Royal Academy 2007
Last year's Summer Exhibition controversy came about when my sculpture "One Day Closer to Paradise" became separated from it's base in storage and the empty plinth was bizarrely selected by the judges and displayed as a sculpture in the exhibition.
The story got into the papers internationally, and the Royal Academy issued a press release insisting that the two parts had been sent in as separate submissions. The event caused hilarity internationally and prompted much worthwhile and revealing discussion about art.
I came up with 3 pieces of work to submit this year in response, and one of them, the sculpture "Bad Dog" has been accepted for this year's Summer Exhibition.
This sculpture consists of a repeat of the stone plinth with the bone-shaped wooden support, now gilded, and an abstract magenta dog. Last year's display had the plinth placed next to someone else's bronze dog sculpture so it looked like a bone on a plate. I've placed my dog on the new plinth, securely bolted on, facing away from the bone (or whatever it appears to be...). It has a harness so it's a guide dog, but with closed eyes it is itself blind. It could be a child's toy. The suggested theme of the exhibition is Light.
The sculpture is mentioned in the RA's website page about the Summer Exhibition, Gallery V: "....David Hensel's Bad Dog, a sardonic comment on the fate of another sculpture by the same artist in last year's exhibition. Inexplicably, only the plinth was shown, to the amusement of the tabloid press."
The exhibition opens to the public on 11 June.
The thinking behind this is that in a way art is always about blindness.
There are many kinds and applications of art, encompassing the entire range of efforts to activate sense and influence, but an important distinction is between art skills employed in the real world to generate invisible influence, to distract or un-nerve us while we adopt images and stories that make us believe (advertising and spin), and art intended to awaken and restore sensibility: art is about the creation and the puncturing of blind-spots, about the staged cultural battle between these factions, with culture being defined as the quality of the place where we live.
Watching last year's performance about the empty plinth, it seemed that many people saw it as evidence of blindness, of lack of discernment, a consequence of degraded education, commercial bias and the power of the art market, but one can look at what goes on in the arts as theatre, can see the entire art world as a cultural performance in its own right, a parody of attitudes and consequences in the real world. It's as if we are all, as audience or participants, creating an automatic pantomime about ourselves and our varying degrees of awareness.
My response to discovering my missing sculpture last year, to the presentation of a meaningless slab of stone as a piece of art, was a sense that this was perfect and should be made public, because that is what artists are supposed to do: to entertain us while telling stories about our strengths and our weaknesses. The world wide audience loved it, roared with laughter. I assume my name would be mud, but having this accepted restores hope, another scene in the pantomime...
The 2 rejected works are these:
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(The gaudy colouring and reference to the sky relate to blindness as do the glued -in white sticks. Am I laughing at the blind, - again, the theme of the exhibition is Light; or at the blindness engineered into the art world? Or maybe the laughing mouth refers to my last year's missing sculpture , One Day Closer to Paradise in which I wanted to question such dependency. The small sculpture tied on the back is a virgin shaped car bomb cloud .) |
