"30,000 Bananas"

Doug Fishbone


Eat your fill of Doug Fishbone?s 30,000 Bananas. Here, the edible installation is piled high in London?s Trafalgar Square. Image courtesy of Doug Fishbone.

On October 5, 2004, I installed an enormous mountain of ripe bananas - roughly 30,000 of them - on the North Terrace of London‚s Trafalgar Square. After sitting on the Terrace all day, like a strange organic sculpture, the bananas were given away to the audience totally free of charge.

For all its apparent simplicity, 30,000 Bananas is a work of some complexity, infusing one of the world’s busiest and most famous public spaces with an altogether unexpected type of experience. The works of 19th Century public sculpture in Trafalgar Square are uniformly grey and austere, set high-up on plinths, permanent, and seek to build an imagined community‚ through the commemoration of long-dead personalities associated with violent and divisive acts of war and colonialism.

In contrast, 30,000 Bananas is brightly colored, at street-level, temporary, and seeks to build up a genuine moment of community through the generous act of giving away free food, the shared experience among its audience of eating that free food, and the shared experience among its audience acting as a collective sculptor‚ whittling away the pile of bananas until nothing at all remains. Some tourists happened upon it and could not quite figure what was what, drawing the conclusion that Londoners were crazy. Some commuters walked by it without seeming to notice anything unusual at all. The

occasional drunk wandered by as we were setting it up and tried to finagle a banana or two. 30,000 Bananas, then, is a site-specific piece that not only questions what constitutes public sculpture, but also one in which the public are genuinely the authors of a work of public art. And as a sculpture itself, the mound of bananas was surprisingly beautiful.