Supermarket Art Fair
4/5
Going and visiting the other booths with my newspaper and rubbish talk seemed a better approach as the exhibitors were often tied to staying at their booth and taking shifts with a few other people to eat, etc. Having a small paper delivery bag would’ve been good. I went back to Paper Gallery’s booth to see how the day was going for them and how the newspapers were being received. David said people were generally picking them up, flicking through them and deciding whether to take them or not (as opposed to just taking them as they were free). He also said people were laughing at them quite a lot, which is great feedback. Crap seemed to amuse the Swedish enormously I don’t think there is a Swedish word crap. Crap in Swedish is skit (crap, shit, dirt, turd, poop, tripe) or smörja (grease, rubbish, trash, Junk, tripe, crap) or skitprat (shit, crap, kibosh). Rubbish is skräp (debris, rubbish, garbage, trash, Junk, litter); strunt (rubbish, garbage, junk, pipsqueak, balderdash, fiddlededee); goja (rubbish, bosh); guano (rubbish, nonsense); larv (larva, grub, rubbish, nonsense); rappakalja (rubbish, mumbo-jumbo).
Maybe it’s because Crap is the first page. The categories are alphabetical, because I wanted a dictionary/reference order/structure to it, and crap is alphabetically first in the list of 19 categories. Feedback from a few people also often mentioned the drawing of David Shrigley’s work (Crap) which is on the first page. Perhaps this is also (partly) because they like his work and/or know his work as he is one of the more well known artists in the newspaper. Simon at Paper Gallery also mention David Shrigley when we talked about my newspaper. We talked mainly more broadly about practice and research, drawing and performance. When I went with Paper Gallery toSluice Art Fair last October, I did a performance piece with the £5 Change work I’d first made in 2004 and first performed with as an exchange item at Antifreeze, Manchester in 2009. This conversation about performance as practice led on to us discuss the fine line between performance as practice and conversation/interaction as research or chitchat that informs practice. With the £5 Change performance piece I was in character and label it a ‘performance’ but the conversations we have about practice, and in the context of an art fair, how much of they are ‘performance’? Food for thought for Talking Rubbish (conversations about rubbish) that I want to further develop.
Sunday – our final day in Stockholm and last day of the fair – I headed back to the fair one last time and went back to the Chicago based Art on Armitage as I’d spotted a coral reef made from crocheted plastic bags. It was the work of Mary Ellen Croteau, founder of the gallery, who wasn’t there to speak to in person but I took the gallery representatives a paper and pointed out Martin Vanden Eynde’s Plastic Reef (2006-2012) and George Sabra’s Plastic Cap Sculpture (2011) (Mary also works extensively with unrecyclable plastic bottle caps). I asked if the paper could be passed to Mary and I really hope that happens.
I had a quick chat with Andreas Westergerg from Filmverkstaden in Vaasa, Finland, about video before talking a bit with the rep from ID:I Galleri from Sweden who had some fab works by Noak Lönn: a small section of parquet floor made from cardboard and also pairs of branches mounted on wooden plaques resembling antlers. Both untitled, the floor wasn’t for sale and the branch antlers were SEK3000 each. I guess these are brand new works for the fair as they weren’t listed on his website.
I also stopped at another Swedish booth I didn’t catch the name of and voted on a proposed artist-designed entrance to the Swedish Houses of Parliament “to inspire the Swedish government when voting on important policies”. There were several interesting, ironic, subversive and poetic designs but I decided my little red sticker should go underneath the one with a massive Louise Bourgeois spider straddling the building. The organisation representative said the proposals weren’t official in the sense of being an invited proposition, but they would be petitioning with the results.
