A few years ago whilst I was still a student I met Richard Wentworth at a talk he gave at the University of Manchester. He was sure he knew me from somewhere but had no idea where. During his lecture he talked about a brick wall he had once watched being built and how he marvelled at it. He wanted to talk to the bricklayer about how much he liked the wall as an Artist but felt this would make the man uncomfortable. I asked him if he thought the use of art was in some way a departure from our natural human instincts or there abouts. He loved the question and said he wished he could answer it. Below is a transcript of the conversation.
Audience: This is do to with what you said about the bricks and the guy with the mousetraps, and how you didn't want to patronise the guy who made the mousetraps, and how a bricklayer is never celebrated. Is art something that you would do that's not part of being a programmed, or a problem-solving, human being anymore (humans have always evolved because they solve problems)? Is art another problem to be solved, is it beyond a more practical thing? As you start thinking of art and trying to understand things through art, is it becoming less and less intrinsic to what a human being can be? Or further away from the animal, from what a human being is? Does it make it more separated from that kind of life?
RW: That's a really fab question. God, what a question! Well, I wish I knew. I read a lot about the history of processes, in the most undisciplined way. If I find a book on the history of the industrial revolution I nearly always buy it. I read a chapter in the middle of the night the other day about needle-making, it was just from heaven. Needles used to be made in one village, Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire, there was no explanation as to what was going on there. Then the industrial revolution gets going and it all gets very different very quickly. But the thing about humans is that we give meaning to things besides, so we don't know who invented the brick, we are never going to meet them, they're not celebrated - it was obviously like the wheel, invented in a lot of places more or less at the same time. It turns up, changes how we behave, and walls start appearing, walls start to have meanings, they are used in different ways, they express different kinds of power, so it's obviously very different to make a wall for somebody else as opposed to making one for yourself. All sorts of things to do with defence, lots of things that we find really difficult to imagine. I find it very difficult to imagine small walled towns where you go out into densely wooded landscapes in the Middle Ages, go out in the day and do things in the woods, and then flee back into the town at night and shut the door. We all experience certain kinds of violence, but [not] that open-landscape type of space, the stuff that's represented in usually not-very-good films, where there is smoke in the distance, they all get together with the mayor and have a word about what that could be.
We're very bad a computing where religion comes into this, where things that are difficult to get hold of come into this, when in an Art History lecture somebody tells you that the hat in The Arnolfinis is like Prada to the power of a million. We're so bad at seeing that that hat or that cloth is a Mercedes Maybach or whatever it's called. So the fact is that's what humans do, they keep giving belief to things (we've talked about that already). I haven't read any anthropology, I really regret that I haven't because, although maybe it would damage me now, it would be really interesting to find out more about all our behaviours. I've done - we've all done - odd things which have broken some social code, and we've felt quite strong and weird about it as we've done it, and sometimes we might have done it belligerently, but sometimes we might have had to do it for some other reason. It's only when those things happen that you register how codified it all is. So I suppose what I meant about the bricklayer is that it's a class predicament. I do know some people who build brick walls but I just sound like an overeducated prat if I start talking about 'your gorgeous walls.' You have to know somebody very well to start that, because for a start bricklaying is an all-weather activity, it's very, very tough - I'm not being romantic about it. But I think what is made is wonderful and is a kind of art, because it's got all that complexity in it.
After hearing Wentworth was leaving the Ruskin School of Drawing to head the sculpture department at the Royal College of Art I thought my luck was in. I wanted to study at an institution famous for its involvement in Art history and its capacity for developing contemporary practice.
On my Rejection letter from one of these Institutions I have copied John Ruskin’s watercolour of The Aigiulle Blaitiere c.1856. Ruskin never exhibited his work and also believed mountains need not always be climbed but could be observed from afar. The other institution is environmentally conscious and sends its rejections via email.
All images copyright Richard Shields
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