PROVOCATION: WHEELCHAIR-USER IN NAZI UNIFORM ON THE PLINTH

Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth as part of Antony Gormley’s One & Other project

Artist and activist Liz Crow sat on the plinth in a crowded Saturday night Square on her wheelchair wearing full Nazi regalia to draw attention to a hidden history and the message it holds for us all today.

Writer Allan Sutherland says “Many of the plinthers have used their hour to espouse favourite causes, be it children’s charities, bee preservation or understanding of chess. But few if any have produced a piece of work as compelling as this, which will undoubtedly remain one of the most significant contributions to Gormley’s project. Apart from the importance of the content, it presented a series of memorable images, carefully choreographed to take advantage of space and time”

Says Liz, “Seventy years ago, the Nazis instituted their first official programme of murder. It targeted disabled people and became the blueprint for the Final Solution to wipe out Jews, gay people, gypsies and other social groups. Today, the development of pre-natal screening and a rush to legal rights for newly disabled people to assisted suicide, show that disabled people’s right to life still needs to be defended. With a rise in hate crime, disabled children still excluded from mainstream schools, and over 340,000 disabled people (more than the population of Cardiff) living in institutions, disabled people still experience those historical values as a daily threat.”

Liz was lifted into place covered in a white shroud. After ten minutes, she pulled off the sheet to reveal the Nazi uniform, and sat motionless, overlooking the Square. Ten minutes later she lifted a flag, bearing the words ‘First they came for the sick, the so-called incurables and I did not speak out -because I was not ill’, taken from an early version of the anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemoeller’s much-quoted statement. She then pulled off the Nazi regalia, throwing away the swastika armband, and took up the flag again. On a summer’s evening, with the flag fluttering in the breeze, the image was reminiscent of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’.

Mat Fraser, actor and presenter, says: “This is an image to make people stop and look and think. There is no room to be complacent. It was ordinary doctors and nurses who voluntarily murdered disabled people and it was ordinary people who stood back and let it happen. The hidden holocaust as it is sometimes referred to is something that could easily happen again. You may think that is ridiculous, but they thought that last time too.”

The provocative image stopped people in their tracks. A spokesperson for One & Other said Twitter had “gone ballistic”.

To watch Liz’s hour on the Plinth:
 http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/liz_c