A Fourth Plinth sculpture as disturbing as life in 2020 Britain

Plinths and what’s on them: who could have guessed that in the year of our plague 2020, they would become one of the hottest political issues in Britain? In London, the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has set up a commission to review all statues and landmarks in light of their relationship to slavery. Of course, it will have nothing to say about Heather Phillipson’s freshly unveiled commission for the Fourth Plinth – a giant dollop of whipped cream that’s attracting the attention of a drone camera and a fly – but that won’t stop everyone else arguing about it.

People have been getting annoyed about what is on this particular plinth in Trafalgar Square ever since it first began to feature artworks in 1999, more than 150 years after the cash ran out for a statue of William IV, leaving it empty. As the most visible space in the UK to feature contemporary art, it inevitably gets a lot of scrutiny. Nicholas Penny, the former director of the National Gallery, which overlooks the plinth, famously described David Shrigley’s elongated thumbs-up from 2016 as “a big joke”.

It was, of course, not as big a joke as the idealised equestrian bronze of George IV – infamous for his boozing and gluttony – on the adjacent corner of the square. Replacing this statue with a more lifelike impression of the king’s colossal 17-and-a-half stone bulk buckling his charger would perhaps make a suitable emblem for the government’s new fight against obesity. Phillipson’s The End, on the other hand, revels in its lardiness. It’s a joyous glob of Pop-art brilliance, topped with a shiny red cherry.

It’s the 13th work to sit atop the empty plinth – and in my view, the best – although “sit atop” is not quite the right expression. It’s overwhelming it, oozing over the edges. The End is the tallest and heaviest commission so far. It weighs nine tonnes. The 42-year-old Phillipson, who attended the unveiling in sparkly blue tracksuit bottoms and a spangly blue mask, told me she wants it to rival Nelson’s Column. And, viewed from the north-west corner, the cherry’s huge stalk extends into the same piece of sky and dwarfs him.

At first glance, it fits perfectly into the mode of colourful, populist works, capable of communicating to the estimated 4,000 people of multiple nationalities that normally pass by every hour in this tourist hotspot. Children, for instance, will love it.

But tourists are in short supply this year, which gives an added edge to the sculpture’s more sinister qualities. The fly is black and hidden from most angles. The helicopter drone, also black, with spinning blades, dominates, even spoils, the sculpture’s form. Its camera is real and live, with images transmitting to a website – www.theend.today – referencing the square as a focus of protest and surveillance of protesters.

There’s disgust hiding in this work, corruption and decay. The cream, whipped to appear light, seems lumpen and sinking down. The cherry threatens to overbalance the structure and topple it. But it is the visual relationship between the fly feeding on the cream, and the drone landing and attaching itself to the cherry, that suggests a deeper entropy, society feeding upon itself, upon its citizens.

It was supposed to be unveiled in March, but was delayed by the pandemic, which is a shame, because this is a work that would work well in a remake of the final scene of Planet of the Apes (1968), in which Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty sticking out from a beach and realises that he’s on a future earth where the apocalypse has happened.

Stranded in the empty corner of a deserted Trafalgar Square, it would have been easy to believe that humanity had “finally, really done it”, and left this dollop of cream behind to be licked by a fly forever.