When, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp revolutionised art with The Fountain, a urinal turned on its side, “signed” with the letters R. Mutt and placed on a functional pedestal, the world had its first Ready Made. A Ready Made is a found object that most people could recognise for its functional, everyday use, which is modified by the artist and recontextualised by its placement in an art gallery.
The Ready Made has become a staple in modern art and a backbone of the conceptual art movement. Damien Hirst gave the NHS obsessed public one of its most iconic Ready Mades 75-years after Duchamp with Pharmacy, and Tracey Emin became a celebrity 81-years after The Fountain with My Bed.
Now curator Paul Carey-Kent is taking the tradition in intriguing, and often humorous new directions. He invited eight artists to take ordinary packaging (from packaging tape, to cans to bottles, to crates and cardboard boxes) and elevate them by transforming them into art.
This is a loaded premise. We are drowning in discarded and unrecycled packaging. The landfills are bursting, our rivers stagnate, and our household recycling bins are stuffed with packaging from online shopping and supermarkets. So you expect a protest exhibition: a rant, an angry statement about the state of pollution and consumerism.
But the artists in this non-judgmental exhibition have instead fallen in love with their unwanted and disliked materials. Unapologetically, artists like Sam Hodge have spent weeks and months transforming the ugly symbols of consumerism and waste into unrecognisable works of art through alchemy. Shane Bradford’s work turns discarded supermarket crates dumped near his studio into blindingly bright, monumental post-modernist canvases (using household oil). Russel Herron turns our enemies into friendly companions.
When you see Herron’s Boy with Red Eyes, you might smile at the naïve art collages with cut out shapes for the eyes, nose and mouth, placed on a used, torn, corrugated cardboard face. They seem to drag the great tradition of British portrait painting – think Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney – back to the school room arts and crafts department. But in fact, Herron, one of the most deceptive artists in the exhibition, has used nothing more (or less) than the traditional colour pencil on paper for his portraits.
Gavin Turk has, for this show, almost abandoned the effort of transformation, relying solely on display cases to elevate the object. He lines up a colourful array of used cigarette lighters in a display case (transformed again by the title, Zugzwang) and a line-up of the actual cans of industrial and household lubricants, in their original containers. The title is Lubricants. Only the stickers with the price are missing.
Aware that he is following in the tradition of Duchamp and others, Turk acknowledges the same and by so doing questions the notion of propriety ideas. Near the entrance to the GPS Gallery (admirably run by the Soho Housing Association on the principle that workers should live near their shops or studios) Turk presents an homage to the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (known for his still life paintings of humble clay jugs and pots) in the form of a sculptural still life. Only the objects we see are untransformed Ready Mades: a Tupperware type horizontal container, and a range of verticals including a large glass container, a soup-like carton, a can, and a large plastic milk carton.
Sarah Pettitt’s work is instantly identifiable by her current phase of unifying her sculptures with ultramarine. A white relief plaque, resembling Ben Nicholson’s White Relief, but more sculptural, is affectionally adorned with a blue and white plastic bag squeezed into a crevice in the cardboard “frame.” The temptation is to pull it out and insert a silk paisley print to play with colour and texture and see the effect.
In another room the sculptural cardboard and packing paper “canvas” has even more marked three-dimensional partitions like a stationery cabinet. It stands proudly covered in ultramarine. The intruder, or welcome bit of colour and soft texture, is a blue and white plastic bag, crumbled up and inserted into the sculpture.
Pettitt also references art history, most strikingly in her Untitled wall hanging where a triangle of thread is suspended by a nail. On the bottom of the triangle the horizontal base of a hanger tilts downward to the left, although illogically, as there is an ultramarine found plastic tube on the right of the hanger that, judging solely by its bulk, should be providing a counterweight.
The nail could bring to mind the crucifixion and the triangle, the Holy Trinity – common staples of the Renaissance Masters – while the thread, references a now long line of artists, like Fred Sandback, who use thread in their art. But could Pettitt also be referring to 19th century, English pioneer Mary Everest Boole who used a form of string art to help teach children mathematics, adding a mathematical aspect to the spiritual? After all, the two forms existed side by side, from the work of Piero della Francesca and Albrecht Dürer, to M.C. Escher.
Joyce Glasser.
