The Ukrainians have a lot of empty plinths where statues of Lenin once stood and last July, taking a leaf out of the Gormley Sutra, steps were erected around the one in Kiev\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Bessarabska Square so that people could climb up to admire the view and\/or take selfies. The installation, Inhabiting Shadows, was the work of Mexican artist Cynthia Guti\u00c3\u00a9rrez, apparently intended to prompt reflection on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153imposed memory, system failure, emptiness, identity, and occupying space.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be an artist to play this game. Elsewhere in the Ukraine, protestors have filled the vacuum: in Odessa, Lenin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s place has been taken by Darth Vader (right). Which of these gestures seems the more artistic? One has humour, the other a pretentious title, but both make similar points, the first more forcibly. When it comes to politics, protest has the advantage over art of single-point perspective: it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t offer the viewer a range of potential meanings, and it often pips art to the post. The 2,500 used life jackets laid out by the International Rescue Committee in Parliament Square to coincide with the UN summit on the migrant crisis on September 19th took most of the wind out the inflatable lifeboats with which Ai Weiwei clad the facades of the Palazzo Strozzi for his retrospective opening four days later. The IRC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s installation was nameless, anonymous and free; Ai Weiwei\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s was fashionably titled Reframe, stamped with the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s identity and priced accordingly.<\/span><\/p>\n As so often, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only money changing hands that distinguishes art from reality; outside the gallery context it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s becoming impossible to tell them apart. No sphere of life, however homely, is proof against artists who have appropriated gardening, cooking and even knitting as means of expression. Undeterred by the embarrassing flop of Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Turbine Hall installation of planters titled Empty Lot in which nothing but a few straggly weeds came up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my plan of scattering dope seeds had to be abandoned when I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember where I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d hidden them \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the South London Gallery has got another Mexican artist, Gabriel Orozco (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m beginning to understand Donald Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s concern there will soon be no Mexicans left south of the border) to design an accessible garden connecting the gallery with the adjoining housing estate. It opened in October. As Kew is involved, presumably this time plants will grow. As a community initiative it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a sweet idea, but as a conceptual statement the Modern Slavery Garden at this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Chelsea Flower show \u00e2\u20ac\u201c designed by Tanzanian-born Juliet Sargent and planted by slavery survivors \u00e2\u20ac\u201c put it in the shade. <\/span><\/p>\n At this point, I have to confess to a guilty secret: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m an avid consumer of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMetro Bites\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 when on the Tube. This silly season, almost every story had the makings of an artwork. In the space of one week in July, there were items about a 96-year-old crack shot granny from Tilburg who since her first taste of a funfair shooting range aged 16 has preferred rifle shooting to sex; a husband in Dudley who murdered his wife for selling his Elvis tribute concert ticket; and two smuggler brothers caught at Plymouth Station with \u00c2\u00a324,000 of heroin in Kinder eggs up their bottoms \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all of which seemed to have more to say on issues of feminism, identity and general abjection than anything in the current Turner Prize. Imagine the improvement to Anthea Hamilton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s strangely anus-free bottom if a Kinder egg could be seen popping out of it. But this summer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s prize-winning Metro artist manqu\u00c3\u00a9 has to be the recovered drug addict from Halifax who had himself buried alive for three days in order to live-stream exhortations from beyond the grave discouraging other addicts from joining him. (Whether he rose again has not been reported.)<\/span><\/p>\n If you think these sorts of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctrue life\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 stories are not material for art, Chinese artist Xu Bing would disagree. The plot of his new film, The Dragonfly Eyes, released in January, was based on the case of a husband who sued his cosmetically enhanced wife for tricking him into producing ugly children. In contemporary art, there is no silly season; it runs from January to December. Appropriately, it was the subs at Metro who came up with the inevitable Turner Prize headline \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcButt Is It Art?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 So much is art these days that \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBut is it real?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is a more pertinent question. As Gavin Haynes commented in his Guardian report on a hoax Corbyn talk staged by Lancaster University art student Lucie Carter in May: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe question \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is Jeremy Corbyn art?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been asked very often. Most people are still trying to answer the deeper question: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is Jeremy Corbyn politics?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/span><\/p>\n We live in an increasingly virtual world where a couple can divorce because of infidelities committed by their alter egos in Second Life and a bored schoolboy can shine a laser pen at a police helicopter when his PlayStation breaks down. It won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be long before we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all as thoroughly confused as the panicked security man recorded during the 9\/11 attacks asking: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreal world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or an exercise?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d No wonder most of us are way beyond caring whether art is imitating life or vice versa. The bored schoolboy was handed a six-month referral order with obligatory attendance on a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthinking course\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, when what he \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and the rest of us \u00e2\u20ac\u201c could really do with is a dose of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcboundary training\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 prescribed to Osborne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s psychiatrist brother with the wandering hands. Without it, the situation is becoming dangerous. When a woman was stabbed at last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Art Basel Miami, no one intervened because they thought it was an art performance. If it had been, they would have been ejected by security.<\/span><\/p>\n Leaving \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcreal world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 problems to one side, has the loss of boundaries benefited art? Not in the opinion of Anselm Kiefer, who gave this analysis of the situation in a speech in 2008: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is a special border, the border between art and life, which often shifts deceptively. Yet, without this border, there is no art. In the process of being produced, art borrows material from life, and the traces of life still shine through the completed work of art. But at the same time, the distance from life is the essence, the substance of art. The more scarred the work of art is by the battles waged on the borders between art and life, the more interesting it becomes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d His position is more nuanced than Nietzsche \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Truth is ugly. We have art lest we perish from the truth.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But how could Nietzsche have foreseen the course of art? As it was, the great philosopher made the wrong call. It is falsehood that is ugly \u00e2\u20ac\u201c without truth, we are in danger of perishing from art.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Can you use real life as a subject?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was the question Gormley posed with his Fourth Plinth project. Which prompts another question: does a plinth make a more eloquent statement by remaining empty? I passed the Fourth Plinth between installations the other week, and it seemed to me that it did.<\/span><\/p>\n Laura Gascoigne<\/strong> The Ukrainians have a lot of empty plinths where statues of Lenin once stood and last July, taking a leaf out of the Gormley Sutra, steps were erected around the one in Kiev\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Bessarabska Square so that people could climb up to admire the view and\/or take selfies. The installation, Inhabiting Shadows, was the work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[630,241,399,633,636,632,627,634,628,631,60,629,635],"class_list":["post-1798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-abraham-cruzvillegas","tag-ai-weiwei","tag-anselm-kiefer","tag-chelsea-flower-show","tag-corbyn","tag-gabriel-orozco","tag-inhabiting-shadows","tag-modern-slavery-garden","tag-odessa","tag-south-london-gallery","tag-turner-prize","tag-ukraine","tag-xu-bing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe Jackdaw\u00c2\u00a0Nov\/Dec 2016<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"