While this has been a week that saw Tate Modern announce an 11-year deal with Hyundai worth around £5million, thus securing the continuation of the Turbine Hall commissions, it isn’t sponsorship of the arts that has been commanding the most column inches and airtime for contemporary art.
That accolade goes instead to New York-based Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard – or more specifically one of his sculptures, a reworking of Allen Jones’ 1969 work, Chair. In Melgaard’s sculpture, the colour of the woman whose bound body takes the form of the chair has been changed from white to black.
Melgaard is well-known for being a bit of a rabble rouser – the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has said he has “never met a taboo he didn’t like breaking” – but in this instance it’s not really the art itself but the context it finds itself in that has attracted all the attention. As you’ll probably know, that context involves a young, rich white woman sitting on the ‘chair’ as she confidently, if a tad awkwardly, stares at the adoring camera.
I’m not convinced by the ‘racist chair’ comments that have been flying around on social media and newspaper websites, but one really does have to wonder what gallery owner and Russian socialite Dasha Zhukova – the woman in question, who also happens to be the partner of Chelsea-owning oligarch Roman Abramovic – was thinking. Possibly not a lot – although it was released as a publicity shot, and publicity it has got.
‘Tacky and distasteful’
Allen Jones – whose original piece is in the Tate collection and not, as far as I am aware, available for sitting on – was interviewed about all the fuss on Radio 4’s PM. He explained the context of the original piece – a reaction to the New York art scene’s embracing of abstraction and “to offend the canons of art at the time” – and concluded that Melgaard’s reworking was “rather tacky and distasteful”.
Pushed further by interviewer Eddie Mair, he was asked whether he thought it was racist. “Everything is in the context… and it [the photograph of Zhukova] was intended as a publicity still. They got it very wrong – I think it’s in very bad taste.”
The context, of course, is everything – from the reason for buying the work in the first place, to actually using it as a chair – hey, I’m so rich that my chairs aren’t just chairs they’re works of art – to then being photographed sitting on it.
There is, though, another context, another aspect, to be considered in this story – one that provides a link to that quite staggering multi-million pound Tate sponsorship deal. And that’s the way that, as is so often the case, contemporary art – and therefore by association artists themselves – is being linked in the public mind to big money deals and rich socialites of questionable taste.
Artists, of course, need both of these things in order to survive and have done so down the ages. But, apart from in a very small number of cases, we know that most artists do not inhabit a monied world of business deals and conspicuous wealth. Instead, they exist on a pittance and make work that – and here’s the good bit – is unlikely to ever be sat on by a very rich Russian gallerist.
