Richard Wentworth: Making Do and Getting by

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Wentworth, like Atget, rarely photographs people, and yet "his world is human, all the more human, for being uninhabited." Whether in his gentle anthropomorphism - a decrepit car, its drooping bumper bandaged with carpet as if wounded - or in his alertness to the practical, yet curious decisions made when dealing with the vicissitudes of life - like the hurried shopper who abandons his dog in the street, chained, not to the railings, but to his shoulder bag - Wentworth's photographs make us look afresh at the cityspace and the humanity it contains. See Richard Wentworth, Making Do and Getting By, with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Koenig Books, 2016 The Courtauld Gallery – set within Somerset House’s North Wing – will remain open for after-hours access too, including The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Edvard Munch. Masterpieces from Bergen. Following the theme of repair and renovation, The Courtauld’s expert team will provide pop-up talks and special demonstrations on the art of conservation, unveiling the tools they use to keep the paintings in the Gallery’s permanent collection looking so vibrant, as if the artists had just finished their last brushstrokes.

Visitors will have the chance to view a selection of photographs taken by influential artist, curator and teacher, Richard Wentworth. The images chosen for the exhibition, depicting ingenious examples of repair, are taken from Wentworth’s on-going project Making Do and Getting By. Beginning in the 1970s, the project records the artist’s encounters with the extraordinary use of ordinarily mundane objects in the modern world. AS In Our Little Screen and Memories of Prison, Ismaeel covers a TV and a lunchbox with decorative patterns, but also with inscriptions that put the objects within a storytelling context, referring to her personal as well as social history.Framed through his categorical methods, ‘Making Do and Getting By’ and’ Occasional Geometries’ Wentworth draws attention to happenstance, placement and coincidence, Wentworth constantly adds to and reconfigures his photographic archive through lectures and exhibitions. According to Bittencourt Grasso in ‘Guide to Unique Photography’ (2012)‘, ‘Wentworth captures pictures of improvisation, where objects are removed of their original context, stripped of their ordinary function and yet often rendered functional in an altogether new and unexpected way.’ The originality of Wentworth’s photographic project lies in its central impulse as an encounter rather than a staging of the object. Richard Wentworth OBE is primarily known as a one of the most influential British sculptors of his generation who for forty years he has used a camera as a way of making “casual notes …. of situations which attracted me” (1). He does not see himself as a photographer and his photographs speak to his self declared casual note taking, there is no particular evidence of technical skill or formal composition which Anna Dezeuze argues references his work to the conceptual photographers of the sixties and seventies such as Ed Ruscha and Sol Le Witt. Azadeh Sarjoughian is a doctoral researcher in the history of art at the University of Birmingham in the UK where her focus is the representation of sexuality and gender identity in contemporary Middle Eastern art. She also received her MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include postcolonial theories, feminist theory and contemporary art. Career: Studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Worked for Henry Moore in 1967, and became part of the New British Sculpture movement in the 1980s. His work is currently showing as part of the Curiosity show at the Turner Contemporary, Margate; and will be in Sculpture in the City, a free exhibition in and around the City of London from 20 June.

Wentworth, on the other hand, most certainly is an artist, of the most self-conscious sort, whose works might be seen as having been born under the sign of Marcel Duchamp. Atget spoke of himself as an "archivist" and called his photographs mere "documents". Man Ray had Atget as an interesting "primitive", yet there is nothing remotely primitive in Atget's talent. Azadeh Sarjoughian Can you explain why you chose the title ‘Every Day’ for the 11th Biennale of Sydney, and what was the necessity of choosing this theme at that time? In July 2009, he curated the Lisson Gallery's Summer show oule to Braid featuring a large number of works from his personal collection and that of Lisson director Nicholas Logsdail. [2] In this unusual exhibition, Richard Wentworth's extraordinary series of photographs Making Do and Getting By (1974-2001), is brought into dialogue with the work of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a figure who stands at the beginning of thinking about photography and Modernism.Isolating an object that already exists, bringing together and stage-managing found things not usually related to art, Wentworth tantalises us into a new realisation of everyday objects to be read in a brand new, unanticipated, way. A door wedged open with a gumboot, the clapper of an alarm bell silenced with a Fudge bar still in its wrapper, a catering-size tin of peas used as a cafe doorstop. These kind of uses have always been the mainstay of Making Do, but many other photographs are less to do with the utilitarian, and more to do with the happenstance arrangements of things, or ad hoc kinds of display, especially the pavement displays of second-hand furniture outside the junk shops of Caledonian Road in north London. Rows of old armchairs lined up by a bus stop, vacant sofas at the kerb, upended chairs like fallen men. I grew up in a world that was held together with string and brown paper and ceiling wax and that’s how it was and I probably fantasised that I needn’t be like that but then I slowly realised (it) actually is somehow the underlying condition of the world.” (3: p18) Stephen Johnstone, ed, The Everyday, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery/The MIT Press, 2008, p 15 A consideration of the main theme of the 2013 Venice Biennale, ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, elevates thinking about the positionality of the Iraqi artists in an international show designed from a perspective of a desire or dream of encapsulating a comprehensive knowledge of contemporary art. The Biennale’s curator that year, Massimiliano Gioni, chose the theme by a reference to Marino Aurit’s architectural model of The Encyclopedic Palace of the World. In the 1950s, Marino Aurit, an Italian-American artist, created his Encyclopedic Palace as a model for ‘a museum in which all worldly knowledge would be documented, preserved, and exhibited’. [8] The structure of the biennale, Gioni stated, is similar to a ‘temporary museum that initiates an inquiry into the many ways in which images have been used to organize knowledge and shape our experience’. Gioni attempted to illustrate this impossible as well as monumental dream by bringing together ‘contemporary artworks with historical artifacts and found objects’. ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’ was an exhibition about the ongoing tension between the self and the universe, and about the impact of images and imaginations on our experience of the self and the Other. Accordingly, Gioni highlights the endeavour to undermine the distance between ‘professional artists and amateurs, outsiders and insiders’. [9] In this context, diversity may not be an issue as it exists, but what is more essential to reflect on is equality. In her review of the ‘Welcome to Iraq’ exhibition, Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton points out the weak artistic value, in her view, of some of the artworks in the exhibition in comparison with the work of those internationally well-known artists of the Venice Biennale who are able to ‘speak the language of resources and money’. In response to this point, Watkins asserts that ‘we are not so hung up on art and similarly value found objects and artifacts: The Iraq pavilion itself is an extraordinary found object’. [10] However, the works on display in the Iraq pavilion were chosen with the good will of searching for invisible and unfamiliar works/artists, and it seems that the job was successfully accomplished. The question is whether curatorial and art-critical perspectives on the works fully integrate them into a broader discourse, and whether they could find their relationships with the past and present in a wider art-historical canon, on an international stage, and to what extent they could compete for a place in our long-term memories.

Meanwhile, artist, writer and curator Ellen Sampson looks at the ways in which material objects can become records of the body in lived experience. Using photographs of her project Cloth, Sampson highlights the beauty of imperfect garments, and the power creases, crumples and stains can hold as evidence of lives lived and journeys taken. ​Photographs from Repair Acts, a project that explores the histories and heritages of repair culture across the UK, Brazil, India and Ireland, will also feature. Founded by artist and researcher Teresa Dillon, the photographic portraits of professional repairers will be accompanied by extracts from first-hand stories of their lives and practice. To celebrate the opening of Eternally Yours, Somerset House will present a special Lates event on 22 June, offering after-hours access and exclusive experiences taking inspiration from the themes of the exhibition. ​Somerset House is London’s working arts centre and home to the UK’s largest creative community. Built on historic foundations, we are situated in the very heart of the capital. ​ ​ New works commissioned for Eternally Yours from British-Lebanese multimedia artist Aya Haidar’s Soleless Series will also be displayed. Developed during a four-month artist residency programme working directly to reintegrate newly arrived Syrian refugee communities into the UK, Haidar embroidered first-hand accounts of migrants' journeys upon the soles of their worn-out shoes to evoke themes of loss, migration and memory. ​ Installation view at the 2013 Venice Biennale of Marino Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace [Palazzo Enciclopedico], c. 1950s (collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, gift of Colette Auriti Firmani in memory of Marino Auriti), photo by R Marossi Henry, Kevin (2007) Parallel Universes: making Do and Getting BY plus Thoughtless Acts (mapping the quotidian from two perspectives) (accessed at Acedemia 30.9.16) – https://www.academia.edu/4353804/Parallel_Universes_Making_Do_and_Getting_By_Thoughtless_Acts_mapping_the_quotidian_from_two_perspectives_ No. Art has many territories: choosing any way of working is like going into a room, but knowing the door to the other rooms is still open.

AS The juxtaposition of Cheeman Ismaeel’s and WAMI’s works (Yaseen Wami and Hashim Taeeh), while both series make a reference to household or domestic objects, dismantles the division of private/public spaces. It seems that both series offer a form of defunctionalisation of the objects, WAMI with their minimalistic strategy and Ismaeel by personalisation of the ready-made objects connected to her memories and life experiences. The artists put the materials and the objects in a wider communication landscape. Would you consider reading these artworks as a response to the binary of femininity and masculinity? How could you see these artworks within the history of feminism and art? I enjoy their work, but for very different reasons. Wentworth's images do not have the density and richness of Atget's, from which Szarkowski teases an entire world, making a point about Atget that also applies to Wentworth: "In an ideal world there is a place for everything, but in the real world things tend to migrate to places where they do not belong." Firstly, whilst the photographs neither reference nor act as references to his sculptures there is an obvious alignment of philosophy and output in the two mediums. Secondly, his choice of subject is not only a very personal perspective of urban life but has been consistently and deeply explored for four decades. We can be tempted into over analysing his photographic work and align it with various movements in contemporary photography but in reality the only relevant reference is the artist himself. This in itself makes this series unusual, it has been created outside of and in parallel with the mainstream of photography history, uninfluenced and seemingly unaware that the mainstream exists; in the interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist that introduces the book (2), he discuses sculptors, architects and writers; photographers are notable by their absence.What is there to connect Wentworth with Eugène Atget, both of whose works are on show at London's Photographers' Gallery? They occupy adjacent rooms and different epochs. The Atgets - which mostly date from the turn of the last century - sit in dim light, framed and fading. The Wentworths are perched on a shelf which runs around the walls of a brightly lit room. Contrast and compare, the exhibition seems to say. Cheeman Ismaeel describes her work, Memories of Prison, as a reference to her ‘husband’s childhood in the 1970s, when he would see his mother carry the box to a large detention centre in the city of Kirkuk, to visit his father, a political prisoner. At age nine, these trips stopped abruptly: his father had been executed’, see Ruya Foundation, Kurdish Elegies: Cheeman Ismaeel, 2013, https://ruyafoundation.org/en/2013/06/kurdish-elegies-cheeman-ismaeel/ Visitors will have the chance to explore what repair means to them first-hand, with live demonstrations and workshops in the installation at the heart of the exhibition, the Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop. The brainchild of designer Carl Clerkin, the installation is modelled on traditional East End repair shops of old, that could - and would - repair anything. A host of artists and designers, including Gitta Gschwendtner, Jasleen Kaur, Poppy Booth, Fiona Davidson, Michael Marriott, Alex Hellum and Jon Harrison, will join Clerkin in the repair shop throughout the exhibition’s run, transforming discarded objects into something not only useful but beautiful. Designer Peter Marigold will show visitors the potential of Formcard, the mouldable, reusable bioplastics he created to fix broken objects and create useful everyday tools. ​ Making Do and Getting By, my photograph series [of everyday objects], because it can't be controlled, tidied up and framed. For the image, see Ruya Foundation, Welcome to Iraq: The Pavilion of Iraq at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, T Chalabi and J Watkins, eds, Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq, Baghdad, p 88