Rubbish? Anything but…
What goes into art installations? A walk around Nicosia with one of Britain’s foremost sculptors reveals there’s more than you might think in discarded items
Taking a walk around old Nicosia on both sides of the Green Line with Richard Wentworth is an interesting experience even for someone like me who spends every day of their life there. The 59-year-old, considered to be one of Britain’s leading sculptors, has a natural tendency to stop and chat to people about anything and everything.
Wentworth’s topics range from gardening and business to life stories, both his and others, and travels. When he talks, his eyes wander around trying to identify objects useful for creating his works of art. He seems to have a unique talent for spotting people he can communicate with; throughout our walk, he never fails to find people fluent in English – many had lived in areas of London he knows well. Often, they offer him items he finds life or art-enhancing. When we go to a plant nursery in search of garden tools that Richard needs for his Cyprus-based art pieces, we ended up instead with several cuttings from a mulberry tree.
“I will plant them in my garden as soon as I get back to London,” he tells the owner.
And in a tiny, dark shop run by Mr. Shisman in north Nicosia, he finds some old oil-lamp shades made of glass that he immediately buys for his house in France.
“These were made in the DDR (former East Germany). They don’t produce them any more in the West. I don’t have electricity in my house so every time I will use them I will think of you,” he promises the 80-year-old shopkeeper who has been running the place for more than 50 years. A few minutes earlier he told us that since his wife’s death he only goes to the shop to have coffee with his friends.
“What a charming old gentleman,” enthuses Richard. “And his shop… It is so hard to place. It is almost the Wild West. And almost everything there is out of time, even the photographs that he showed us. What I am trying to say is that there are pieces of human expression there. I don’t want to come here and be just a folkloric shopper.”
I nod my head and we continue walking around. I understand what he means because I have already spent about four hours with him looking at things, collecting, choosing, buying. And it hasn’t really been that easy. For example, Wentworth needs spades, forks and axes, but locally or regionally-made – not foreign. However, he doesn’t want anything too obvious either, by which he means nothing too obviously Cypriot.
“I need to be very careful because I am dealing with things that are very culture-specific,” he explains.
We also keep on wandering around looking for “rubbish”. This is my term for the stuff we collect although Richard objects to my use of the word. He says he looks for “objects that have lost their identity”. We enter an open space between some buildings that are falling apart. It is typical of old Nicosia, north or south, full of ruins and waste. Richard goes into the middle of it and methodically starts selecting empty cigarettes packets, flattened plastic water bottles, pieces of paper and empty tin cans.
“There is a lot of historical language in tools and emblems and heraldry,” he says. “It is extremely interesting. It is like sticking labels. That is how people invented languages. They would say: ‘your family is a goat and my family is a lion and you are red people and we are blue people’. Now, of course, it is called culture. The fascinating thing about it is that we are still so much part of it but we don’t notice it. People wear signs like Coca Cola or Nike now. It is very medieval. It is like: ‘Here comes a Coca Cola person and there goes a Gap man’. It is like a language which makes us part of a big group. It is like flag-waving.”
He suddenly stops and bends to pick up an old metal part of an iron. Thousands of giant ants start running in all directions from underneath it. The iron had served to disguise the secret entry to their nest. “This is really a rare find,” says Wentworth. Then he looks for a piece of paper to cover the nest again.
So what do you do with these objects? I ask. “Do you make a story to go with them?”
“No,” he answers. “But you can take up something like that and you can add various meanings to it. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher. One might say it is a discarded water bottle. And then you can ask what it means. And then you can say that somebody has drunk this water and this water has a cultural context, i.e. it is Turkish water and water in Turkey is a big issue, and the bottle is made of the stuff that you can also make clothing of, and it had a short life, and the thing is discarded and then you think how it is discarded. In Germany, for example, you wouldn’t find anything like that lying on the ground. There is no culture of discarding like that there. You put things into a bin.”
I ask him how would he then create his art in Germany (he has spent quite a time there). Would he just import the objects of lost identity from London?
“No, no, it is not about rubbish,” he protests (I notice that now he is using my terminology). “It is much more about the gap in between. It has to do with space and people. I am not suggesting that in Germany I would make a sculpture about a cup of coffee but I mean it is not a useful question because it is not a bridge that I would cross.”
Germany seems to have left a certain impression on him because it crops up again when he answers my next question about how he began his artistic career.
“You know, one of my favourite models is a German toilet,” he says. “It has this platform so you can come round and see what you have done. It may, for all I know, be a perfectly good way of witnessing your health but I don’t know any other culture that takes itself so seriously. So when people say: ‘Tell us about your career’, I say: ‘I don’t want to turn around like in the German toilet. I flushed the water and it went away. It was yesterday.’ But, obviously in the very short term I can say: I came here to Cyprus. I left London on Tuesday morning. It took me the whole day to get here. I arrived on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday I thought: ‘Oh hell, what am I going to do? I have got exactly one week to create something from absolute zero to the stage I could say about that I mean it’. And obviously I have changed since last week, I mean since I arrived here.”
Changed? Why? I want to know. Again, he is more than willing to explain.
“Well, it is an action of being in a separate constraint. Of course, nothing I have done here is a total novelty. It is not like I slept with a goat for the first time or ate horse excrement. But I have had a lot of pieces of different experience and they don’t fit together very tightly, without gaps. Of course, I still know what they are. For example, this thing that a Turkish Cypriot tinker has made for me, the one that people here use for containing fire. On the Greek Cypriot side they make them in a different way and I am going to join them together. Is the Greek one better than the Turkish? I don’t know. But they have the same function. So there is a lot of information surrounding me while I am here. This includes working in Istanbul, knowing Garo (Keheyan, the organiser of Wenthworth’s exhibition), knowing a lot of things about this sort of culture, knowing Morocco a little bit, knowing Kosovo, knowing Albania and knowing even places much further away. In a way it is like a ball of strings. You look at any of these pieces of string and you think: ‘That is a funny conversation, it goes together with any other piece of string which is exactly the same piece of string’.”
So what is he really doing collecting all these various objects in the streets of Nicosia for seven day
s?
“I am thinking what I want to say. It is like inviting somebody to dinner. I might spend a week thinking who else shall I ask? What shall we have? Shall we eat inside or outside? What shall I put on the table? Shall we have wine or beer or both? It is quite normal and of course, this is my job.”
One of the most repetitive points made by art critics about Richard’s art is that he gathers these everyday objects and then, by combining them in unexpected ways, changes their meaning. Is that true?
“I don’t know if it is true,” he answers. “The things people write about art… I almost know who first wrote it. It sounds radical and I don’t think I am that radical. I wouldn’t say it is completely untrue but I can’t recognise myself in it. I mean I recognise that somebody wrote it and I recognise that they were trying to articulate something but there is a long history of people doing that. I mean sculpture is absolutely three-dimensional art, full of pre-existing imaginary and pre-existing material, which sometimes can be called ready-made. But, of course, if you collect all artists who create their works from gathered objects and put them all on a piece of paper you will see differences. You will see different motivations.
“I admit that there has always been elaborated materiality in my work,” he continues. “For example, I am always conscious whether I am going to nail something or screw it. It is absolutely different. Something that is nailed has a different meaning because the nail goes through the wood. It is erotic. The wood goes ‘wooo wooo’, and the nail goes ‘hohoho’, and it is really a profound conversation. Anybody who does anything like that knows these things. And when we go to all these people (tinkers, gardeners, etc) they know that I know that they know that I know that they know that I know. They don’t want me to direct them and I am not pretending that I want to be them but there is something going on.”
We are now on our way to the Aegeon restaurant near Famagusta Gate, whose owner has promised Richard some plates. We enter via the backyard and a lady takes Richard to a small storage room. He sifts through piles of china looking for plates of different shapes and shades. He wants some off-white, almost yellowish ones. “I will put them into a pile, like that,” he demonstrates to the lady. “If they have different tones of white it will be easier to see various shapes.”
Then, inspite of the earlier anecdote about the revealing German toilet, he starts telling me about himself.
Richard Wentworth. New Installation/Sculptures. With Found Objects. The Pharos Trust Centre for Contemporary Art. 24 Digenis Severis Avenue, Nicosia. Unil July 31. Visiting hours: Tue-Fri, 11am-1pm and 3-5pm. Tel: 22 663871
Richard Wentworth on
Being born in Samoa
My father was stationed there for a few months. He was a soldier. But it is not romantic. It is literally a piece of paper. My early life was spent at the bottom right corner of England and you what it feels like? It is nearly Belgium. It is coastal. It is slightly industrial but not very. It is London-centric. The country is pretty but it is sort of potentially suburban landscape. You can see nice views but it is an overpopulated landscape, not a huge working landscape.
Childhood
I wasn’t a crazy child and I didn’t want to kill my parents but I was rebellious because I was anxious. The world I was born into didn’t make any sense. I didn’t understand what my parents’ rules of life were about and, of course, it turned out that I was right because their rules were to keep up and bend and melt. This is what the world was like then.
Parents
My dad probably wanted to be a good dad, but he and my mother had sort of strange immature relationship. He was very short tempered and she could always antagonise him. So I was kind of a ‘war baby’. They would have their little wars and then he would say things like: ‘Oh, you are your mother’s boy’. I suppose I felt uncomfortable.
Going to art school
My father was horrified. Even my mother was, although she herself had attended a sort of genteel preparatory art school for women. Anyway, I went to a college of art and I wasn’t a very typical art student at that time but I don’t think I was more interesting or more decadent than anybody else. Like most of my peers, I was into the WHO and Jimmy Hendrix and all the other clich?s of that time. There were also one or two very interesting people there. And then life starts in a way. You take some opportunities, you make personal choices, you fall in and out of love, and the world proceeds. But probably not with a huge arrow pointing: ‘go this or that way’ and saying ‘this is what you have to do if you want to have a career’.
