Animals in our care often work really hard. One of the things I miss in contemporary art is the representation of the cow or cows. In times past some of the great paintings of Europe have a cow in the foreground, huge in scale, with a tiny cityscape perched on the horizon in the far distance. A different scale of values. I bet this is possibly true in Chinese art too, where the fact that the texture of everyday life for people is interwoven with the lives of animals, domestic and wild, and therefore means they are worthy of representation in the arts.
Another thing missing a lot in art these days is any sense that labour is involved, for subject and audience. Whilst it is obviously an issue for those artists who are makers, even then the way work registers in the experience of art is weakened by some of the institutional contexts we find the art. In this Liverpool Biennial you can see labour as part of what is going on, for you as an observant participant, with the work of Sarah Sze at the Bluecoat and the two channel video by Omer Fast, called Take a Deep Breath, a powerful, multi-levelled piece of work on show at Tate Liverpool.
Posted by Philip Courtenay
No comments:
Post a Comment