Acrylic on canvas, 142cm x 114cm.

Digital print 48cm x 32cm.

Limited edition

Shredded Frieze magazine on Iceland pizza and cheesecake packaging, 65 cm x 55cm x 10cm.

It has come to my attention that the posts on this blog can be confusing/puzzling (thanks Noreen) – what are they?  Well, they are (generally) photos of my artwork.  The above piece is part of an ongoing series of parodies of the drawings of Sol Lewitt (at least they’re based on his drawings (for which he, helpfully, provides instructions) though perhaps he isn’t the only target of the parody here): drawings like this one –

My versions of Lewitt are less pure.

The process – in the case of my piece – involves shredding pages from Frieze magazine (a high-end art magazine) then sticking the shredded bits – in patterns similar to the Lewitt one – onto Iceland food products packaging, allowing the packaging to dictate (to some extent) the nature/direction of the patterns.  I suppose the real target of these pieces is Frieze magazine – after all, some damage is done to the magazine, especially the pages of advertisements, of which there are many (more than actual art writing).  On the one hand I’m pointing to the obvious fact that Art, as a domain, is as commodified as everything else in this society; on the other hand the foregrounding of the semantic association between Frieze and Iceland is given some (comic? sardonic?)tension – I think – through the different levels of cultural capital associated with the two – high art (marketing), low supermarket.

And in terms of how the above activity plays out on the level of the art market I’m at, the following photo shows one of the Lewitt pieces – entitled Best Before 7 Sept (because the exhibition – for one night only – ended on the 6th) – at Eastside Projects in Digbeth (Birmingham UK): the piece – being studiously ignored – is indicated by the arrow carefully drawn on the photo below.

 

Digital print, 48cm x 33cm.

Photo, from Difficulties of Representation, HR Smoke