Visual art - No subject or material is too humble for this true heir of Duchamp
Be extra alert when you visit Richard Wentworth's witty, inventive and unsettling show at Tate Liverpool. Anyone who imagines that his display would consist of objects as stately as the figures favoured by Henry Moore, with whom he worked as an assistant in 1967, will soon feel disconcerted. At every turn, Wentworth ambushes the viewer with sculptural surprises, demanding that we constantly look up, down, sideways and even behind our own backs.
Wentworth delights in catching the onlooker off-balance, but not simply for amusement. Ever since he emerged as one of Britain's most rewarding sculptors in the early 1980s, this resourceful artist has taken the wavering pulse of modern life in all its diversity and transience. Unlike the Hepworth-Moore generation, with their steady loyalty to stone and bronze, he is committed to the notion that sculpture can be made from virtually anything and does not need to be hand-made.
He is, in this respect, a true heir of Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades. Wentworth pays overt homage to the subversive Frenchman in a piece called If Only, where Duchamp's Bottle Rack of 1914 is invaded by a vertical glass panel, dark blue on one side and mirrored on the other. The spiky Bottle Rack looks aggressive, bristling with hooks, but Wentworth's tall panel gives it a strangely vulnerable air, the glass seeming to rush upwards like a shaft of light escaping from its container.
The feeling of fragility becomes an overriding theme as we investigate the other exhibits. Take the walking stick suspen-ded high above a door. Balanced on another glass strip projecting from the wall, it looks ready to be dislodged by the slightest breeze. But somehow it stays aloft, like a gravity-defying circus performer.
The myriad plates and bowls assembled in a huge floor-piece called Spread could easily end up smashed. Staring down at this ceramic expanse, we become conscious of our own shoes placed perilously near all the breakable edges. Our eyes are soon diverted, however, by the bewilderingly different designs. Some have tartan borders, while others are festooned with garish fruit decorations. One is an ashtray with gilded recesses where smouldering cigarettes once rested, while a nearby plate adorned with European maps has "Berlin Checkpoint Charlie" inscribed at its centre. Whether a tourist trinket from Majorca or a dish containing a printed dinner menu from the Hotel l'Horizon in Jersey, these ceramics testify to the bizarre pressures of market demand. Taken together, however, they evoke the vastness of some plain or ocean, its horizontality disrupted only once by a renegade vase tipped on its side. All crowded together, their abundance makes us realise how many other heterogeneous plates exist elsewhere in the world, waiting for Wentworth to give them all a provocative new identity.
Nothing is too humble to escape the attention of this instinctively democratic artist. An inveterate photographer, he prowls hectic streets and quiet landscapes on the lookout for everyday detritus. The outcome, an ongoing series of images called Making Do and Getting By, shows Wentworth at his most deft. Placed side by side on a metal shelf running round the walls of a sizeable room, they range in mood from wry humour to nerve-wrenching violence.
Wentworth's lens zooms in on a notice attached to a San Francisco window pane that announces: "Security will return in 10 mins." And he cannot resist photographing a news-stand for the Islington Gazette declaring in bold capitals: "King's Cross renamed to rid vice image." But he also notices evidence of urban turmoil. A stretch of iron railings in north London lurches backwards, bent and smashed by the impact of a crashed vehicle.
Above all, true to his sculptural bent, Wentworth points his camera at three-dimensional objects given fresh, unexpected meaning by their fragmented or abandoned state. He focuses on a partially collapsed wooden bench in Gloucestershire, a battered car door left in a field, a chair dumped in a paint-spattered bin on a London doorstep and a humble plastic cup impaled on a spike. Fascinated by even the most mundane or debased materials, he succeeds in making us respond to the cheap plywood sheets boarding up a blighted shopfront called Mr Discount, or to the insistent rhythms of corrugated iron blocking off a demolition site in Westbourne Grove. The latter photograph was taken in 1972, soon after Wentworth graduated from the Royal College of Art. He has been searching for similar spectacles on pavements, window sills and country pathways ever since, determined to free himself from conventional ways of understanding the world.
This stubborn sense of independence reaches its most arresting form in False Ceiling. Walking into a large, ostensibly empty room, we discover - just inches above our heads - a host of books hanging down. Their flatness and immensity echo the misty winter waters of the Mersey visible through the windows. All the books cast shadows across walls and floor alike. In the end, though, it is the covers of these volumes that monopolise our attention. They could hardly be more disparate. Love's Labour's Lost dangles near something called Really, Nurse!, and after a while, moving from Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel to Germaine Greer's menopausal treatise The Change, we realise that Wentworth's choice is as wide as his ceramic samplings in Spread.
But the fundamental point of False Ceiling cannot be found in the juxtaposition of South Sea Adventure with Freud and the Post-Freudians. Rather, it centres on the contrast between the dark, oppressive layer of books and the light-filled void above. Here, Wentworth appears to be implying, we can find room for our own thoughts, unconfined by the published texts threatening to limit us below.
Hence the exhilarating spirit of liberation running through this show. Whether he employs a real bale of hay or sprung steel, coat-hangers or a ping-pong table, Wentworth is set on emancipating our ways of thinking and perceiving. Expectations are undermined wherever we look. Trying to lift a lightweight chair, we discover that heavy metal balls hang down from the seat and make it virtually unshiftable. A dysfunctional universe is presented here, and yet Wentworth is not a pessimistic artist. Even though a grand piano is strewn with cracked plates, they have all been glued together by an artist bent on retrieving wonder from the wreckage of everyday existence.
"Richard Wentworth" is at Tate Liverpool (0151 702 7400) until 24 April
Post this article to
Post your comment
Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website
