The fourth plinth - the horse by Hans Haacke

That nasty thing on its leg is a constant LED display report of the state of the stock market prices. It's in the shape of a bow and the art work is called Gift Horse, but it ruins this eloquent statue.  

Surely this piece is all about our relationship with the horse, in essence. First of all, horses in statues are typically heroic seats for heroic (?) warriors. But this one invites us to look at the fabulous structure inside the horse and just admire it.

Then, of course, it sets us off thinking that the horse, too, is quietly heroic; historically it has gone into battle and been hacked at and shot and blown up just because we demanded that it do so.

Then we think that there used to be so many more horses; that the streets were full of horses pulling carts and cabs and carriages, we built civilisation on those horses and now they are all dead. It's a memorial to them all!

We don't memorialise them, usually. We use them for dog food and boil their bones up for glue. That is our relationship with the horse and we look up at the horse (so large, so glorious with the sky coming through its structure), and we question it.

Then we think that it might symbolise our relationship with the whole natural world, that we use it to sustain us until nothing remains but its bare bones.

And you compare it with other skeletal structures you know and what comes to mind is the dinosaur in the Natural History Museum. How we love dinosaurs, and gaze in wonder at their bones, but we don't often gaze in wonder at the creatures that are alive and right in front of us now. I can't say I think about horses from one year's end to the next - why should I? 

A friend of mine recently had one of her two horses put down. "Oh I'm sorry", I said. "What was wrong with it?" 
"It was useless." she said. "There are far too many useless horses."

Well, I have little knowledge of these things but the horse had been a good servant of hers which she had taught to do most unnatural things (dressage) and then she had simply lost interest in it and !!!

That is the human and the natural world; the balance is wrong and we approach it all with our clever long- sightedness and cold pragmatism and our constant questions about how useful it is, how useful it might be? and we will kill it all...

The Spectator’s Digby Warde-Aldam might previously have called plans for the piece “OK as public art goes”, but having seen it in reality the critic became so disgruntled by the “strip of stockmarket ticker-tape tied in a bow around its leg” that he declared: “Haacke is aiming for an Ozymandias-style comment on capital and society; what he achieves is the equivalent of a biro’ed anarchist symbol on a GCSE maths textbook. Look on my works, ye mighty, and cringe slightly.”

see the article here

Ekow Eshun, chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, said. “It’s a memento mori, it’s a reference to art history and to the fact that money is the hidden dynamic that fuels our city for good and bad. It’s a beautiful and poetic piece.”