Richard Wentworth is among the generation of well-established British artists that includes Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. It is no coincidence that they are all male, and are known for large-scale, imposing works of art. Nonetheless, Wentworth’s work has always resisted these grandiose and spectacular statements. Instead, he has focused on the urban condition, and all of its throwaway gestures, both physical and metaphysical. He revels in the performance of the everyday, incorporating ephemeral elements of life into a body of work that has taken the diverse forms of photography, sculpture, installation, walks and talks. He is also a generous teacher: as Master of the Ruskin School of Art he has just become responsible for a new generation of artists who will hopefully question the art object with the same rigour that Wentworth has during his career.
Wentworth’s work is in some ways more akin to archaeology than to art. He excavates and displays, digging up hidden layers of history. He has taken found objects, subtly interfered with them and juxtaposed them with other everyday objects in white cube galleries, undermining the preciousness of commercial art spaces.
A keen observer of contemporary life with
all its trials and idiosyncrasies, for 20 years he has walked the Caledonian
Road close to his home in London, compiling his ongoing photographic series
Making Do and Getting By. The resulting photographs document urban
banalities that seem incongruous: a giant can of peas propping open a door,
a scrap of carpet replacing a damaged car wing, a wine glass perched on a
fence. Wentworth finds vitality and pathos in these mundane situations,
resisting the tendency to monumentalise or create fetish photography; he
sees the photograph as a record of a moment, nothing more, nothing less.
As Wentworth explains it, the city moves too fast for us, and all that we
can do is struggle to keep up with its relentless pace. For his Artangel
project last autumn, Wentworth examined such urban moments in London with an
installation which occupied the General Plumbing Supplies store at 66 York
Way, near King’s Cross station. Wentworth typically avoided the monumental –
in contrast to previous Artangel projects like Whiteread’s groundbreaking
House or Tony Oursler’s high-impact, centrally sited The Influence Machine –
and instead found a site in a part of town that most people find aggressive
and ambiguous. An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty was a specific
reaction to the space of the building, as well as to the street outside. The
artist established links between the street and the interior through a
number of features. The words ‘IN/OUT’ were painted in reverse and upside
down onto the floor of the entrance, so that it was difficult to determine
which way was indeed in and which was out. Wentworth had befriended the
street-painters who had painted the bus lane markings on York Way, and they
offered to paint the title of the exhibition onto the floor using the same
technique. Once inside, one could climb up to a periscope, via a staircase
concealed in a construction container placed on its end, to experience a
360-degree cinematic slice of King’s Cross.
The exhibition also included a variety of maps of the local area; videos of the street-painters, aeroplane tracks and a mapmaker drawing the London A-Z map in the traditional style; classic films that included shots of the neighbourhood; puzzles featuring the A-Z map; mini A-Zs; and a large map that became tribally forested with pins left by visitors marking the streets on which they lived. In addition, Wentworth installed a dozen ping-pong tables onto which local streets were painted. These were host to a level of daily activity that culminated in a heated tournament between local minicab drivers and a team from the British Library.
Wentworth paid tribute to the ebb and flow of urban life and to the way that people engage with the neighbourhood; the exhibition was distinctive in its aim to be unspectacular in an age where many artists are working with spectacle. Visitors would often come into the space and ask ‘Where is the exhibition?’ to which the reply would be, ‘You’re in the middle of it’. Wentworth’s point is that the city itself is rich with textures that we walk over and skim past every day, and that these unclaimed layers of the city contain a history that is lost with each new addition.
Wentworth’s recent installation at the Venice Biennale continued his interest in cities and the everyday. For his contribution to Absolut Generations, sponsored by the Swedish distilling company, Wentworth worked alongside Semiconductor, also known as Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, a young couple from Brighton who were Wentworth’s ‘protégés’ for the project. It was a logical pairing of wits, as Semiconductor’s digital and video works almost exclusively feature urban landscapes shifting, mutating and collapsing. For his part, Wentworth created a screen of industrial, galvanised shelves that cut across a room in the Palazzo Zenobio. Dictionaries from various countries, representing numerous regions and dialects – Arabic to English, Korean to Chinese, Cyrillic to French – were propped against a glass partition on a tilted screen, creating a distorted shop-like display. Traffic mirrors placed throughout the space conjured up reverse images of many of the books, and encouraged viewers to engage with space in a less straightforward manner. The installation, titled Mirror Mirror, was complemented by his portrait of a half-full Absolut bottle placed on a copy of Modern English Usage, itself placed on a mirror.
Venice was also the setting for Wentworth’s artwork for contemporary: a photograph of a transparent plastic cup placed precariously on a bush in the Giardini. It is revealing that, for Wentworth, the highlight of this year’s Biennale was a chance meeting between a cup and a hedge. The significance of this moment, this epiphany, is heightened by his fondness for the discursive, whether between object, places or people.
Wentworth is currently contributing to a
group effort called 15/1(2) at 1 000 000 mph project space in London’s East
End, the re-launch of a project called 15/1, which took place in a south
London council flat in 1992. In 15/1(2), 15 artists, including Wentworth, DJ
Simpson, Roxy Walsh, and Mark Harris, have each been given two days to
respond to existing conditions within the space, and are free to alter
anything created by preceding artists. The only stipulation is that others’
work cannot be removed. The last artist to contribute, Wentworth bound the
fluorescent lights with pages of the London A-Z, subtly lowering the tone
and altering the appearance of the other works. That he would be involved in
such a project is indicative of Wentworth’s enduring interest in the various
levels of the art world and of his boundless curiosity.
Kathy Battista is Research Fellow of The London Consortium and Books Editor
for contemporary