Richard Wentworth: Making Do and Getting by

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Visitors will have the chance to explore what repair means to them first-hand, with live demonstrations and workshops in the installation at the heart of the exhibition, the Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop. The brainchild of designer Carl Clerkin, the installation is modelled on traditional East End repair shops of old, that could - and would - repair anything. A host of artists and designers, including Gitta Gschwendtner, Jasleen Kaur, Poppy Booth, Fiona Davidson, Michael Marriott, Alex Hellum and Jon Harrison, will join Clerkin in the repair shop throughout the exhibition’s run, transforming discarded objects into something not only useful but beautiful. Designer Peter Marigold will show visitors the potential of Formcard, the mouldable, reusable bioplastics he created to fix broken objects and create useful everyday tools. ​ In 1998 - 99 he curated Thinking Aloud, a national Touring exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge and Camden Arts Centre, London that explored the creative process as well as the profligate nature of mass production and consumerism. See Negar Azimi, ‘Home Away from Home’, Artforum, vol 52, no 1, September 2013, pp 334–335; Zoe Pilger, ‘Welcome to Iraq, art review: New exhibition shows country in whole new light’, Independent [online], 17 March 2014; Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, ‘The Aesthetic of Promise’, Critical Muslim 08, October–December 2013, pp 135–144; D Fernand, ‘Art and Minds’, The Sunday Times Magazine, 5 May 2013, pp 42–45, 47 Between 1971 and 1987, Wentworth taught at Goldsmiths College and his influence has been claimed in the work of the Young British Artists. From 2002 to 2010, Wentworth was 'Master of Drawing' at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and was the head of the Sculpture department at The Royal College of Art, London from 2009 - 2011. Richard Wentworth OBE is primarily known as a one of the most influential British sculptors of his generation who for forty years he has used a camera as a way of making “casual notes …. of situations which attracted me” (1). He does not see himself as a photographer and his photographs speak to his self declared casual note taking, there is no particular evidence of technical skill or formal composition which Anna Dezeuze argues references his work to the conceptual photographers of the sixties and seventies such as Ed Ruscha and Sol Le Witt.

Also exploring the power of preserving and continuing an object’s story, artist and potter Edmund de Waal invited Japanese artist and Kintsugi specialist Maiko Tsutsumi to work with him on a group of 18 Meissen porcelain plates, some in fragments, that he had acquired at an auction in 2011. The plates, which were once owned by, and stolen from, the Jewish von Klemperer family during the Second World War, became damaged during the 1945 bombing of Dresden. In De Waal’s own words, the act of threading golden lines across the fractured plates is a poignant reminder of the object’s story and its losses.An interesting question would be whether this series is conceptual art? Undoubtably the ideas behind the work take precedence over any traditional notion of aesthetics but Wentworth often identifies pleasing patterns created by light and instinctively recognises strong colour combinations and compositional forms. And whilst it is not sophisticated or accomplished at a technical level there is no sense that Wentworth is actively building a vernacular snap-shot aesthetic into his work, the photographs just happen to be that way. In some ways it is a companion book to John Pawson’s A Visual Inventory (5); Pawson, an architect, has collected over a quarter of million images that record landscapes, buildings and architectural details that inspire or just intrigue him. Like Wentworth he uses the camera as a note book, a visual diary, and whilst he is more often investigating form and the juxtaposition of colours and patterns his work is similar to Wentworth’s in that it reveals the thought processes of an accomplished practitioner in an art medium parallel to photography. Visitors will have the chance to view a selection of photographs taken by influential artist, curator and teacher, Richard Wentworth. The images chosen for the exhibition, depicting ingenious examples of repair, are taken from Wentworth’s on-going project Making Do and Getting By. Beginning in the 1970s, the project records the artist’s encounters with the extraordinary use of ordinarily mundane objects in the modern world. At the heart of the exhibition, ‘The Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop', a pop-up created by designer Carl Clerkin and modelled on traditional East End repair shops of old, hosts live workshops and demonstrations from artists and designers including Peter Marigold, Gitta Gschwendtner, Jasleen Kaur, Poppy Booth, Fiona Davidson, Michael Marriott, Alex Hellum and Jon Harrison

Most recently, Wentworth’s ‘Making Do and Getting By’ (2013) was included in the Hayward touring exhibition ‘Curiosity’. The exhibition’s curator Brian Dillon describes Wentworth’s work as ‘an archive or glossary of semi-sculptural modifications to the fabric of the everyday.’ Significantly, Wentworth’s pictures are abstract projections of the peripheral vision by which the artist negotiates the world. Somerset House is London’s working arts centre and home to the UK’s largest creative community. Built on historic foundations, we are situated in the very heart of the capital. ​ ​ In August 2014, Wentworth was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. [1] Making Do and Getting By [ edit ] JWFor the Iraq pavilion, I wanted to place an emphasis on traditional crafts, such as rug making, as well as popular culture. Doing my best to avoid folkloricism, I wanted to encourage a consideration of different levels of cultural output that may not have been thought of as being ‘artistic’.

Azadeh Sarjoughian is a doctoral researcher in the history of art at the University of Birmingham in the UK where her focus is the representation of sexuality and gender identity in contemporary Middle Eastern art. She also received her MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include postcolonial theories, feminist theory and contemporary art. Double Lifetime by Loudon Wainwright III: it's about how great it would be if you got two lives. He's a beautiful, funny writer. I get the sense that he's been impossible to live with, too. In 1996, his Marking the Parish Boundaries along the River Tees in County Durham was the first public art project to be funded by the National Lottery. Since the early 1970s Wentworth has been capturing chance encounters of oddities and discrepancies in the modern landscape in the ongoing photographic series known as Making Do and Getting By. Mundane snapshots and fragments of the modern landscape are elevated to an analysis of human resourcefulness and improvisation, whereby amusing oddities that would otherwise go by unnoticed become the subject of intense contemplation. Azadeh Sarjoughian Can you explain why you chose the title ‘Every Day’ for the 11th Biennale of Sydney, and what was the necessity of choosing this theme at that time?

AS The juxtaposition of Cheeman Ismaeel’s and WAMI’s works (Yaseen Wami and Hashim Taeeh), while both series make a reference to household or domestic objects, dismantles the division of private/public spaces. It seems that both series offer a form of defunctionalisation of the objects, WAMI with their minimalistic strategy and Ismaeel by personalisation of the ready-made objects connected to her memories and life experiences. The artists put the materials and the objects in a wider communication landscape. Would you consider reading these artworks as a response to the binary of femininity and masculinity? How could you see these artworks within the history of feminism and art?Quotidiana’ (5 February–21 May 2000) was curated by David Ross, Nicholas Serota, Ida Gianelli, Giorgio Verzotti and Jonathan Watkins Dezeuze, Anna (2013) Photography Ways of Living and Richard Wentworth’s Making Do, Getting By (accessed at Acedemia 30.9.16) – https://www.academia.edu/5269475/Photography_Ways_of_Living_and_Richard_Wentworths_Making_Do_Getting_By_Oxford_Art_Journal_36.2_2013_pp._281-300 A door wedged open with a gumboot, the clapper of an alarm bell silenced with a Fudge bar still in its wrapper, a catering-size tin of peas used as a cafe doorstop. These kind of uses have always been the mainstay of Making Do, but many other photographs are less to do with the utilitarian, and more to do with the happenstance arrangements of things, or ad hoc kinds of display, especially the pavement displays of second-hand furniture outside the junk shops of Caledonian Road in north London. Rows of old armchairs lined up by a bus stop, vacant sofas at the kerb, upended chairs like fallen men. Have an interesting life." Lots of people have said that to me, and I think it's the most important thing to know when you're young. If your life is completely boring, and you've got a nice swimming pool, then I don't see the point.

Special Morgan Stanley Lates event on 22 June to celebrate the opening of Eternally Yours, offering after-hours access and free exclusive experiences, including transforming time with artist Abigail Conway in the spectacular surrounds of Somerset House’s courtyard Ali Samiaa, still from The Love of Butterflies, 2010, courtesy of Al Sumaria TV, the artist and the Ruya Foundation

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For Atget, everything is in his photographs, even if his ultimate intentions were more shadowy. Many of his images - over 8,500 of them - were made to be sold to architects, designers, artists, archives. But the thing about Atget is that there is more going on in the photograph, and in the world, than the superficial record of a thing or a place. Exactly where he places himself, framing the shot, is of absolute importance. This is not so with Wentworth. What Atget's camera captures is more than an intention, more than evidence.