基思·阿诺特认领

For Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist 1968 Arnatt dug a square hole in an area of grass, in the bottom of which he placed the cut-out grass before lining the sides with mirrors so that the hole became imperceptible within the larger surface of grass. It was only when a viewer’s shadow was cast over the hole that its presence was revealed, as is documented by this self portrait. As with Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72 (Tate P13143 ), Arnatt’s use of photography in his work became a means to undermine confidence in the veracity of the photographic medium. He has commented: ‘I was beginning to become aware of the unreliability of photographic evidence and began to play with that feature. I felt that what a photograph could not tell or show might be just as significant as what it could.’ (Quoted in John Roberts, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966–1976 , London 1997, p.47.) The art historian Hilary Gresty has commented: The idea of something which one could not see becoming an art-work, and that of the process of making something of which there was no evidence of any activity having taken place intrigued Arnatt. Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist was a simple self-effacing statement of the division between the concept, the process of making the art-work and the actual finished result … The absurdity of creating a work with the specific notion that it should not be visible seemed an almost ritualistic process of reduction which could be treated with a certain amount of irony. (Hilary Gresty in 1965 to 1972 – When Attitudes Became Form , exhibition catalogue, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge 1984, p.29.) This is one of a group of works which were exhibited, or intended to be exhibited in Keith Arnatt’s participation in Seven Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972. Other works from this group are Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72, Art as an Act of Retraction 1971 (Tate P13140 ), Art as an Act of Omission 1971 (Tate P13144 ), I Have Decided to Go to the Tate Gallery next Friday 1971 (Tate P13142 ) and Rejected Proposal for the Peter Stuyvesant ‘City Sculpture Project’ (For Cardiff City) 1972 (Tate P13141 ). In their range they illustrate the move in Arnatt’s work from the making of situational sculptures to a documentation of performative acts that question – through a linking of philosophical text with image – the status of art and the role and identity of the artist, whom Arnatt shows to be in different states of disappearance. This group of work was presented by the artist to Tate Gallery Archive in 1972 and transferred to the collection in 2010.

Originally conceived as a catalogue intervention for an important exhibition of Conceptual art, The New Art, held at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1972, Trouser - Word Piece was finally realised in its present form at the time of Arnatt’s solo exhibition, Rubbish and Recollections , at the Photographers Gallery, London in 1989. It consists of two abutting photographic panels containing text and photograph. On the right is a photograph of the artist standing with a placard hung from his neck, bearing the words ‘I’m a real artist’. On the left, under the artist’s name and the work’s title, a paragraph of text quotes from the writings of the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1911-60) published under the ironic title Sense and Sensibilia in 1962. In common with contemporaries working in his field, Austin placed his emphasis on an analysis of the subtleties of ordinary language. He believed that by investigating and cataloguing the most commonly employed grammatical constructions, a philosopher might discover the practical distinctions which create nuances of meaning. In Sense and Sensibilia he applied these principles to perception and illusion. Arnatt had attended a course in Moral Philosophy at Oxford University in 1959, focusing on the philosophy of language, and had begun to draw parallels with his own artistic investigations. In Trouser - Word Piece he employed Austin’s linguistic analysis as a satirical meditation on the nature of the real, using the devices of philosophical enquiry to mock the notion of artistic celebrity. The section of Austen’s text asserts that it is only in the negative, i.e. in knowing what is being posited as not real , that the assertion that something is real may be understood; thus ‘it is the negative use that wears the trousers’. During 1972 Arnatt had himself photographed wearing the same placard in a number of urban locations, including in front of Newport Museum Art Gallery. In the same year, he inscribed the assertion that ‘Keith Arnatt is an artist’ on the wall in an installation at the Tate Gallery as part of the Seven Exhibitions series . The analysis of what constitutes the ‘real’ reflects a particular climate of enquiry in the early 1970s, when artists were consciously using ‘real’ materials in ‘real time’ and ‘real space’. At the same time art was being forensically examined and unravelled to its most basic component parts. The artist has commented that Trouser - Word Piece was also directed at those colleagues in the conceptual art world who wanted to become famous and who, he felt, were becoming increasingly egocentric (David Alan Mellor, Chemical Traces: Photography and Conceptual Art , exhibition catalogue, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull 1998, p.5). Arnatt had already made ironic reference to artistic egocentricity in an earlier photo-documentation work, Self Burial (Television Interference Project) (see Tate T01747 ), in which the artist apparently but implausibly disappears into the earth. Other works made during the same period, such as Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969-72 (Tate T07647 ), similarly play on notions of the real in relation to photographic illusion taking the artist’s characteristic quasi-mocking tone. Arnatt later said, ‘I have never been quite sure whether my attitude, then, was one of bemused attachment or bemused detachment’ (quoted in Live in Your Head , p.39).

Arnatt’s first photographic performance project, Self Burial (Television Interference Project) (see Tate T01747 ), was created for the German television channel Westdeutsches Fernsehen. In October 1969, over a nine day-period, each of a series of nine photographs was shown for about two seconds. Originally called the ‘Disappearance of the artist’, the photographs document the progressive disappearance of the artist into the earth, providing a comic development of the theme of critical debate prevalent at the time: the dematerialisation of the art object. Arnatt expanded an interest in the nature of the art object with an investigation into and satire of the activities around the production of art itself. He stated: ‘the continual reference to the disappearance of the art object suggested to me the eventual disappearance of the artist himself … my work then was an oblique was of examining my own position as an artist as well as that of others’. (Quoted in 1965¿-1972 When Attitudes Became Form , exhibition catalogue, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 1984, p.29.) In Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self Arnatt mocks the manner in which much avant-garde art of the time incorporated the image of the artist as subject, object and creator of the work, again within the context of disappearance. He stood on the pavement at the door to the Newport College Art department while a colleague drew a chalk line around his shadow cast on the pavement and the wall behind. The silhouette was filled in with semi-transparent grey-brown paint and the scene was photographed. The resulting image depicts an anamorphically distorted figure positioned as though it is standing on the pavement. Because it is derived from a real body it appears natural, but at the same time it is clearly not. The feet are disproportionately large and the head is disproportionately small, while the height is that of a young child. Actual shadows on the left of the image and to the side of the drainpipe running up the wall heighten the confusion created about what is real and what is art. The white chalk line around the artist’s silhouette echoes the lines of white mortar between the bricks in the wall and a white line and arrow crudely drawn onto the bricks above the artist’s head. Pointing in the same direction as his feet, towards the drainpipe, the arrow adds a sense of purpose to the standing figure. Like the daubs of white paint on the wall on the other side of the drainpipe, the line and arrow were fortuitous discoveries – traces of anonymous urban graffiti that Arnatt incorporated into his work. In an earlier related work, Invisible Hole Revealed by Shadow of the Artist 1968, Arnatt lined a square hole he had cut in a lawn with mirrors, thereby creating an invisible hole. It was only when a viewer’s shadow was cast over the hole that its presence was revealed, as is documented by the artist’s photographic portrait which became the finished work. Like his creation of the invisible hole in this work, and his self-burial the following year, Arnatt’s use of photography in his self-portraits became a means to undermine confidence in the veracity of photographic documentary reportage. He has commented: ‘I was beginning to become aware of the unreliability of photographic evidence and began to play with that feature. I felt that what a photograph could not tell or show might be just as significant as what it could.’ (Quoted in Roberts, p.47.) Further reading David Alan Mellor, Chemical Traces: Photography and Conceptual Art, 1968-1998 , exhibition catalogue, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull 1998, pp.4-7, 43 and 69, reproduced front cover in colour. John Roberts, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976 , London 1997, pp.46-52, reproduced p.46. Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75 , exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Gallery, London 2000, pp.2 and 38-9, reproduced p.38.

Arnatt was fascinated with works of art that are created in the natural landscape but leave no trace of their presence behind. ‘The continual reference to the disappearance of the art object suggested to me the eventual disappearance of the artist himself’, he wrote. This sequence of photographs was broadcast on German television in October 1969. One photo was shown each day, for about two seconds, sometimes interrupting whatever programme was being shown at peak viewing time. They were neither announced nor explained – viewers had to make what sense of them they could.

Art as an    Act of Retraction 1971 consists of eleven black and white photographic panels showing the artist in the    process of eating pieces of paper on each of which has    been printed a different word. These words are listed in the final, twelfth panel where they form the subtitle or explanation of    the work: ‘eleven portraits of the artist about to eat his own words’. The    tension here is between utterance and retraction – the eating of words made    literal as the taking back of something already said; and yet Arnatt is not quite    eating his own words but is ‘about to eat’ them. Using the figure of the artist as    creator, art is retracted before it has perhaps been completed, putting the    creative act into question. Art as an    Act of Retraction is one of a group of works which were exhibited, or intended to be exhibited in Keith Arnatt’s    participation in Seven Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972. Other works from this group are Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist 1968 (Tate P13145 ), Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72 (Tate P13143 ), Art as an Act of Omission 1971 (Tate P13144 ), I Have Decided to Go to the Tate Gallery next Friday 1971 (Tate P13142 ) and Rejected Proposal for the Peter Stuyvesant ‘City Sculpture Project’ (For Cardiff City) 1972 (Tate P13141 ). In their    range they illustrate the move in Arnatt’s work from the making of situational    sculptures to a documentation of performative acts that question – through a    linking of philosophical text with image – the status of art and the role and    identity of the artist, whom Arnatt shows to be in different states of    disappearance. This group of work was presented by the artist to Tate Gallery Archive in 1972 and transferred to the collection in 2010.

Art as an Act of Omission is a single panel text work quoting from the philosopher Eric D’Arcy’s book Human Acts – An Essay in their Moral Evaluation (1963). D’Arcy considers an omission to be the ‘not-doing’ of something that was expected to be done, leading Arnatt to ask the question: ‘If art is what we do and culture is what is done to us – what would culture do to us if art is what we didn’t do?’ In other words, Arnatt asks that if art was an expected action that was not carried out, how would this particular omission affect our lives, if at all? This work also exists as a printed card that Arnatt sent to close friends and colleagues, examples of which can be found in Tate Archive (TGA 786.5.2.6 and TGA 830.2.1.12, the latter postmarked March 1971). A significant aspect of Arnatt’s work at this time addressed ‘non-production’ or ‘not-doing’ as a form of artistic practice. For instance, for the exhibition Idea Structures at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 1970, he presented the text work Is It Possible for Me to Do Nothing as My Contribution to This Exhibition , alongside Self-Burial 1969 (Tate T01747 ). Later that same year he sent a card to Charles Harrison on which was typed ‘10.9.70. 8.25pm. THE DECISION TO DO NO ART WORK FOR AN INDEFINITE PERIOD OF TIME IS THE WORK (the work ceases to exist upon production of a subsequent work)’. This card is also in Tate Archive (TGA 839.12.1.11). Art as an Act of Omission is one of a group of works which were exhibited, or intended to be exhibited in Keith Arnatt’s participation in Seven Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972. Other works from this group are Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist 1968 (Tate P13145 ), Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72 (Tate P13143 ), Art as an Act of Retraction 1971 (Tate P13140 ), I Have Decided to Go to the Tate Gallery next Friday 1971 (Tate P13142 ) and Rejected Proposal for the Peter Stuyvesant ‘City Sculpture Project’ (For Cardiff City) 1972 (Tate P13141 ). In their range they illustrate the move in Arnatt’s work from the making of situational sculptures to a documentation of performative acts that question – through a linking of philosophical text with image – the status of art and the role and identity of the artist, whom Arnatt shows to be in different states of disappearance. This group of work was presented by the artist to Tate Gallery Archive in 1972 and transferred to the collection in 2010. Further reading Seven Exhibitions , exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1972. The New Art , exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 1972. I’m a Real Photographer: Keith Arnatt Photographs 1974–2002 , exhibition catalogue, Photographer’s Gallery, London 2007.

Rejected Proposal for the Peter Stuyvesant ‘City Sculpture Project’ (For Cardiff City) 1972 is a small, single panel work split horizontally into two halves; the upper half contains text and the lower half a photographic image of two billboards in a car park in Cardiff. The billboard on the left states ‘keith arnatt is an artist’ while the one of the right declares ‘keith arnatt is not an artist’. The text in the top half is taken from the philosopher Wesley C. Salmon’s (1825–2001) book Logic (first published in 1963) which aimed to show how contradiction may be defined, that even if we do not know which of two contradictory statements may be true or false, it is certain that one is true and the other false. Trouser–Word Piece 1972 (Tate T07649 ), to which this work directly relates, acted out the notion that one can only consider something to be real by knowing what is posited as not real. For this work, Arnatt joined a text drawn from the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin’s (1911–1960) Sense and Sensibilia (first published in 1962) with a photographic self-portrait in which he holds a sandwich board declaring ‘I’M A REAL ARTIST’. The Rejected Proposal for the Peter Stuyvesant ‘City Sculpture Project’ (For Cardiff City) exchanges the photographic self-portrait of the earlier work for text, and the declarative emphasis of the upper-case text used in Trouser-Word Piece for the quieter lower case. This work was, as the title indicates, a proposal for the 1972 City Sculpture Project . Funded by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, this sited sculptures in cities around Britain for a minimum period of six months. The projects chosen for Cardiff were by Garth Evans (born 1934) and William Pye (born 1938). This is one of a group of works which were exhibited, or intended to be exhibited in Keith Arnatt’s participation in Seven Exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London in 1972. Other works from this group are Invisible Hole Revealed by the Shadow of the Artist 1968 (Tate P13145 ), Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of his Former Self 1969–72 (Tate P13143 ), Art as an Act of Retraction 1971 (Tate P13140 ), Art as an Act of Omission 1971 (Tate P13144 ) and I Have Decided to Go to the Tate Gallery next Friday 1971 (Tate P13142 ). In their range they illustrate the move in Arnatt’s work from the making of situational sculptures to a documentation of performative acts that question – through a linking of philosophical text with image – the status of art and the role and identity of the artist, whom Arnatt shows to be in different states of disappearance. This group of work was presented by the artist to Tate Gallery Archive in 1972 and transferred to the collection in 2010. Further reading Seven Exhibitions , exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1972. The New Art , exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 1972. I’m a Real Photographer: Keith Arnatt Photographs 1974–2002 , exhibition catalogue, Photographer’s Gallery, London 2007.

Pictures from a Rubbish Tip 1988–9 is a series of five large colour photographs by the British artist Keith Arnatt featuring close-up shots of rubbish that has been dumped at a local tip. In each photograph, the lens focuses upon select pieces of discarded food – such as bread, chicken bones and vegetables – that lie on clear and pale-coloured plastic bags. These bags both reflect and diffuse the surrounding daylight, highlighting the varying hues of the rubbish so that the scenes appear brightly coloured and partly abstract. Although the types of rubbish shown and their exact position within the compositions varies slightly, each is presented at an apparently fixed distance from the camera and this, as well as the similar lighting effects used across the five works, creates a sense of cohesion in the series. Arnatt took the photographs in 1988–9 on multiple trips that he made to the Coleford Tip near his home in Tintern, Monmouthshire. He did not use any artificial light when shooting the frames, relying solely on daylight, and the artist employed an extremely shallow depth of field, sharply focusing the lens on the closest part of the featured object. According to the critic Mark Haworth-Booth, Arnatt ‘chose to place this very narrow plane of focus on each object’s nearest edge. This ... Arnatt believes, puts the viewer in the position in which he himself was when he first noticed and picked up these half-buried objects’ (Mark Haworth-Booth, Keith Arnatt: XXI Bienal de São Paulo , exhibition catalogue, Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo 1991, p.1). According to the photographer David Hurn, Arnatt’s decision to present the rubbish close up and in bright but diffuse lighting is an attempt to conceal the image’s context so that its subject – a piece of rubbish – is initially unidentifiable as such. Hurn has stated that the series is about looking – about the difference between knowing something and seeing something; the fact that we might know that this is a bit of orange or a cake, but when we see it taken out of context, photographed in a way we don’t normally see, it can look like a Turner. (Grafik and Hurn 2009, p.10.) In this way, the discarded, mouldy food items can be seen as objects of beauty when presented in a different setting, especially when using framing techniques, colour and lighting and that enhance the visual appeal of the images. Furthermore, curator Clare Grafik has contended that in their framing and composition, Pictures from a Rubbish Tip reflect ‘Arnatt’s interest in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, particularly the still life genre and the vanitas tradition’ (Grafik and Hurn 2009, p.137). Vanitas paintings depict objects thought to symbolise the transience of life and the futility of earthly goods and pursuits, including books, fine objects and foodstuffs. In a similar way, by focusing on food items that have been discarded en masse, Pictures from a Rubbish Tip presents the wastage and excess that characterise modern consumption, although Arnatt shows these objects in a manner that simultaneously emphasises both their beauty and their decay. The photographs in Pictures from a Rubbish Tip were first exhibited in the 1989 show Through the Looking Glass: Photographic Art in Britain 1945–1989 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and were included in Keith Arnatt: Rubbish and Recollections that was held the same year at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Further reading Through the Looking Glass: Photographic Art in Britain 1945 – 1989 , exhibition catalogue, Barbican Art Gallery, London 1989, reproduced p.99. Keith Arnatt: Rubbish and Recollections , exhibition catalogue, Photographers’ Gallery, London 1989, reproduced pp.40–2. Clare Grafik and David Hurn, I’m a Real Photographer: Keith Arnatt: Photographs 1974 – 2002 , London 2009, pp.10–11, reproduced pp.52–7.