Category Archives: Sculpture

Chance encounter

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Christian Boltanski, Chance, 2011

Since I seem to be stuck in mazes and cages this week, it’s perhaps no surprise that Christian Boltanski’s installation for the French pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale last year has worked its way back to the front of my mind. For me, this was one of the highlights of the Biennale though admittedly I think I’ve yet to see a work by Boltanski that I haven’t liked. This work does feel quite different to most of Boltanski’s installations though, not least because it’s playful – literally, in that it includes a game – and open to a hopeful reading, though more sombre interpretations are also possible.

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Rubbish self-portraiture

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Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Dirty White Trash (With Gulls), 1998 ( months’ worth of artists’ trash, 2 taxidermy seagulls, light projector)

Tim Noble and Sue Webster make rubbish self-portraits. That’s not to say they made self-portraits that are rubbish (though of course that’s a matter of opinion). No. It’s that they make self-portraits from rubbish. If we are what we eat – as the old cliché susggests – then surely we’re also defined in some way what we throw away.

The materials for Dirty White Trash (With Gulls) six months’ worth of artists’ trash. Noble and Webster have assembled the trash into a pile that casts a shadow of the couple sitting back to back, smoking and drinking as seagulls seem to pick at the pile of rubbish that forms the image.

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Sensory overload

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Helen Chadwick, Cacao, 1994

I guess I’m still thinking about chocolate – it is still Easter after all – but yesterday’s post also left the desire/disgust dichotomy firmly in my mind too so today’s post being about Helen Chadwich’s work might easily have been predicted. And where better to start than with Cacao, Chadwick’s 1994 chocolate fountain. At first sight the work looks like a mud bath of some sort and the spluttering as air bubbles through certainly sounds a lot like the bubbling mud of a hot spring. But things aren’t quite that simple. Firstly there’s the central column to consider: it’s hardly reminiscent of a decorative fountain with water falling prettily, indeed it appears deliberately and somewhat comically phallic. But it’s not really the way the work looks and sounds that I remember most vividly – though both are clear in my mind – it’s the heady smell of chocolate that fills the space. So much chocolate and none of it for eating! Ultimately then, this is a work that looks and sounds slightly unpleasant and has a smell that quickly becomes cloying, and yet I’ve always wanted to stay with it longer than is strictly necessary.

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Artful eating

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Janine Antoni, Gnaw, 1992

What better time than Easter Sunday to be thinking about chocolate. Lots of chocolate. And having posted about artists working with their own body the last couple of days, today I’m all about an artist who uses her body not as the source of the image but as the tool to make the work. In Gnaw, Janine Antoni gnawed away at a 600lb block of chocolate and another of lard, using the blocks as two parts of a three part installation. The work is a strange one. On the one hand chocolate is delicious, but lard?! Okay, so I’m a vegetarian, a block of lard is never going to be something I enjoy being faced with in a gallery or anywhere else, but I think disgust is a pretty universal response.

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Boxes of tricks

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Nam June Paik, TV is Kitsch, 1996

As we lose the analogue television signal, the impetus to get rid of old analogue televisions is even stronger. The cathode ray tube makes them bulky and heavy next to the sleek lines of plasma and LCD televisions and the need to have an external box to pick up a signal adds to the feeling that the time has come. But that same bulk that seems so annoying in the average living room is key to quite a lot of art from the last few decades. The box is part of what can blur the boundaries between moving image and sculpture. In the case if Nam June Paik’s TV is Kitsch it is the physical presence of the television casings that gives the work its form.

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Make do and mend

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Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (for David) (detail), 1992-97

There is something sad and touching about emptied out fruit stitched back up in a futile attempt at mending. But there’s also something about it that amuses me in a way. I think in Zoe Leonard’s installation Strange Fruit (for David) the thing that both moves me and makes me smile is the scale of the thing. It feels like a point that could have been made with a few pieces has taken control and not let Leonard stop; the empty fruit are scattered liberally across the floor, filling the space. In total roughly three hundred pieces of fruit have had their peel or skin dried out and put back together with stitching or other forms of fixing or adornment.

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The trouble with language

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Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade, 2007

Before moving on from text and language – at least temporarily, there’s more I want to write about at some point – it seems like a good idea to go back to the basic building blocks of text: letters and punctuation.  Typography is more usually the domain of designers but given that lots of artists have concerned themselves with language as a sign system, it’s no great surprise that some have also worked with its constituent parts.

In Every Word Unmade, Fiona Banner presents the alphabet as an opportunity for communication; the basic letterforms have the potential to become words.

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Book art and other structures

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Liu Wei, Untitled, 2011Untitled, 2011

The idea of books as art is hardly new. The concept of the artist’s book is a familiar one; indeed, there are artists’ book fairs all over the place. It’s just that when books become art is usually in the form of a book work: a book by an artist that functions as a work in its own right rather than as documentation. In Liu Wei’s exhibition at White Cube, Bermondsey at the moment, books have become sculpture and taken on the form of a city seemingly teetering on a rock with skyscrapers leaning at alarming angles.

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Deformities and pregnant pauses

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Nina Saunders, The Age of Reason, 1995

If rice can be art – and clearly it can be, and good art at that – then so can all sorts of everyday objects and materials. Like chairs. Admittedly chairs might more usually be expected to count as, say, furniture design, but attempts to categorise things can so easily go wrong and sometimes a chair just isn’t a chair. Such as when it’s afflicted by a large spherical tumour. Or when it starts to collapse in on itself. Or, well, any number of things really…

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The stuff of art (and life)

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Vong Phaophanit Neon Rice Field 1993

Vong Phaophanit, Neon Rice Field, 1993

Rice is a staple. It’s a foodstuff a large portion of the world’s population depends on. For those of us with the luxury of choice whose diet has become mixed as a result of the movement of people, goods and traditions, it has less cultural significance but is nonetheless something we take for granted, while knowing we could survive without it. For us it could perhaps be argued that art is something akin to a staple. We could perhaps find a substitute if push came to shove but in its own way it nourishes us. Mix the two and you have Vong Phaophanit’s Neon Rice Field an extraordinary installation for which Phaophanit was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994.

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