Rubbish in, art out

By now you may have heard that Dane Mitchell was awarded the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award in Hamilton by Te Papa curator Charlotte Huddleston. His winning work Collateral is a selection of the wrappings other artists used to pack their works when sending them to the Waikato Museum to compete in the Award. Mitchell’s wry commentary on the old 'what is art?' challenge - anything an artist says, or even suggests, is so - will come with its own issues for anyone bold enough to purchase it (the work is priced at $5250).

The problem with making work that looks like rubbish is that it can easily end up being treated that way. The most famous example in New Zealand is Billy Apple’s Neon Accumulation which was binned by a cleaner at the Govett-Brewster. But this is not just a provincial problem. Even mega institutions are not immune. Cleaners at the Tate Gallery in London put a key part of a work by Gustav Metzger out with the rubish (it was later recovered) not recognising the bag of trash was not, er, a bag of trash. Damien Hirst has also had a run-in with the art rubbish problem. His 2001 installation of studio detritus at London's Eyestorm Gallery was mistaken for a pile of rubbish and swept away by a cleaner who remained unrepentant. "I didn't think for a second that it was a work of art - it didn't look much like art to me. So I cleared it all into bin-bags and dumped it." And still it goes.

Four years ago, a collector of the British artist Anish Kapor was awarded £350,000 damages when the art storage company Fine Art Logistics dumped Hole and Vessel II mistaking it for junk. In a subtle twist on the rubbish theme, an old bath that was part of a Joseph Beuys work was scrubbed clean by zealous gallery staff in the eighties.

Fortunately the institutions and professionals into collecting work like this are aware of the pitfalls. The folk at Fine Art Shipping aren’t going to be fooled, not for a moment. As packers for some of the most important galleries and artists in the world they totally get the trash/art thing. “Sometimes the most difficult objects to store or ship are those which look like everyday things and could be mistaken for same. That litter box, for example, or the artist whose artwork was a crate and, in another case, a light pencil drawing on a ragged piece of cardboard. In a working warehouse, such items must be isolated, draped with caution tape, and severely labeled so as not to be confused with supplies or trash.”
Image: the art work formally know as box.