A giant blue bird sculpture in London’s Trafalgar Square challenges our preconceptions about the purpose of public art, argues Alastair Sooke..

A giant blue bird sculpture in London’s Trafalgar Square challenges our preconceptions about the purpose of public art, argues Alastair Sooke.

“Ladies and gentlemen, here it is: the big, blue… bird!” So proclaimed the Mayor of London Boris Johnson last week. On cue, assistants tugged at black drapes to reveal the latest public sculpture to occupy the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square: a gigantic electric-blue cockerel by the German artist Katharina Fritsch.

When I cycled past the sculpture, which is called Hahn/Cock, later that morning, it made me laugh out loud. The colour of the rooster, reminiscent of the iridescent, otherworldly pigment patented by the French artist Yves Klein, offers a surreal, comical contrast to the drab bronze statuary and buttoned-up grey facades of the grand buildings nearby.

More importantly, the double entendre of its title is fully intended: with his stiff, punk-like coxcomb and jowly wattle, this puffed-up cockerel is meant to appear pompous and ridiculous. I particularly enjoyed his magnificently rumpled tail feathers. There’s something deliberately deflating about the manner in which they droop, so that the cockerel has the bleary aura of a whoring-and-roistering old rogue, worse the wear from drink, still strutting despite being unable to perform in the bedroom.

Here, then, is a sally by a female artist against the many vainglorious monuments commemorating self-important men that have been erected all over the world. Of course, the rooster isn’t the only sculpture of an animal in the vicinity – Edwin Landseer’s bronze lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column are some of London’s principal tourist attractions. Nevertheless there are several examples of statues of doughty old heroes in Trafalgar Square – not least Admiral Horatio Nelson, who surveys the British capital from the top of his tall Corinthian column. Fritsch’s work is the latest in a series of temporary sculptures to occupy the otherwise empty Fourth Plinth in the square’s northwest corner (the plinth was built in 1841 to support an equestrian statue of William IV for which funds were never raised). It got me thinking about the triumphs and pitfalls of public art.

In a broad sense, public art is as old as the hills: think of the statues of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The four colossal-seated sculptures of Ramesses II hewn out of the sandstone facade of his rock temple at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt were designed with a very specific public in mind – his Nubian enemies. A blunt display of imperial chest thumping, this is art that bludgeons the viewer into submission. Millennia later, Michelangelo’s marble statue of David offered another example of the symbiotic relationship between art and the state: positioned outside in the Piazza della Signoria, it became a public symbol of the independence of the Florentine Republic.