Whats going on!?
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About
Everyday Monuments showcases works by three emerging UK artists – Catriona Robertson, Jacob Talkowski and Alaric Hammond. Each uses everyday materials in innovative ways – re-utilising and revitalising materials that would otherwise be taken for granted, ignored, or discarded. The artists have taken base materials and infused them with power, meaning and significance.
Their works are beautiful objects in themselves but also invite contemplation of how we routinely use and interact with objects, technology, and architecture. The works invite us to take a fresh look at materials and objects in our own everyday life, outside of a gallery space.
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[online] available at: https://www.saatchigallery.com/exhibition/everyday-monuments [accessed 12.01.2024]
Here we are again.
Everyday.
Monuments.
Saatchi.
So, lets try to use the logic of art school. These are ‘everyday’ (hopefully not! but mass produced, utilitarian & pop-arty) readymades. That means they have connotations of convenience, seaside-iness, rather than construction or labour. This undertone comes from their arrangement, but we understand that it’s art, because the form is strange and because of where they are. Because they aren’t bricks, we read them in this register, and we focus on form. The form creates looking, the repetition creates scale creates movement. We understand there is a conceit to do with weight. “[…] granted, ignored, or discarded” maps onto “readymades, discards, remains.” Fine.
Now intention. Jacob says, don’t be daft. They are just containers, our willingness to entertain that this is art is a middle-class affectation to not notice the emperor is wearing threadbare clothes. Our pedagogies of architecture, site and intervention mean we have no way to figure out which way is up, and we’ll admire anything we’re told to. At the same time, it itself avoids any claim to power by being quick, cheap and easy, ‘wink-wink, nudge-nudge,’ so does land as a work of contemporary art. (see 7th Nov, Q&A, A New Dawn, A New Day). Probably this sting-in-the-tail works for Saatchis. Fine.
When its concerns are so close to my unit 1 project, why do I feel like I just don’t really … like it? (Not that I like my bricks much more). Maybe because none of these three artists monumentalise anything. Rather, there is no relation to any event, or events in general, except the event itself. There is a ‘making-big-ness’ so is it the lack of specificity on the part of Saatchi that turns me off? These would be fine in works about the seaside, or apocalypse. In the past, I would always have claimed to like everyday things in the gallery that change the way we see them outside…
It’s weird because I love simplicity; Leah wearing 3/4 bottle of Chanel, or Briony Godivala swapping people in and out, or Moss pogo-ing as a frog, these are great, and so simple. Is it because they stand by them, they are sincere works? Or perhaps because audience is included in the laugh, in on the joke? Or is it because they are willing to put their bodies on the line, and be the subject, be the clown? Or because they only do it once? Or because they are expressive? Because they are falling? Because they have show an inner dimension, between what is felt and what is seen?
After all whats monumental about these artists’ works, apart from scale?
But isn’t that what I wanted to do? Banal, small, unreliable, dispersable, historically-bounded?
So … is it this that I like in my studio practice? Falling, putting myself on the line, including the audience in the laugh, feeling, being seen, being specific?
I think being specific is funny.
Also, in terms of sanity, let’s not go crazy here; no-one’s saying that this takeaway stuff is the best artwork in the world, or the sole claim to work about monument. For one obvious thing, it’s inside. Saatchi is saying, yep, we have some works here with no nasty surprises, it’s mobile, known, slightly provocative to a wide audience, within the Overton window, it’s get-able on a few levels - so let’s show Jacob and Catriona once a year or so and let’s back them to see what they do next. Good for them