Richard Wentworth
Samoa, 1947
A ‘you’ spot - pale blue board balanced on two sandbags saving parking spot. Board reads ‘skip coming in morning’ X
(student text received by RW while at Museum De Paviljoens)
Richard Wentworth developed 4 new sculptures relating to the context of Museum de Paviljoens in Almere. Besides these he exhibited 16 photographs from his ongoing series 'Making Do Getting By'
Abingdon (1979), Bloomsbury, London (1985), Camberwell. London (1984), New York (2000), Gloucesterhire, England (1997), San Fransico (2001), Barcelona (1992), Clerkwell, London (1999), Islington, London (1992), Bloomsbury, London (1997), Rome (1986), San Francisco (2001), Farrington, London (1997)
Photos fixed behind glass on shelf.
Urbs (2008)
Claim, 2008
At Sea The Horizon Remains Eight Miles Distant, 2008
Orchard, 2008
My father meant well, and in about 1968, (perhaps for my 21st birthday?) he bought me a Pentax camera from the Duty Free at Hong Kong airport.It was a handsome object, selected by the discriminating engineer for the young art student. It introduced me to the word ASAHI.
I never quite saw the point of photography although I used my camera (the first of half a dozen pentaxes) to record my student sculptures. It was an analogue world and I experimented with slide film (expensively) and somewhere there must be a few pictures which signalled some of my long term interests. Perhaps I mistook the ‘railway carriage windows’ of exposed roll film as a sort of list making or a chronicle type scroll...
Even so, I don’t believe I ever recorded my artisan acivities as one of Henry Moore’s assistants. Students seldom rehearse knowingly the trajectory or style of future activities. Much later, looking back, it all seems obvious, even deterministic, like a well worn foot path. London, where I have lived for over 50 years, is busy being unresolved, throwing up fresh contingencies on a daily basis, with a population often congratulating itself (sometimes ironically) on coping. Money is the invisible cushion against many of these abrasions. If not self hatred, then certainly self hindering, the city’s conduct is characteristically perverse - as if it contrived to tie its own shoe laces together while it sleeps. Through the economic slack of the 1960’s & 1970’s we rattled about in the bagginess of London while it dismantled large parts of its fabric and buffered itself against change and decomposition. How the world puts itself together interests me as much as how it takes itself apart. I love what happens in the gaps. I like the way people know the gravity of material and what things are worth - a lingua franca of weights and measures on which spur-of-the-moment resourcefulness depends.
I don’t like to hunt, I prefer the pleasures of encounter. The eye is still the most beautiful looking-tool, although the brain is its backroom laboratory. The camera, like the pen, is a prosthesis and an approxometer for experience. The impulse for humans to semaphone their feelings to one another is sometimes called art. There is a smile of recognition when overhearing argot or noticing what kinds of mortar hold up the fabric of language. We like rimes just as much as we desire reason.
RW Museum De Paviljoens
april 2008