Waiting for someone to tell us what it means
People will look at the winning work at this year’s National Contemporary Art Awards and say it’s just a bus stop.
It is, after all, a bus stop. But judge Caterina Riva will tell you it’s more than that.
It’s art. And, according to her, it was the best of more than 200 entries from across the country.
Miss Riva announced the winner during a ceremony at Waikato Museum last night. The artists, Michael Parr and Blaine Western, of Auckland, were awarded $15,000 in prize money.
Their creamy-coloured, deadpan shelter sits, fixed in concrete, on a patch of grass outside the museum, facing away from the street.
Like winning works before it – a pile of rubbish in 2009 and a giant QR code in 2011 – the bus stop is sure to cause controversy.
Miss Riva said this wasn’t her intention. ‘‘I don’t think this is necessarily controversial, but I think if people do talk about art that something positive is happening.’’
It has already been used by the city’s homeless, and others use the shelter as a place to have a chat, to read or to simply sit and question its purpose.
The artists even welcome tagging. It’s a blank canvas, open for interpretation.
Miss Riva, director of Artspace Auckland, agreed that the work would attract criticism but defended her decision to name it as the winner.
‘‘It’s not just a bus stop, because if it was a bus stop it would be turned the other way around.’’
She said removing the work from the context of an art gallery, and separating it from its usual purpose, forced people to engage with it differently.
Parr and Western were inspired by the brutalist architecture popular in Hamilton during the 1950s and 60s. They built the bus stop from scratch, and laid the concrete foundation.
The runner-up works received merit awards. One, by Roman Mitch of Auckland, is a mock studio space littered with materials to symbolise the beginning of the artistic process.