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Tom Denman contends that for every monument there is a riot waiting to happen, because at best they represent the status quo and at worst they embody the kind of issues that lead people to riot, including colonial and other forms of repression.
When I get off the number 11 bus at Trafalgar Square and cross the street - so that I'm actually on the square, passing a statue of someone I may or may not notice - I see a large, looming figure staring right at me. It's something about the wide-brimmed hat; it acts as a leveller. Although his pose and facial expression only become picturable as I near him, even from a distance his humility and immediacy contrasts with the surveillant distance of the other statues, including King George IV - Caesarean, on horseback - and two other plinthed figures I don't recognise at first but later learn are the rebellion-crushing colonial generals Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles Napier. There are more statues, all militaristic: a row of busts at the National Gallery-end of the square, and of course Admiral Horatio Nelson on his column. They all look the same because they all overlook us - in both senses of the word, one being neglect, the other surveillance - whereas Samson Kambalu's statue of the Malawian pastor and anticolonial rebel John Chilembwe has a gaze that meets.
Antelope, 2022, the newly unveiled iteration of the Fourth Plinth commissioning programme, is taken from a photograph, itself taken in 1914, in which Chilembwe stands on the front steps of his Providence Industrial Mission church in Mbombwe and looks straight at the camera. Unlike the figure next to him, the British missionary John Chorley, he is wearing his glasses: he bears witness to his own capturing and makes sure that whoever else is looking knows he can see them. Chorley holds his glasses behind his back - according to Kambalu's three-dimensional rendition, since we can't see this hand in the photograph. Because Kambalu (Interview АЖ434) has rearranged these figures back-to-back, the detail becomes noticeable when you're facing Chilembwe, close to the plinth. This departure from the photograph intensifies Chilembwe's looking and the choreographic contrast it makes with Chorley's posing. Without necessarily demonising him...