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| One of the things that Is more and more evidently happening is
that the ways artists might function is getting broader, that
doesn't mean its getting better - it just means its getting broader.
That means you might think more broadly but it also might mean
that opportunities might come to you from a much wider base. On the left I was invited to make, I think they call it an intervention, at the British Museum. I was given an extraordinary opportunity, which was to pick any Egyptian pottery I wanted and display it and to do whatever else I wished to alongside it. So I did something very simple. If you go to the British Museum, thousands heaving and shoving, if you don't go at the right time of day its a sort of social war zone. So I picked up their rubbish off the steps and their rubbish is pretty much the stuff that everybody drinks on the streets. And I met the man who is in charge of packaging for Britvic who told me that that industry is most effectively described as gift wrapping liquids. So the next time you hand over 50p for something in a tin compare it to the cosmetic's business. Anyway the nice thing that came out of this was the discovery that the pots I chose, which were on the top shelf, spanned four and a half thousand years and the shelf that represented us represented crudely about 25 or 30 years of technology i.e. canning, blow moulding... And the man from Britvic came to my house and lovingly handled caps and looked inside them and said, 'oh yes, this is the Italian method which is very unusual to find imported into England, you see, its got a double seal and four different plastics...' And this is not me taking up some kind of ecological position its just a simple observation of a huge sophistication that we live right next to, constantly, and probably don't even know. Or, by way of contrast, I was asked to make plates for 450 people for a gala dinner at the Serpentine, for Princess Di'. Well, her lot already seemed to me pretty wretched. She seemed to me a pretty strange person as well. So I broke all the plates and stuck them all together - we're talking about people paying serious money to sit down to dinner - as a sort of little tweak into the art-world, or maybe into the world. And what is extraordinary is that nobody remarked on this, nobody seemed to think broken plates that had been mended that were sitting on a table that was laid in this manner could possibly have any kind of - would it be innuendo? - would it be irony? |
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