The first thing nobody tells you about plinths is that they are never quite level. Museums will insure a sculpture for more than my apartment building and then stand it on a box that wobbles if you breathe on it with intent. When the sculpture is me, the wobble becomes a professional concern. I have learned to find the high corner with my heel inside four seconds of stepping up. This is not a skill you can put on a comp card, but it should be.
The second thing is the view. From a plinth you see the tops of everyone's decisions: the photographer's parting, the stylist's roots, the art director pacing a slow circle like a shark that studied semiotics. Everyone below you is worried. You, alone at altitude, are not allowed to be. Your entire job is to look like the one object in the room that was always going to be there, that the building was in some sense constructed around.
I developed a private test for whether a pose is finished. If a stranger walked in with a clipboard, would they measure me for a crate? If yes, hold it. If they would instead offer me a chair, something in the shoulders is still asking permission. Sculpture never asks permission. That is the whole trick of it, and it took me three years and one filed knee complaint to learn.
People ask if it's boring, holding still. They're thinking of stillness as the absence of movement. It isn't. It's movement with the volume turned all the way down: the heartbeat redistributed, the weight negotiating between hip and heel, the afro doing whatever the air conditioning wants while the rest of me declines to participate. There is a lot going on. The camera just isn't invited to most of it.
At the end of a plinth day there is a moment I have never once skipped: stepping down. You do it backwards, one hand on the box, like leaving a small boat. And for about four seconds, back at sea level with blood reintroducing itself to my feet, I am a person again instead of a work. I won't pretend I always prefer it.