The aesthetically and thematically problematic sculpture by Teresa Margolles comes with a backstory that many Londoners may find perplexing
Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant) by the 61-year-old Mexican artist Teresa Margolles TOLGA AKMEN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Alastair Sooke
Chief Art Critic
18 September 2024 1:29pm
Like a shipping container winched onto the side of a dock, an unwieldy new sculpture, by the 61-year-old Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, appeared on top of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square today – the 15th temporary commission to occupy this contested site since 1999, when Mark Wallinger’s affecting, life-sized model of Christ, Ecce Homo, popped up.
Recalling the mock-ups for Margolles’s block-like artwork, I worried that the finished sculpture, which weighs more than three tonnes, would be a disaster, with all the elegance of a fly-tipped fridge. In the event, it has more grace and nuance than I was expecting – but it’s still beset with aesthetic problems, and comes freighted with a Central American backstory that, writ large in such a prominent setting in central London, many may find perplexing.
Titled Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times in an Instant), it takes the form of a gigantic cuboid, almost as big as the plinth itself, assembled from plaster casts of the faces of 726 trans, non-binary, and gender-non-conforming people from Mexico and Britain. These are attached to an armature in the manner of a Mesoamerican “tzompantli” or skull rack, which displayed the grisly remains of war captives and sacrificial victims like beads on an abacus.
The piece was inspired, if that’s the right word, by the still-unsolved murder in Mexico in 2015 of a transgender woman who was Margolles’s friend; unsurprisingly, since the artist trained as a forensic pathologist, and has a studio attached to a morgue, the result is a sombre, funereal artwork, with the blanched, chunky presence of the Cenotaph. All those ghostly faces, some smeared with traces of makeup transferred during the casting process (along with, apparently, hair, eyelashes, and skin cells), are obviously reminiscent of death masks; yet, confusingly, the sculpture is also intended as a celebratory monument to the “resilience” of the trans community worldwide. Who throws a party inside a catacomb?
The casts have the quality of smashed crockery, as if a pet cat had run amok across a plate rack, and their rough edges, coupled with those traces of cosmetics, provide pleasing texture. That said, they also call to mind a quintessential primary-school art-class activity in which children are invited to make papier-mâché heads using balloons. All those lined-up faces – including one, oddly, seemingly with big black eyebrows as bushy as those of Groucho Marx – also made me think of the children’s game “Guess Who?”.
Margolles’s work feels as alien as a spaceship from a faraway planet TOLGA AKMEN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Looking inwards, they’re clustered together defensively in the manner of a “tortoise formation” shield wall deployed by an ancient Roman legion. But the in-between gaps are unfortunately wide, so that the underlying steel structure – which, awkwardly, resembles a chicken coop – is too prominent.
Quite how Margolles’s masks, which have been treated only with a thin layer of lacquer, will withstand the British weather this winter is anybody’s guess. Here’s mine: in the coming months, they’ll slowly start to discolour, dissolve, and droop. Not pretty.
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is why the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group was adamant that, above all, what London needed for the next two years was a public sculpture tied so intimately to the experiences of trans women on the other side of the world. The persecution of transgender people is abhorrent. But should the Fourth Plinth be a soapbox for identity politics? Margolles’s work feels as alien as a spaceship from a faraway planet.
Details: london.gov.uk
Source (Archive)
