Currently Reading: Vitamin 3-D: new Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation. Ellegood, Anne. 2009. Phaidon, London.
… continued
The book itself, it’s worth mentioning, is a huge mid-green tome with a wedge of cover front and back held together with a soft spine. The edges of the pages are a metallic green, giving the effect of a massive square green vitamin pill that once consumed the reader will be more enriched in the knowledge of all the best sculptors.
The main body of the book is the alphabetised selection of the 117 sculpture stars. This is clearly meant to be a reference book, or dictionary to sculpture today (in 2009). The oversized pages and glossy full page photographs give a pictorial and brief introductory account of the individual practices that have been brought together as le crème de la crème in sculptural medium (which Ellegood practically denounced as redundant, antiquated museum-esque filter in her introduction as if in self-reflexive criticism).
Of these 117 sculpture stars, I found 4 applicable to my rubbish research: Christoph Büchel with Dump (2008) (I had already included his LAST MAN OUT TURN OFF LIGHTS (2010) which I saw at Tramway but Dump seems now much more relevant), Jedediah Caesar’s Californian (2008) comprised of collected detritus of his house and studio (a focus that a number artists have employed akin to a survey of their wordly (studio/life) possessions – Schabus, Dupont, Emin, Ross-Ho, MacRaild, Shapiro, Dong), Jim Drain with iii open iii closes (2007) comprised of scraps and Ruben Ochoa’s Extracted (2006) which includes dirt in the material specification.
In some ways I’m slightly surprised that in 2009 there are not more inclusions of rubbish artists, but on the other hand it’s just a sample of 117 out of 500 nominees. Although the quotidien everyday/recycled object was cited in Ellegood introduction as a key theme, it could clearly not dominate such a diverse field as sculpture/installation. However, it is clear that sculpture (in the expanded field) is a main historical basis for rubbish, a pretty obvious conclusion for me having come from a sculpture background to study rubbish as a distillation of many of my main critical concerns.
