An upturned urinal, a spade hanging from the ceiling, an unmade mattress, a banana duct-taped to a wall… and now a load of outdated rope. British artist David Shrigley’s conceptual set up, consisting of ten tons of discarded rope heaped on Stephen Friedman Gallery’s ground, is the newest work to query the worth of artwork.
Titled “David Shrigley: Exhibition of Outdated Rope,” the solo present opened on Thursday in London. The artist, who is understood for his overtly easy work branded with even easier logical fallacies, is the artwork world king of one-liners. And this present is simply that: “a pile of outdated rope.” The work will set you again £1 million ($1.3 million), which is a snip in comparison with the $6.2 million paid for Mauricio Cattelan’s readymade duct-taped banana final fall in New York.
Shrigley spent months looking the UK for cast-off rope, a lot of which was destined for landfill. A whole lot of it had a maritime use “from thick cruise ship mooring strains, to slim cords on marker buoys, lengthy strains and crab and lobster pots,” the exhibition textual content reads. “Different have been salvaged from climbing colleges, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, scaffolders and window cleansing companies.”
So what message is the artist making an attempt to convey? He stated the present began with an idiom that outdated rope has no use. “It’s additionally arduous to recycle, so there’s a whole lot of it mendacity round,” Shrigley defined within the exhibition notes. “I assumed: what if I flip that right into a literal exhibition of outdated rope. After which say, sure, that is artwork, and sure, you should purchase it for £1 million. The work exists as a result of I’m within the worth folks place on artwork, and the idiom gave me an excuse to discover that. I feel £1 million is a good worth, partly due to the concept and partly as a result of it’s numerous rope.”
It’s a usually deadpan stance from him. The set up is sort of a bodily manifestation of his work on paper, and it’s straightforward to think about the present rendered in his portray type; a rudimentary line drawing of the piled-up rope underneath the phrase “Cash for outdated rope.”
The exhibition will polarize opinion, like most conceptual artwork, however its shock worth will certainly be dampened by the very fact this type of stuff is now not stunning within the artwork world. “Readymades,” the time period coined by Marcel Duchamp, have been round for greater than a century, with the likes of Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, and even Pablo Picasso leaping on the bandwagon lengthy earlier than Tracey Emin’s My Mattress made headlines in 1998.
The Guardian’s artwork author, Eddy Frankel, made a very good level that I feel is price repeating. “Making a snarky remark in regards to the worth of artwork in a gallery that’s struggling to outlive financially (Stephen Friedman Gallery introduced some fairly large losses earlier this yr) does really feel a bit awkward, too,” he wrote. “It’s like Shrigley is saying: ‘You lot would purchase any outdated crap, wouldn’t you?’ But this can be a gallery that’s having fairly a tough time promoting any outdated crap.”
It stays to be seen who, if anybody, is keen to pay £1 million for the “outdated crap.” However timing is every thing, and with one other eye-catching Cattelan work hitting the public sale block this month in New York, his 18-karat, 100-kg golden bathroom, the urge for food for conceptual artwork shall be examined.
