Four Green Horsemen – Louise Stern

London’s Economist plaza sits in the centre of town, near Bond Street where the shoppers congregate and the Royal Academy of Art where the proper English go to see art. A few of the blue-chip art galleries have their homes nearby, and tourists flock to take photographs of themselves in the centre of neighboring Piccadilly Circus. The Economist magazine has its offices in a building just off the main drag, an unassuming structure with an anonymous and hard area outside the building where six contemporary art commissions a year set up home temporarily, greeting the flow of businesspeople going in and out.

Four Green Horsemen

Louise Stern

 

 

 

 

London’s Economist plaza sits in the centre of town, near Bond Street where the shoppers congregate and the Royal Academy of Art where the proper English go to see art. A few of the blue-chip art galleries have their homes nearby, and tourists flock to take photographs of themselves in the centre of neighboring Piccadilly Circus. The Economist magazine has its offices in a building just off the main drag, an unassuming structure with an anonymous and hard area outside the building where six contemporary art commissions a year set up home temporarily, greeting the flow of businesspeople going in and out.

In May a new commission will be set up and this one is sly and elegant. They aren’t usually words you would think could co-exist well without canceling one another out, and often in the type of neighborhood that surrounds the Economist building you wish they would co-exist a lot more. Fortunately, Karen Tang pulls it off, with the help of the Contemporary Art Society, which curates the commissions. Tang, who is known for her metal filigreed sculpture, sometimes veers into the decorative with her delicate cutouts. You can easily imagine some of her previous work as a series of nouveau china patterns for chirpy cultural magpies. She has incorporated everything from designs from Mexican basilicas to Asian jade temple ornaments to French Toile de Jouy drawings as templates for her etchings into silos and tables and walls. They are impressively craftsman-like and very appealing, but they have lacked a certain edge.

She seems to have found it with Four Green Horsemen, the Economist commission. The four horsemen are familiar and iconic cultural figures which lend themselves easily to everything from video games to television shows, yet have biblical origins and appear in an Albrecht Durer woodcut of 1498. The horsemen are Death, War, Famine and the Conqueror, and their heavy menace and the fear swirled up by the hooves of the horses is powerful enough that it still feels immediate in the modern day.

The horsemen are the perfect evil and immortal ancestors to the smug war heroes that adorn the marble pedestals and plinths of Central London. Tang acknowledges their omnipresence by putting them on a circular silo, allowing them to gallop into infinity in the middle of the Economist plaza, where a subconscious reminder of the constant danger that the desire to conquer and murder poses to the ego is not amiss.

Pushing things one step further, Tang has also chosen to paint her silo a color called "dollar green." Green, as well as being the color of the American dollar, is also the color of rebirth. Far from erecting a pedantic monument against capitalism, Tang is acknowledging the narrow margin between the human need to create and construct, and the need to destroy and maim and the never-ending struggle and love affair between these two urges, which are Siamese-twinned to each other. The Four Green Horsemen are the embodiment of the desires and drives that have built up the setting in which the horsemen will take up existence for a few months. Their beauty might mislead and sway some of their viewers; but their true significance will take up root, as the horsemen themsleves have for centuries now.