Listening on the 4th Plinth

 

Evelyn Morrison

I have been a student at the Beshara school for over 25 years. I like working with environmental sounds and I am intrigued by silence and how to integrate it into my practice. In 2009 I was studying Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art, the same year that Antony Gormely's "One & Other" took place on Trafalgar Square in London. On Friday 2nd October 2009, as part of this event, I spent one hour on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square. I was the 2114th of 2400 participants who occupied the plinth for 100 days and nights uninterruptedly.

Gormley says he hopes this project is about making a new order, about expressing our hopes and fears now for what is possible. We as people make an idea reality, as an image of ourselves and simultaneously a portrait of humanity, on the plinth as a lens and an elevated point of view. This is maybe an indication of what the place of art can be. Antony Gormley also talks about how each of us would express what we care about. For me this meant to sit in silent meditation and be the quiet centre for the surrounding sounds and noises. Silence not as an absence of sound but including all of them through listening. A public sound piece within this special space and project, and a metaphor for being alive and awake in this world. Perhaps that is what the composer Robert Ashley meant when he talked about "a music that wouldn't involve anything but the presence of people."

Listening to the sounds that surround me has always held great attraction, I literally live in a soundscape, and yes, in a city. Paradoxically, this listening started as a way of dealing with incessant so-called noise, by letting it be, being attentive, rather than trying to block it out. John Cage said: "Open your window - music!" And isn't meditation above all listening? Listening with all you got, all you are?

On the day of the plinth there was, amongst many preliminaries, an interview. My interviewer mentioned how most "plinthers" talked about themselves and then seemed to go off doing something totally different on the plinth. This remark struck me deeply, and with the sudden recognition that for me it was the opposite: in that one hour 'who I am' and 'what I do' were to be identical. And it also struck me forcefully that this was something I had been missing, I had been longing for.

Finally up on the plinth - removed from normal surroundings, totally on my own, and yet not alone at all, since I knew that friends were tuning in, and maybe strangers as well, each in their own way - watching, listening, meditating etc. Later I would write in the visitors' book: "an ocean of sound". And that was going to be my overwhelming and abiding memory of the hour - being totally immersed in an ocean of sound. An unrelenting, complex, ever-changing, churning sea, structured by currents, some small and fleeting, others huge and powerful. Immersed, yes, but not as an object in water, rather like a position, a place, of recording, of witnessing.

Except that this place had no dimensions, was itself motionless, and presented no obstacle whatsoever to the endless waves passing through it. Sometimes sounds arranged themselves very briefly into soundscapes. The voices of a class of schoolchildren in the distance together with the sun on my face and the sound of the fountains became a fleeting summer beach scene. Did I say earlier "be the quiet centre for the sounds?" Was there such a place, an empty space in the middle? It comes as no surprise that after letting everything in, whatever was there before gets washed away, including ideas of 'there', 'centre', or 'quiet'. Trafalgar Square was special in many ways, a special hour, in a special place. What it made clear is that the ocean - of sound or otherwise - is here, now, whenever we stop, are still, close our eyes and are attentive to what is - anywhere, any time.

The webcam can still be watched - click here...