Brits talking rubbish about modern art, and vice versa.
Other people’s garbage, your movements and old teapots are all on display in London’s galleries this summer
In London, the late-’90s are back: property values have hit the stratosphere; app developers are recreating the dot-com boom; and ex-Young British Artist enfant terrible Tracey Emin’s infamous 1998 work My Bed (an actual bed) sold this month for £2.54-million. But three of this summer’s more provocative art exhibitions turn the perceived worth of art — and of objects themselves — on its head. Tate Britain’s British Folk Art presents centuries’ worth of anonymous curios from soldiers’ pincushions to shop signs for the illiterate. At the Serpentine Gallery, Marina Abramovic invites gallery-goers to walk among bare walls. And the Science Museum’s atmosphere gallery is displaying tons and tons of garbage.
“The art world is now split,” says Joshua Sofaer, the artist behind the Rubbish Collection, an exhibition whose cheeky name anticipates criticism from the “my five-year-old could do this” brigade. Some art, he offers, “is just about commodity: material value is negligible — paints and a canvas cost a few pence — and when a signature or the context of a gallery or establishment is applied, they accrue a certain kind of value. And then there is a kind of artmaking about how art might shift or transform.”
Sofaer’s own work involves a literal transformation: From June 15, he and a team of volunteers, along with some gallerygoers, will have sorted through a month’s worth of all the museum’s waste, documented it in photographs, and sent it off to be processed; on July 25, they’ll put the decontaminated, compacted trash on display. Sofaer promises cheeky nods to conventional exhibitions: lighting duct fixtures on a string will be shown “like the V&A would display an ethnic piece of jewellery”; a giant bolt will be set on a plinth, and a set of lighting grills will “look like an immediate Malevich” — the Russian artist’s works are on display at the Tate Modern — “if you put them together.” But mostly you’ll see bales of objects that will stun with their scale, including 7.4 tons of card and paper, two tons each of food waste (as fertilizer) and glass sand, 700 kg of steel, and 250 kg of sewage blocks, a.k.a. “sludge cakes” of dried human waste.
Some of this work will be representative (human waste takes months to dry, so Sofaer won’t be displaying quite the same old s--t flushed out this summer), but he hopes to have provoked “behaviour change” through participants’ “handling the rubbish [and] seeing the extraordinary things that people are throwing out” — including a box full of cutlery that suggests some people take the directive to clear their cafeteria trays rather too far. And maybe gallery-goers will reflect on how society is changing as well: a crumpled, discarded love letter, apparently from one young student to another, ends, “Reply if you can on paper or tell me privately.” For a new generation, the physical is becoming ephemeral; only data lasts forever.
With 512 Hours, Serbian-born performance art doyenne Marina Abramovic, who last year filmed a video for Jay Z’s art-as-bling celebration “Picasso Baby,” looks to make art out of nothing at all — or just about. She is in the midst of a 64-day run (ending Aug. 25) in the Serpentine Gallery, with a few props but no “art objects” per se. The blackclad artist guides gallery-goers around: When I attended, some were standing motionless on the foot-high stage surrounded by chairs in the main area, some lying in cot beds (more spartan than Emin’s) in one side room, others pacing as slowly as possible back and forth in a third, otherwise empty, room. In this last area, Abramovic whispered to me: “It’s important to do it seven times.” Apparently the heart rate stabilizes, the body takes in the right amount of oxygen, and if you wear the industrialsized ear protectors handed out at the door, you’ll feel less selfconscious.
The point of the exercise is oblique, but it does make time seem to slow down — especially when all watches and recording devices have been left at the door. What’s more, gallery-goers become each other’s objects of scrutiny. 512 Hours recalls that other famous work about “nothing,” John Cage’s 4’33”, whose performer sits in silence so audience members will focus on the sounds around them — and their own sounds. No doubt with 512 Hours the cult of personality obtains, but Abramovic isn’t selling anything — entry is free, and refreshingly, memories are the only souvenirs.
For a less conceptual gallery experience, one can pay £14.50 at Tate Britain to see a plethora of objects, many of which are (or at least were) functional — a decorated earthenware jug, an anthropomorphic weather vane, naively drawn pub signs — with none of the narrative about a famed artist’s life that purports to make My Bed more than just an unmade bed. In a gallery devoted to the story of British art, this show unearths what has been excluded since the Royal Academy was founded in 1768. From then, says co-curator Martin Myrone, “We’ve been focused on a canon of major figures working in London rather than a broader sense of an artistic culture which extends beyond the mainstream.”
The show offers objects of uncertain financial worth — how much for a 19th-century horse vertebra with a Methodist preacher painted on it? — and often of uncertain provenance, and raises significant questions. For instance, did folk artistturned-trained painter Walter Greaves “lose his identity” after acquiring recognized technique, and if so, is there a necessary value to formal education? And does an establishment artist like fisherman Alfred Wallis, who was “discovered” by Ben Nicholson in the 1920s as a “primitive archetype,” actually stand out when his work is displayed among other fishermen’s similarly naive paintings? What role might fortune or circumstance play in an artist’s ascent to the realm of the collectible?
Many of the exhibition’s objects generally languish in storage in collections across England; British Folk Art suggests they should emerge more often. Work such as My Bed, in fact, may have laid the ground for this. Says Myrone: “It’s possible now to show an oversized teapot and everyday objects from the past. Contemporary art practice has perhaps prepared us for valuing and engaging with these materials … I think we’re all that much more ready to see surprising things in an art exhibition.” And these shows may help us see the art around us every day, without signatures, galleries, or millions and millions of pounds.