30,000 bananas in Trafalgar Square

7:58am Wednesday 6th October 2004

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Trafalgar Square has gone bananas. Really.

Installation artist Doug Fishbone stacked 30,000 of the fruit on a heap in front of the National Gallery.

It took him three hours from 2.00am on Tuesday to assemble the sculpture. Yet it lasted only 10 hours: By 3.00pm bags of bananas were handed to every hungry tummy on Trafalgar Square.

Except to the artist himself, as he would not fancy any bananas "for a while".

This was not Fishbone's first banana sculpture. He did it twice in Ecuador (the world's leading banana exporter), once in Poland and then in New York.

Two trucks delivered the bananas to the Square after the Greater London Authority permitted the spectacle.

The Banana Group, which promotes bananas in Britain, donated the fruit, for which Fishbone was suitably grateful. "Otherwise I would have had to pay for them myself."

His message?

According to curator Tom Morton, Fishbone wanted to bring "some joy, some mystery and an element of the unexpected" to the Square.

The artist himself was less specific. It's visually interesting, he said. And it smells good. "But I'll leave the political reading to the viewer. It's more interesting not to manage that."

Admittedly, the dome-shaped heap of yellow was quite an arresting site: Vibrant, yet strangely serene.

The public's reaction ranged from "very positive to very annoying", Fishbone said. He beckoned towards a bunch of teenagers skating on smeared bananas: "It bothers me very much."

What did the viewers think?

"We love Doug's bananas," raved Londoner Nadine Feinson, waving a banana signed by the artist. She liked the idea of art as an edible gift to the public.

Canadian tourist John Harrop was less philosophic. "I really don't understand art," he commented with a bag of bananas in one hand. "It's different, that's all I can say."