hotel after only getting two hours' sleep on an early flight from Düsseldorf, is talking about her sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The moment she was asked to submit an idea, she knew what it would be: a big blue cock. Sorry, I mean a big blue cockerel. Fritsch's winning commission - an oversized rooster 4.7 metres tall painted a deep matt blue - is unveiled today, positively inviting double entendres as it sits there in the shadow of Nelson's Column. And that, of course, is part of the point.
There is certainly a delicious, childish pleasure to be had in seeing a sculpture called Hahn/Cock ( hahn means "cock" in German and carries the same double meaning) in such an august location, waving his tail-feathers at the National Gallery and aiming his beak at Nelson's sniffily turned back. There's humour, too, in the fact that a cockerel - the national symbol of France, especially when coloured a distinctly Gallic hue - will reside for the next 18 months right beside a monument to the vanquishing of the French. Is this irony intentional? "I definitely never thought about the French thing," she says. "But it's a nice humorous side-effect to have something French in a place that celebrates victory over Napoleon." She gives an impish smile. "He has come back as a cockerel!"
Humour runs through much of Fritsch's work, which is well-known in Britain: she was the subject of a major show at Tate Modern in 2001, and is represented by influential gallery White Cube; but she is much more famous in Germany. Since the late 1970s, when she began studying at Düsseldorf's prestigious Kunstakademie, where she now teaches, she has turned out a series of meticulously rendered sculptures of animals and people, their detailed naturalism made strange by spray-painted colours that are garishly unexpected and uniformly matt.
Sometimes, she places her sculptures in unsettling scenarios, like scenes from a fairytale or a half-remembered dream. In Man and Mouse, a giant, soot-black rodent looms over a man's sleeping body; in Child with Poodles, a baby lies on a painted gold star, surrounded by hundreds of miniature black dogs. The poodles are funny, but they are also faintly terrifying - and as far from kitsch as it is possible for a plaster poodle to be.
While it's true that only the square's pigeons are likely to be terrified by Hahn/Cock, there is more to the work than humour: it's a clear sendup of masculine posturing and power, of which Nelson's column is a fine example. The cockerel's carefully sculpted plumage echoes the folds of the admiral's uniform, while the natty crest looks a bit like his hat. Standing right behind him, Hahn/Cock makes stern-faced old Nelson look, well, a little silly. Is this a feminist statement?
"I'm a feminist, I must say," she replies. "It's about male posing, about showing power, about showing ... erections! I mean, look at that column!" She laughs. "As a German woman, when I first came to London, the area around Trafalgar Square seemed to be very much focusing on men - especially with fashion, with Jermyn Street. You have all these dandies, all these businessmen in their suits, who have to be powerful and successful. And they are a little bit posing like cockerels."
Before he's even had a chance to roost, Fritsch's cockerel has already ruffled some feathers - as has become traditional with the Fourth Plinth programme, which has seen a rolling series of artworks on the site. Most of the commissions - including Marc Quinn's 2005 sculpture of the disabled artist Alison Lapper, and Antony Gormley's interactive project One & Other, which saw more than 2,000 people occupy the plinth for an hour each over 100 days - have had their share of nay-sayers. This is part of the point: the plinth programme is keen to inspire a healthy debate about what constitutes public art.
Fritsch certainly sees it this way. Chief among the early detractors of Hahn/Cock are local conservation group the Thorney Island Society, who registered a planning objection earlier this year on the grounds that the sculpture was "totally inappropriate; however fanciful and dramatic it might appear to be". Fritsch's response is diplomatic. "I think from their point of view," she says, "they might be right. I had a few days of big insecurity. I'm very respectful, as a German coming to a foreign city. I don't want to make fun of Trafalgar Square, or the battle of Trafalgar. But I was invited. And I think that, through this piece, you have a monument that is always asking, 'What was the Battle of Trafalgar? Who is this man on the column?' I think it's keeping history alive."
For Fritsch, colour is what transforms a sculpture from a naturalistic ornament into a symbol. "It evens it out, makes it abstract - like a visual sign, an icon. That is important: my work is always on the borderline between a detailed sculpture and a sign." Fritsch fell in love with colour while touring Germany's medieval and baroque churches as a child, absorbing their brightly painted works of art; she also has a form of synaesthesia (a crossover of the senses) and associates colours with numbers and days of the week. Sunday is white, the number seven is blue-grey. She is passionate about returning colour to sculpture, believing in its power to trigger an emotional reaction. "In the more abstract 20th century," she says, "colour was lost. It was not allowed because it was maybe too childish, too sensual, too emotional."
Emotions certainly run high when Fritsch displays her work in public. In 1987, she was asked to create a public sculpture for Münster, and came up with a sunshine-yellow madonna: a potent statement in such a predominantly Catholic city. The first version, in plastic, was stolen and ended up at a police station; the second, in cement, had its nose broken off, and was regularly sprayed with graffiti. It was a good lesson in how strong reactions can be to public art. "People got very emotional," she says. "In the daytime, people brought candles and flowers and stood there singing and taking photographs. Then in the night, drunken people hit her or sprayed her. I never expected anything like it."
More recently, she was delighted by the response to Figurengruppe (Group of Figures), a collection of nine sculptures, including another yellow madonna, that was installed in the garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2011. "It was unbelievably popular," she says. "I think people were attracted because it was about colour - and there were no pedestals. The impact of a sculpture becomes very direct when you can stand right next to it and take a photo."
Hahn/Cock doesn't present quite the same photo opportunity - unless visitors come armed with a ladder - but the vivid blue bird is sure to be all over Flickr and Instagram fairly soon. For Fritsch, its unveiling today is the tense final step in a long, painstaking journey that began with that initial flash of inspiration. "An idea," she says, "appears in a minute - you have all these memories and things in your brain and they all get together. In a single second, you have the right picture. I don't know if this idea will work. But I am hopeful."
www.yahootrend.com
0 comments Blogger 0 Facebook
Post a Comment