VISUAL ARTS/NORTH

"The art of skips and plinths"

I was talking to Stuart Brisley during Inner Art and he told me about a piece of wood a gallery in Sweden had kept.  He had used it during a performance and it had some paint spilt on it.  Stuart recently discovered that the gallery still has this piece of wood.  So over twenty years later someone thinks that this piece of paint-splattered plank has some value.  It is hard to see what artistic value it would have.  Perhaps it would be of interest as a memento.  The danger is that as time goes by this object will be displayed as something that does have artistic value.  Certainly the artist never intended the object should have gone anywhere other than a skip.

More recently I saw blackboards by Joseph Beuys exhibited in the Ulster Museum.  I had actually seen these 'works of art' being made as I had attended Beuys' lecture back in the 70s when he used the blackboards to illustrate points in his talk.  Back then I had assumed that after the talk the blackboards would have been wiped with a cloth ready to be used again.  How wrong I was.  Just what the self-publicist Beuys would have made of it I don't know.  I do know that when an artist is alive they spend a lot of time and energy being involved in the curation of their own work.  After they die it becomes increasingly difficult to show their work as originally intended.  It is important that curators acknowledge and respect the original intention of the artist.  With good curation Stuart Brisley's plank will not end up on a gallery wall in Sweden.

Beuys' present show in IMMA, Multiples raises further questions about curation.  Why is so much of the work in perspex cases?  Is it because he is now famous and the objects must be protected from the fingers of the public in case they alter their value? I have always loved Beuys' Sled.  It seemed to sum up so much that was important to him as an artist.  The Tartars who rescued him after he was shot down in World War II used a sled I assume to move him from the wreckage of his plane to a sheltered spot.  The fat on the sled had been used to cover his burns, the felt to protect him from the cold and a light to help them find their direction.  I had looked forward to seeing this object.  To find it in a perspex case on a pedestal weakened the object.  My memories were of photographs of it on the ground behind a VW van or some similar ground-based installation.  Here, it was sculpture further removed from the viewer by the perspex.  It totally lacked the impact and excitement I got from entering the Tate one time and seeing a wonderful Beuys installation of large rocks simply strewn on the floor.

So is Stuart Brisley's board an art object?  Are the blackboards in the Ulster Museum works of art? 

Is the sled in IMMA the object Beuys originally created?  How do we respect an artist's intent after they die? That, friends, is the curator's egg.

Brian Kennedy