I’ve been researching these last few weeks; reading books, going to exhibitions and symposiums. Regarding my twitter project, where I’m posting images of readymade sculptures, I’ve been reminded of a contextual connection and found a new one. The connection that I already knew about (but was lurking in the back of my mind somewhere) was Richard Wentworth’s series of photographs that I remember from his retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 2005. I now remember seeing the photos in the last room of the exhibition and seem to recall that he used these photos to then make his own sculptural response. These photos were from the everyday and were of found sculptures. When I went to the ‘Modern British Sculpture’ at the RA a few weeks ago I came face to face with another one of his photographic series entitled ‘Making Do and Getting By – A Selection of Everyday Encounters 1970-1985 (1985)’. This was a selection of photographs edited as a video and accompanied by some jolly music with breaks of narration by Wentworth. Seeing this piece allowed me to develop a sense of distance between my work and his. His work was a very humorous look at objects outside of their usual role and as the title suggests a look at how we change the value of things when using them to perform another role. Some of the objects are used very instinctively, with quick decisions being made by the maker; others were similar to mine, where sculpture had unwittingly been made. Using photography to capture and preserve these fleeting temporal moments make the whole set of photos intimate and revealing about the human condition, with regards to our adaptability.
The other set of photographs I’ve come across recently were taken by Brassai in the 1930’s, they were referenced in the excellent book by Briony Fer about Eva Hesse called “Studioworks’. Brassai’s photographs were a small selection of images published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in number 3-4. These photographs were of magnified everyday objects; such as brioche, bus tickets and toothpaste, photographed in moody black and white, they are transformed into mysterious aesthetic objects. Included in the same magazine there were images of strange tribal art brought back from ethnographical expeditions, the everyday strangeness of the close ups are compared to the fetishisation of the primal art and leave us wondering if there is not some strange power imbued in the everyday objects.
By photographing these objects with a surrealist eye, Brassai proposes a link between sculpture and photography but is this link only a detached, passive one? Can found sculptures to which the artist has no control over, apart from capturing them by using photography, really be used to comment on sculptural concerns? These photographs are markedly opposed to the traditional notion of sculpture as the deliberate mastery of a particular medium. The ‘Involuntary’ sculptures are unmonumental, only existing for a short period of time but are replenished daily, numbers on a massive scale, all over the world, and made unknowingly: remade and reconfigured in all matter of materials, positions and placements. The recent tragic events in Japan showed images on television of cars, boats, houses displaced, sometimes piled on top of each other. As well as feeling upset at the enormity of it and the high number of lives that have been lost and the unimaginable destruction of the area, I couldn’t help but marvel at the uncanny strangeness of it all. How the powerful force of nature had left everything that we take for granted absurdly unfamiliar.
