Duchamp and me.

Rejection.

I know how Duchamp felt.

100 years ago, his urinal 'Fountain' was submitted for an art exhibition in New York and was rejected. My offering - created in Duchamp's honour - was also deemed unworthy ... of a plinth at this year's Bradford Open Art show.

Not for a minute would I even begin to liken my work, entitled Toilet with Stool, with Marcel's minimalist marvel. He got there first, I'll grant him that. And I very much doubt that my creation will ever be recognised as iconic. Duchamp started it all, back in 1917, by selecting a quotidian item, repositioning it and calling it 'Readymade Art'. 

 As artist Ryan Gander says: Art is like a mountain without a summit: an artist can climb up and find the 'corpse of an art', take its adrenalin, water, food etc and then carry on.  
I simply took inspiration from the grandmaster.

How could my offering possibly be refused? When I submitted my random assemblage, I thought it could not be rejected, given the importance of the anniversary of the beginning of conceptual art. The irony is not lost, however, that it was shunned.

2017 marks the century since Marcel Duchamp submitted his urinal 'Fountain' to an art exhibition. He bought the urinal from a sanitary ware firm and presented it on its back rather than upright, signed and dated it ‘R. Mutt 1917’. He then submitted it as an artwork to the newly established Society of Independent Artists that he himself had helped found.

The society’s board of directors, who were obliged by their constitution to accept all submissions from its members, rejected it, saying that a piece of sanitary ware - something associated with bodily waste - could not be considered a work of art and was ‘indecent’. Duchamp resigned in protest against the board taking it upon itself to veto and effectively censor an artist’s work.

I spotted my rather sad looking toilet in a skip outside the college building where I was studying for a BA in Fine Art. The little voice in my head told me to walk away, which I actually managed to do. But it was still there some days later and I couldn't resist, so I arranged for it to be collected by the college porter who insisted I cleaned it thoroughly first before he trolleyed it into the art department. I set about considering what to do with the knackered - and heavy - loo; playing with puns (bog standard, toilet humour) and adding mannequin heads, arms and oddments to the bowl. Eventually, for the end of year show, I scrawled M. Rutt 2106 on the side and placed it on a stool. The object could only be viewed through a peephole (pee - geddit?) 'toilet' eye sign (see pictures) in the installation room, lit by a small bulb. In this way I was cleverly (in my mind, anyway) mimicking both Duchamp's iconic work and his final piece Étant donnés  which could only be seen by peering through an aperture.

I do not know why my artwork was rejected by whomever at the Bradford Open. The curator says they do not give feedback. 

On collecting my toilet and stool from Cartwright Hall, I was however honoured to find that they had been stored in the print room, sharing space with a Lichtenstein and a Hamilton, among other greats.

The original Fountain was both vandalised and then lost, but a few replicas are still in existence, including one at the Tate Modern in London.

My toilet is going back in the skip.

Ginx's Baby

In the summer, a long-standing traditional book shop in Kirkstall closed. The owners were retiring and were giving away their stock.

.

I left with two ornate bookshelves for a fiver each, and boxes full of wonderful old hardback books, mostly falling apart, but with a new potential - for altering them with artistic means.
Now before you go: NOOOO! Books do come to the end of their lives and I seek out such, so that I can recycle them and try to throw little or nothing away. The pages can be drawn on (Tom Phillips - A Humament), carved into (Brian Dettmer), folded, painted, embellished and so on. I have made papier mache out of the pages, turned the spine into a bookmark, and the covers for creating book boxes.
So, armed with my stash of books, I went home to investigate further. One book, was called Ginx's Baby, and initially I was thinking about how I could alter it yet keep the theme of the wonderful cover picture and inside illustrations. Then I started to read the book. And couldn't put it down.

Ginx's Baby was written by Edward Jenkins, who lived from 1838 to 1910. The book,
published in 1871 was described as: "A satire on the struggles of rival sectarians for the religious education of a derelict child."
Then, as in the discovery that so much overlaps and connects, I found that Ginx's Baby inspired a polychrome drawing , taken by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in 1871. The picture is in the Royal Photographic Society collection, which just so happens to be housed in the archives at the National Media Museum in Bradford, my college and work city. The photograph was one of a series taken for Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) work ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, 1872, a study into the origins of human expressions. After meeting Darwin in 1871, Rejlander became the main photographer for the project. ‘Ginx’s Baby’ was also commercially successful, and so Rejlander created versions on cartes de visite and cabinet cards. 

"The striking image of this helpless working class child soon became part and parcel of the Victorian social and political debate on poverty, charity and social justice. Photography took on a new relevance. It suddenly dawned upon critics and observers that certain photographic images have the power to influence public opinion and determine or change its course. A single shot can strike deeper than a million words."
(https://abeautifulbook.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/ginxs-baby-malden-road-chalk-farm/)


Rejlander was famous for his large, allegorical photographs and self-portraits. At the invitation of Darwin, Rejlander posed for four photographs in Expression. He even had his moustache trimmed so as not to obstruct the pantomimic grimaces and decorous gestures he acted out for the camera. But his most famous contribution was his picture of a screaming child, known as Ginx’s Baby, illustrating the chapter on “Low spirits, anxiety, grief, dejection, despair.” Rejlander sold 300,000 prints of this photograph, which almost single-handedly kept his foundering studio afloat.

Photographer Oscar Gustav Rejlander,
with  his picture of Ginx's Baby

In the Darwin archive at the University of Cambridge there is a photograph of Rejlander next to Ginx’s Baby. It rests on an easel and by it sits the photographer, mimicking his subject’s expression, his arm around the picture of the baby. Another, almost identical picture appears alongside it, like a stereoscopic slide. “Fun, only,” he wrote on the back of the photograph, “There I laughed! Ha! Ha! Ha! Violently—In the other I cried—e, e, e, e,.. Yet how similar the expression.” It is almost impossible to tell them apart."
(cabinetmagazine.org/issues/17/tearslaughter.php)

I contacted the Bradford museum to see if it was possible to arrange to see the picture and maybe put it on show with the book. Collections assistant Lewis Pollard invited me to call in which I duly did and was invited into the hallowed chambers of a backroom in the museum where Ginx's Baby was ensconced in protective wrapping. Lewis put on a pair of white gloves and removed the picture. I admired it for a few minutes, and took some pictures of it next to the book.
So, I asked, would it be possible to put this photograph on show alongside the book in the museum?

No.

Lewis explained that the photograph had been 'acquired' by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and was soon to be transported down South along with other prints from the Bradford collection.

Lewis Pollard with the photograph of Ginx's Baby
 and my book

This move is not without controversy. The Royal Photographic Society collection, which is made up of more than 400,000 prints and historic equipment, had been housed in the National Media Museum since 2003.
The decision to move the collection from Bradford to London was described as an act of “cultural rape on the city” by local politicians and a signifier of “metropolitan cultural fascism”. It prompted an open letter, signed by figures such as David Hockney and Mike Leigh, that protested against the relocation.

(https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/05/va-to-open-new-galleries-for-photos-acquired-from-bradford-museum)


* August 1 2017. I emailed the V&A about Ginx's Baby in June but have heard nothing back from them.

Some Reason led me to discover a conceptual artist.

At the opening of the MA show in Dean Clough Mills, Halifax, I stumbled across some metal words set on a walkway between the industrial buildings.
It caught my eye: in particular, the words 'some reason' stood out. The whole thing (a weighbridge, apparently) looked like this (thanks, Google):




So after changing my Facebook cover picture to the above, I wandered into the realms of wondering the whole sentence could mean:
                     'some limestone some sandstone enclosed for some reason'

Googling this was the obvious place to start, and it led me to a blogger in whose footsteps I had followed who recorded the vision as a piece of public art as part of the regeneration of the mill. (This blogger called it 'pretentious' but added: "wondering why it being done by an artist rather than an engineer leads me to change my feeling about it so markedly.")
So - the artist. Next on Google's list is from the The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Volume 1, with a section on Weiner, Lawrence.




There was a sentence tacked to the original Google image :
Steel pennies don't come from or go to heaven.
This search led to a book of these words by Lawrence Weine (no 'R')

Lawrence Weiner was featured at the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery in Leeds with his work Steel Pennies Do Not Come From or Go to Heaven19.02.1993 - 23.05.1993
Oh, by the way, this is what Lawrence Weiner looks like. Isn't he avuncular?





If you'd like to read more about Lawrence Weiner and can't afford the book, here's the Wikipedia page about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weiner
And some very interesting information about more of his work here:
http://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/lawrence-weiner-within-a-realm-of-relative-form













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Random stuff

Well here I am at the end of my third year. It's been three years of fun ... I mean, hard work... and now, the end is near, and now I've reached the final curtain.

So I thought I'd use my blog for some random thoughts and pictures as no-one really ever reads my blog so it doesn't matter what I put on it.

So this is London, where I was at the weekend. I walked miles, as usual thinking that distances weren't so far. At various points in my meander from Covent Garden to the Southbank I encountered men in smart suits with tourism officer badges. This was one such, walking past a posh hotel with his white paper bag.

Can't remember where this one was. But I seem to have taken a picture at an interesting moment.

So here is my doll's house. It is an interactive piece with visitors encouraged to move the occupants and items around in the rooms. 

Three sculptures: of action man; charity shop item; action man man cave.

My homage to Marcel Duchamp.

My toy sculptures are sprayed gold to show how value can be added to low value objects,

Detail of wall hanging.

End of year show:

Friday June 10

4-8pm

Then weekdays 10-40pm to June 17.