What I wanted from the plinth, though, that I was ready for.

I am a Londoner. It was one of the three words I used to describe myself on my profile on the One and Other website. I am also a terribly pretentious bastard. So I trotted out all the rubbish you’d expect, about getting the public involved in art, being connected to London, and that sort of thing. Said that while I know it’s hardly charity work, or anything worthwhile like that, it’s a little way of giving something back to the city I love. Blah blah blah, so far so boring.

That’s all by way of preamble. Because, you see, in all the media write ups, or blog and twitter commentary, whether they’re praising the project as a fantastic way to get the public involved in art, or damning it as revealing the banality of the British public, I have yet to see any one that stopped stroking their chin long enough to talking about what it’s like to be up there. So here goes.

I often say that I love London, and I joke about the fact that I don’t leave it much. This isn’t just a figure of speech. It’s not just a joke. I am absolutely head-over-heels besotted with the place I live. Even on the bad days, when it’s 35 degrees on the tube at rush hour, and I’m pressed up against a bloke who thinks that personal hygiene is something for girls and sissies, and the driver comes over the loudspeaker to tell us that someone’s just jumped under the train ahead, and we’re stuck here for the next half hour, there is still nowhere else I would rather be. I stand there, the sweat trickling down my back, and all I can think is “only in London do you get shit like this” and I smile, and relax, and I feel better. I am a full-on hopeless case for London, its sights, sounds and smells, its past, present and future. London is the place where the magic fucking happens.

And you can all stop looking at me like that, because I can now prove it.

Here’s the thing that the write ups of the plinth don’t tell you. It’s fun. It’s a little slice of sheer bloody London magic. There is nowhere else in the world where a night like I had last night could have happened.

I expected to get up there with my camera and tripod, and arse about for an hour. That’s exactly what I did. In any circumstance, arsing around with my camera for an hour makes me happy. I expected some of my family and friends to turn up, and they did. In any circumstance, my family and friends make me happy.

I am groping for the words to describe it. “Greater than the sum of it’s parts” is meaningless if I can’t adequately convey the parts.

So: there I am, a bloke in a white suit, standing spotlit in the middle of London on a summer night, clutching a camera. This was the least important part of the night – the silly outfit, and what I was doing didn’t matter very much to me. The absolute joy for me was seeing my friends turn up, whether they were in their regular clothes, or in a variety of weird and wonderful outfits, watching people who I know hadn’t met before, or who had only met in passing talking to one another and laughing, or getting texts, phone calls, and yes, twitter messages from friends who were watching around the world, watching the conversation that happened around the fact that I was on the plinth. That sounds kind of egotistical, I know, but it’s not the sense I mean it in – I’m not someone who is entirely comfortable being the centre of attention – but passing messages from London to Toronto was not something I’ll forget in a hurry. There simply was a really marvellously warm and friendly vibe about the whole experience – not just from my friends, but from the members of the public who were passing by who got involved, posing for photos and shouting up questions and comments – there was a lot of smiling and laughing going on in Trafalgar Square last night. Like I said: a slice of pure London magic.

I had hoped to come down from the plinth with a few good photos, and maybe some new thoughts on London and life in general. I come down with all of those things, but I did not expect to come off the plinth thinking “that was fun, I want to do it again”. And yet that’s exactly what I did.

So the next time you see someone spouting off about how the people up there are boring, or how the project isn’t really art, or anything like that, tell ‘em to fuck off. The experience made me think, and was emotionally affecting (it may not have been deep, but if it raised a smile, then that counts) not just for me, but for the other people in the square, and watching over the internet (at least to judge by the response I had had from friends), and if that’s not Art, I don’t sodding know what is.

Well bloody done, Anthony Gormley. And thank you for the opportunity. And, at risk of turning this into some ghastly parody of an acceptance speech, thanks to all the people at Artichoke, who made it happen, and most especially thank you to all my family and friends who turned up in person or on the internet, because it was absolutely you lot who made it a thing worth doing, and if I have learned nothing else from from last night, then I have been reminded how fortunate I am to know you all.

I plan to be up there with camera and tripod taking such pictures as suggest themselves to me, weather permitting. If you fancy coming along to watch/throw things, I’d appreciate the support. If you fancy turning up in some kind of ludicrous outfit, thus helping ensure that I have things to photograph from up on the plinth, that’s even better, but outfit or not, if you’re in town, and not busy, do swing by.

So, where is everybody on Aliza Shvarts, then?

In case you’ve missed it, Ms Shvarts is an Art Student at Yale, and her latest piece includes blood from 9 months of self-induced miscarriages.

Well, maybe. There was a tediously predictably appalled set of noises from both the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies and Yale University released a statement saying the Ms Shvarts is a performace artist, and specifically:

“Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.”

That the whole thing is a fake, and the press release is part of, rather than simply about, the art.

Shvarts has since said that no, that’s not entirely true – the for 9 months she has both artificially inseminated herself with a needle-less syringe (from a panel of anonymous donors that she gathered for the purpose of the art) and then took an abortifacient, timing the insemination for maximum chance for conception, and the abortifacient with her natural cycle, so she cannot say with any certainty whether or not she was actually pregnant at any point. This lack of certainty, is, to her part of the point.

So, the first question to be asked is “is she telling the truth?”

Let’s assume she is, because even if she isn’t, well, I don’t think the questions she’s trying to pose are in the line of “what is art?” and “what is truth?” There are any number of far easier ways to set up those questions.

So first question: is this moral? Well, not if you’re pro-life, obviously. And there are a number of people who are only pro-choice up to a point, and this probably exceeds that for a lot of them. Except…

Even if this is real, there’s no certainty that she did concieve or abort. Even she doesn’t know, and it’s explicitly part of the work, that actually, the controversy only exists in the telling – she’s had to make a physical object to provoke the reaction, but actually, her intent is to create a reaction out of the uncertainty.

Is “it might be over the line” enough of a justification to judge her art in that context? If we believe in innocent-until-proven-guilty, then how can we presume that she did? And even if intent does changes our presumption, why does it do it in a less “real” case, than in actual criminal law, where, say “murder” and “conspiracy to commit” are different things?

And there’s another interesting angle to this. In the artist’s words:

“Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.”

And it’s hard to argue her point. If it’s acceptable to do things to your body that are not entirely in line with what nature intended, surely every possible “unnatural” act deserves at least a bit of time considering whether or not it is also something there is value in doing. She’s come up with a delibarately polarising example, of course, but nothing succeeds like excess, and all that…

For myself: well, I’m pro-choice. She gets to chose how she treats her own body, just like we all do. So for me, this isn’t over the line. It can’t be. Yes, it does make me a little uncomfortable, for reasons I can’t really articulate very well, but that’s my failing to live up to my own principles, not a judgement I can make on her.

And well, I’ve never been bothered by art that’s “trying to be controversial”, because if art isn’t trying to provoke a response, then what the hell is it doing? You might as well protest that someone throwing water on a crowd is “trying to make people damp”. I get slightly more bothered when it’s prefixed by “just”, but I don’t think this is “just” anything. Yes, it was an attempt to create controversy, but it’s on a subject that’s worth discussing. We’re currently stuck in the bodies we have, and I think it’s worth looking at the limits to which society will permit us to have control over them.

Do I think it’s legitimate for someone to claim a press release, and people’s re-telling of the work on commentary on it as part of the artwork? Yeah, I do. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s just making explicit what is implicit in a Turner or Monet – that art is created with the intent of reaction. If she wants to claim that this post is part of her art exhibit, I’m happy to let her. It couldn’t have existed without her, after all.

What do you think?

Architecture isn’t something that immediately springs to mind when someone says “Art”, yet it’s probably the form or art that most of us have most daily interaction with, since it’s the art form that creates the spaces we live in.

But on the other hand, it’s also the one to which it is hardest to apply the working definition I opted for in my last entry – that Art requires that the creator be expressing a thought they have had about the world. It’s not impossible. Jump Studios for example, created a fascinating space for the new Red Bull office in London this year. I’m not sure how it would feel to work there, done out as it is in heavy blues and stark whites, but it’s certainly interesting. It’s other major unusual feature is that the building incorporates slides as a way of moving between floors in the office.

Which leads me, of course, to “Test Site” Carsten Höller’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern. Holler’s body of work combines architecture, sculpture and other disciplines to ask questions about the way we interact with the space around us. It’s a notion that’s increasingly relevant today, as we start to move from an industrial economy to an information economy. Suddenly, we no longer need to have our use of space dictated by the practicalities of using machines. There are exceptions as, for example, major internet companies are forced to locate their server farms in places where they can obtain the bandwidth and electrical supply they need, but for the most part, we are increasingly free of the need to work in warehouses, or even dedicated office space.

And so it becomes increasingly relevant to ask how we can make use of space in such a manner as to enhance our daily lives, not just from a functional point of view, but also as a means to create moments of pleasure in our day to day life. This is the question currently facing artists and architects, and having been to experience “Test Site” myself, I have to say, Höller and Jump are probably on to something.

“Art, in the human truth of it, touches the universal. Seeing Art, we recognise a thought we had but could not utter, are made less alone.” — Alan Moore from “Snakes and Ladders”.

I use that quote a lot. But it’s one of the best working definitions of Art I’ve ever come across, or at the least, it’s one I find myself in strong agreement with. It provides a way of telling Art from non-Art – the acid test it points to it simple: was the creator of a given work trying to express a thought about the way they see the world, as opposed to “just” creating something pretty/entertaining?

This definition, or course is one that leads to things being Art simply because their creator says they are, but then, Art is not automatically good or worthy. There is no shame in simply creating something pretty or entertaining – I’d far rather look at a really pretty picture that was not Art than a really banal one that was expressing the really boring views of a very tedious man. I don’t wish to suggest that it’s in any way a lesser thing to create beauty rather than Art, simply a different thing. But if we must have a means to define Art, then that’s the one I choose to use.

I’d further suggest that in order for Art to be considered “good” it should also invite the person experiencing the work (I could just say “viewer” but I want to emphasise that I’m not just talking about the purely visual arts here) to think. It should pose questions, or make suggestions. It should be the artist engaging in a discourse, saying “Here’s what I think. Do you have any ideas on the subject?”.

I do wonder if Abts won in part because her painting are closer to most people’s idea of conventional “Art”, and if the Turner Prize committee are trying to balance the scales a little, after least years Shedboatshed, and Jeremey Deller’s documentary the year before that.