ĭesmond Morris in Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution traces the practice back to a medieval custom used to seal business transactions. The term fistmele is a Saxon word that refers to that measurement. This fistmele should be about 7 inches (18 cm), which is about the same as a fist with a thumb extended. Before use, the fistmele (or the "brace height") was checked, that being the distance between the string and the bow on an English longbow. It has been suggested that 'thumbs up' was a signal from English archers preparing for battle that all is well with their bow and they are ready to fight. In modern popular culture, necessarily without a historical basis from Ancient Rome, it is wrongly presumed that "thumbs down" was the signal that a defeated gladiator should be condemned to death "thumbs up", that he should be spared.
According to Anthony Corbeill, a classical studies professor who has extensively researched the practice, thumbs up signalled killing the gladiator while "a closed fist with a wraparound thumb" meant sparing him. While it is clear that the thumb was involved, the precise type of gesture described by the phrase pollice verso and its meaning are unclear in the historical and literary record. It is disfigured by enforced cockiness.Īre we all modern Stalins, an inane public demanding that artists grin and smile and affirm that life in Britain is Really Good? David Shrigley’s thumb is so pleased with the way things are that it wants to jab God in the eye.- Juvenal, Against the City of Rome (c. Yet this thumb is deformed by its striving for joy. You can’t get any gesture more celebratory than a big thumbs up. What do people want from art? How about uplift? There is huge pressure on public art to be celebratory.
I see it as a sly parody of the emptiness of public art. As art, and without speeches to tell us what it’s about, this is a weird and bizarre sculpture whose stark silhouette against the London sky is not affirmative or reassuring but aggressive, not to mention phallic, ungainly and hysterically strident. The problem with an art project as hyped and publicised as the Fourth Plinth is that the mainstream media reviews the PR icon, rather than the work itself that people will see in the coming months. It is also strangely thin, more like a finger flipped up by a pissed-off American than a jolly British symbol that everything is Really Good. Like the giant thumbs of the hitchhiker in Tom Robbins’s novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues or the enormous green thumb of the psychotic cockney Hitcher played by Noel Fielding in The Mighty Boosh, this thumb is seriously out of scale. The closed fingers of the massive hand fill the long rectangular plinth, while the stupendous vertical thumb offers a 21st century answer to Nelson’s Column itself. In quite old-fashioned ways, Really Good works well. From Mark Wallinger’s Christ humiliated on the vast equestrian plinth, to Hans Haacke’s apocalyptic Gift Horse, the best works make sense of what can otherwise seem a gratuitous decision to put modern art – which long ago abandoned such Victorian things – on an empty plinth just because there happens to be one handy. Sculptures that work well here pay attention to the site, its surroundings and history. At seven metres high this is the tallest sculpture ever put on the plinth and, while that may seem the kind of statistic tour guides reel off, it has genuine relevance to how it works on a square that is also home to Nelson’s Column. Then there is the surreal monstrosity of the hugely deformed thumb. The vaunted optimism of Shrigley’s thumbs-up to Britain’s glorious future is undermined by the deathly black hue of his appendage. Then the sleek black bag covering the sculpture was smoothly zipped apart to reveal. He came on like a circus ringmaster, and even got the jaded hacks to count down to the unveiling of what he boasted was a beacon of London’s readiness for a post-Brexit world, and joyous proof the capital is “Open. London Mayor Sadiq Khan was heavily buying into the optimism line however when he launched Really Good, Shrigley’s fourth plinth commission, on a dank and dark morning.
0 kommentar(er)
