Read and watch Turner Prizewinner and Tate Trustee Jeremy Deller’s account of his project at the New Museum in New York. Read also Jonathon Jones commentary on Deller’s similar (previous) proposal for the Fourth Plinth. That was a another car damaged by a bomb. This particular car “was destroyed in an attack on the crowded book market at Al-Mutanabbi street in central Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Thirty eight people were killed and hundreds injured.” Feel free to use the comments function on this post…
4 responses so far ↓
1 rjrae // Feb 27, 2009 at 9:50 pm
War artefacts as art objects throws up many points for consideration. The twisted metal of this bomb wrecked car is the main aesthetic highlight of this art project. Can we view this as a separate component from the whole display as an art work/event though? As a solo component or as a whole it brings varying degrees of ethical concern to the idea of disaster, human tragedy and the readymade. Deller works with social history as a medium within the art institution, which while being a good platform for cultural exposure, runs the risk of somewhat de-humanising the concept of ‘war’ more so than the repetitive news slots in that we must also look at this work through the lens of an artform. Luckily Deller’s use of Iraqi citizens as a human artobject inclusion counteracts this to a degree. Deller states that the car is a “conversation piece” which also distances emotion somewhat from the reality of this object, as if it were something interesting for the coffee table brought back from a war torn holiday. If Deller could subscribe more conceptual weight to the inclusion of this object perhaps it would generate more discusion than conversation. Deller’s project title almost saves it all from critique though, as It Is What It Is.
2 Nigel // Feb 28, 2009 at 9:27 am
I put this post up as a challenge to the theorists of “dialogic art” – against the advice of others who thought I should not give any more airplay to this “self-absorbed” venture. Whatever we think of Deller’s motives, the insertion of such objects into the domain of the art museum has been, post-Duchamp, a particularly New York thing. See, famously, the primitivism/post-colonialist debate around Susan Vogel’s insertion of a Zande hunting net into the show ART/ARTIFACT at the Center for African Art in 1988. See also the essay by Arthur C. Danto in the catalogue to this exhibition, and Alfred Gell’s elegant response: Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps. Despite his demurrals (ambiguous title, invitation to discourse, recruiting of “experts”) this intervention is presented to the world as a “Deller”. However you might read Deller’s insertion of this particular object into its museum context(s), it seems to me to represent both a quantum leap in terms of the re-contextualising impulse behind much late conceptual art, and a kind of intervention that opportunistically trades on the suffering of distant others. Is it being proposed as a work of art (the work of an artist) before it is anything else? If so, with what consequences?
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