Art Craziest Nation

Recently visited Liverpool for job interview-flunking purposes (again!), but the day had some positives as it also at least offered the opportunity to visit the Walker gallery on the way to the appointment and see some art, and one exhibit in particular, entitled ‘Art Craziest Nation’. The work of collaborative pair The Little Artists, it featured, basically, a tableau of an exhibition of contemporary and modern art, with these works and the gallery space in which they were displayed made entirely from Lego. The title is itself a play on that of a book by celebrity art commentator Matthew Collings, ‘Art Crazy Nation’, which surveyed the recent British art scene. I suppose the tableau itself was in the style of those of Jake & Dinos Chapman’s miniature visions of hellish scenarios and proceeded from there to offer a most creatively-accomplished and amusing recreation of a number of iconic works of modern art. It was great fun to recognize, and most impressive to appreciate, such works as Damien Hirst’s pickled shark and butterfly paintings, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed (with, delightfully, jumping intruders included, as happened during the work’s display at the Turner Prize show of 2000), Joseph Beuy’s ambulance and sleds (really impressively done), Warhol’s dollar painting, Michael Craig-Martin’s ‘Oak Tree’ (which is, in fact, in its original incarnation, a conceptual conversion, a glass of water upon a high shelf), Rachel Whiteread’s concrete-cast room, Jeff Koons’s basketballs in a tank and many others. In particular, such masterpieces of Minimalism – all of which I adore - as Carl Andre’s bricks and squares, Donald Judd’s wall-mounted blocks and Dan Flavin’s fluorescent lights were recreated perfectly in scaled-down form. The tableau also featured a gallery shop, a most witty and pertinent comment on the umbilical link between the contemporary experience of art and commerce, and numerous celebrity art world figures, glasses in hand, as may be encountered at a private view of a big contemporary show. All in all, it was a most enjoyable exhibit to see, so well realised was it. It also made one realise just how sophisticated the Lego itself can be, it’s developed such a long way since I was a kid and loved playing, creating, with it.

Images of and information about ‘Art Craziest Nation' can be found here at the exhibition’s official website.

I also managed a quick visit to a bargain clearance bookshop and, for £3 each, picked up hardback copies of Douglas Coupland’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – which proved to be a most engrossing, thought-provoking, moving and subtly profound read, as usual with DC, who is one of my favourite contemporary authors and whom I was once fortunate to see speaking most entertainingly at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, around the time of the publication of ‘All Families Are Psychotic’ – and Jonathan Coe’s biography of the writer BS Johnson, ‘Like a Fiery Elephant’, of which I’ve read enough intriguing and complementary comments to inspire me to explore its contents, despite knowing nothing of the subject’s work: I loved Coe’s ‘What a Carve Up!’, a wonderfully satirical account of the Thatcher years with some amazingly creative plot twists, and ‘The Rotters’ Club’, which most evocatively recreated the atmosphere of the 1970s and adolescence, wittily and movingly. Actually, I really should devote more time to reading and the study of art instead of this blog! Maybe that’s a suitable point on which to close for now.