Richard Wentworth: Making Do and Getting by

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Have an interesting life." Lots of people have said that to me, and I think it's the most important thing to know when you're young. If your life is completely boring, and you've got a nice swimming pool, then I don't see the point. Anything painful that has been said to me has probably turned out to be useful – but I don't like it when painful turns into spiteful. I'm amazed that people don't have better things to do. In short For the image, see Ruya Foundation, Welcome to Iraq: The Pavilion of Iraq at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, T Chalabi and J Watkins, eds, Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq, Baghdad, p 88 AS To what extent did the ambiguity of the concept of the everyday help you to include a wide range of artworks? A door wedged open with a gumboot, the clapper of an alarm bell silenced with a Fudge bar still in its wrapper, a catering-size tin of peas used as a cafe doorstop. These kind of uses have always been the mainstay of Making Do, but many other photographs are less to do with the utilitarian, and more to do with the happenstance arrangements of things, or ad hoc kinds of display, especially the pavement displays of second-hand furniture outside the junk shops of Caledonian Road in north London. Rows of old armchairs lined up by a bus stop, vacant sofas at the kerb, upended chairs like fallen men.

Between 1971 and 1987, Wentworth taught at Goldsmiths College and his influence has been claimed in the work of the Young British Artists. From 2002 to 2010, Wentworth was 'Master of Drawing' at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and was the head of the Sculpture department at The Royal College of Art, London from 2009 - 2011.In the 54th Venice biennale in 2011, Iraq participated for the first time after thirty-five years; the exhibition, titled ‘Wounded Water’, showed works by Ali Assaf, Azad Nanakeli, Walid Siti, Adel Abidin, Ahmed Alsoudani and Halim Al Karim Somerset House is London’s working arts centre and home to the UK’s largest creative community. Built on historic foundations, we are situated in the very heart of the capital. ​ ​ verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ See Richard Wentworth, Making Do and Getting By, with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Koenig Books, 2016

Fundamentally changing the way we think about art, sculpture and photography, Richard Wentworth baulks at the monumental, finding his motifs in the everyday world instead. WAMI (Yaseen Wami, Hashim Taeeh), Untitled, 2013, installation view in ‘Welcome to Iraq’ at the 2013 Venice Biennale, courtesy of the artists, photo by Francesco AllegrettoAurit’s dream has never been realised, but it became an inspiration for the 55th Venice biennale and attracted international attention. The work is in the permanent collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. More information is available at: https://folkartmuseum.org/news/december-2012/ Both Atget and Wentworth are authors of photographic compendia which describe the great cities of London and Paris poised at two very different moments of change - at the twentieth century's beginning and at its end. For both, the city is a vivid yet fugitive place, continually undergoing cycles of renovation, disintegration and renewal once more. Its pavements are a 'stage' for social activity, and its physical details, however fleeting, full of meaning about the nature of an urban society - and what the individuals within it, own, do, make and improvise. Firstly, whilst the photographs neither reference nor act as references to his sculptures there is an obvious alignment of philosophy and output in the two mediums. Secondly, his choice of subject is not only a very personal perspective of urban life but has been consistently and deeply explored for four decades. We can be tempted into over analysing his photographic work and align it with various movements in contemporary photography but in reality the only relevant reference is the artist himself. This in itself makes this series unusual, it has been created outside of and in parallel with the mainstream of photography history, uninfluenced and seemingly unaware that the mainstream exists; in the interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that introduces the book (2), he discuses sculptors, architects and writers; photographers are notable by their absence.

I enjoy their work, but for very different reasons. Wentworth's images do not have the density and richness of Atget's, from which Szarkowski teases an entire world, making a point about Atget that also applies to Wentworth: "In an ideal world there is a place for everything, but in the real world things tend to migrate to places where they do not belong." JWI did that because I knew Penjweny made the work for a different kind of audience. Buzz and The Love of Butterflies were the kinds of films you could watch on your phone and not miss much. Not cinematic extravaganzas, they were like episodes from a sentimental soap opera on TV. The idea of watching films on laptops in the exhibition also occurred to me because that’s how people watch films most of the time in Iraq. I don’t remember seeing a cinema there. The following conversation with Jonathan Watkins is an exploration of Watkins’ curatorial engagement with the concept of the everyday. Watkins is a British curator who has been the director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in the UK since 1999. In 1998, he curated ‘Every Day’, the 11th Biennale of Sydney, in which he highlighted ‘the power of relatively simple gestures’ within the artistic observation of quotidian phenomena and marked the selected works in relation to ‘efficacy and unpreciousness’. [3] There is no simple answer to the questions that arise in the investigation of daily life. As Lefebvre puts it, the everyday is a realm of contradictions; it is the intersection of repetition and creativity, familiarity and ambiguity. ‘The ambiguity and indeterminacy’ of the everyday are what Stephen Johnson recognises as the seductive aspect of the concept for contemporary artists, leading them to avoid approaching the everyday in ‘any straightforward documentary way’. [4] Moreover, within curatorial practices, as Watkins explains, challenges emerge through the juxtaposition of alterities and commonalities of lived experiences as represented in such an international exhibition, while, at the same time, there is also a concern to avoid a sense of exoticism in the presentation of non-Western artworks. [5]In 2000, together with Fischli & Weiss and Gabriel Orozco he worked in "Aprendiendo menos" (Learning Less), curated by Patricia Martín and presented in Centro de la Imagen, Mexico city. [3] Three different perspectives through photography, where the artists are a means to portray street findings within the urban landscape, its surroundings and its objects. A consideration of the main theme of the 2013 Venice Biennale, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, elevates thinking about the positionality of the Iraqi artists in an international show designed from a perspective of a desire or dream of encapsulating a comprehensive knowledge of contemporary art. The Biennale’s curator that year, Massimiliano Gioni, chose the theme by a reference to Marino Aurit’s architectural model of The Encyclopedic Palace of the World. In the 1950s, Marino Aurit, an Italian-American artist, created his Encyclopedic Palace as a model for ‘a museum in which all worldly knowledge would be documented, preserved, and exhibited’. [8] The structure of the biennale, Gioni stated, is similar to a ‘temporary museum that initiates an inquiry into the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience’. Gioni attempted to illustrate this impossible as well as monumental dream by bringing together ‘contemporary artworks with historical artifacts and found objects’. ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ was an exhibition about the ongoing tension between the self and the universe, and about the impact of images and imaginations on our experience of the self and the Other. Accordingly, Gioni highlights the endeavour to undermine the distance between ‘professional artists and amateurs, outsiders and insiders’. [9] In this context, diversity may not be an issue as it exists, but what is more essential to reflect on is equality. In her review of the ‘Welcome to Iraq’ exhibition, Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton points out the weak artistic value, in her view, of some of the artworks in the exhibition in comparison with the work of those internationally well-known artists of the Venice Biennale who are able to ‘speak the language of resources and money’. In response to this point, Watkins asserts that ‘we are not so hung up on art and similarly value found objects and artifacts: The Iraq pavilion itself is an extraordinary found object’. [10] However, the works on display in the Iraq pavilion were chosen with the good will of searching for invisible and unfamiliar works/artists, and it seems that the job was successfully accomplished. The question is whether curatorial and art-critical perspectives on the works fully integrate them into a broader discourse, and whether they could find their relationships with the past and present in a wider art-historical canon, on an international stage, and to what extent they could compete for a place in our long-term memories.

This summer, Somerset House presents Eternally Yours, a free exhibition exploring ideas around care, repair and healing. Staged across the three Terrace Rooms, Eternally Yours showcases diverse examples of creative reuse, from historical artefacts that embraced upcycling and repurposing, to recent work from leading artists and designers that have repair at the heart of their practice. This timely exhibition invites visitors to appreciate the worn and aged, uncovering the history and emotional value of the items we hold on to, rather than discard. It takes the idea of ‘repair’ as a philosophy and a provocation, inviting us to reconsider our way of life and relationship to the planet, and everything that surrounds us. Highlights include: ​ Richard Wentworth OBE is primarily known as a one of the most influential British sculptors of his generation who for forty years he has used a camera as a way of making “casual notes …. of situations which attracted me” (1). He does not see himself as a photographer and his photographs speak to his self declared casual note taking, there is no particular evidence of technical skill or formal composition which Anna Dezeuze argues references his work to the conceptual photographers of the sixties and seventies such as Ed Ruscha and Sol Le Witt. Visitors will have the chance to view a selection of photographs taken by influential artist, curator and teacher, Richard Wentworth. The images chosen for the exhibition, depicting ingenious examples of repair, are taken from Wentworth’s on-going project Making Do and Getting By. Beginning in the 1970s, the project records the artist’s encounters with the extraordinary use of ordinarily mundane objects in the modern world. Looking ahead to the future of design and repair with artists and activists Superflux, Bridget Harvey and Tenant of CultureAS Over the years of your directorship at the Ikon in Birmingham, many of those artists that you worked with at the biennales have had exhibitions in the gallery. How do you define the practice of diversification in an institution such as Ikon? And do you apply different strategies in designing public engagements with non-Western artworks or those art works that are sensitive to the phenomenon of exoticism?