The Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s latest exhibition has many people wondering whether 14 tonnes of coal is actually a work of art. Artists (and I use the term lightly) Matthew Cornford and David Cross created this pile of coal to highlight the rising fuel costs and climate change.For goodness sakes even Belgian artist Jan Fabre had the courtesy to hang his friggin vegetables in condoms to justify his work. They are lazy bastards using intellectual rhetoric to justify a pile of coal. How dare they swipe George Orwell’s essay title and call it “Lion and the Unicorn”, could they have not come up with at least their own original title? A spokeswoman for the gallery said “The sea of coal installed in the gallery is expected to have a sensory impact upon visitors and will draw out both the historical and contemporary significance of coal to the region.” Blah, Blah, Blah. The Sun’s French art critic, Toulouse Le Plot, had this to say “Zis is ze pits”.
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Friggin Comments
6 Comments
December 14, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I think my main issue with the coal is that it just isn’t very interesting as an object. When I first saw it I wondered if it was finished, if there was supposed to be anything like lights or sound to go with it.
I don’t agree that the artist are ‘lazy bastards’, though, upon reading the theory behind the work it seems like something they have thought about quite a lot. And thinking about things is never lazy.
And ’swiping’ the title? ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ in Orwell’s essay referred to those creatures as symbols in British Heraldry. A book with this title had already been published in 1899, over forty years before Orwell’s work appeared, so its not like his title was sparklingly original anyway. Appropriation has a long history in creative works.
For me, the communication of their ideas through the art work itself doesn’t really work unless it has the accompanying theory. And maybe that’s bad art. But regardless of what you think of it, it is art.
December 14, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Touche Dave!
December 15, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Ah, the joys of democracy.
December 16, 2008 at 12:06 am
Well, Dave you have inspired me and I am off to launch my art display of lawn clippings. Psst… great blog by the way….
December 21, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Well thank you.
Good luck with the lawn clippings, you should apply for arts council funding for that…
December 22, 2008 at 3:29 am
Yes, great idea, I think I might borrow the title ‘How Green Was My Valley?’ and relate the art to the cruel and abusive manner in which lawn is cut….Dave you are a legend!