And so to episode two of School of Saatchi, the reality show featuring up-and-coming conceptual artists. This week the brief was to create pieces of public at to be exhibited in Hastings, a town that could hardly be called famous for its avant garde artistic vision. To facilitate the process the six contestants were placed into three pairs and given a ludicrously small budget and time frame to work with.
Each group came up with a different idea and, while the reality of the executions never matched the ideal of the concept, I liked all of them. Suki and Sam produced a two part instalation based on the geometric form of a radar reflector, built on a much larger scale and placed into a crumbling and rotting beached boat. It was quite beautiful and it worked as a symbolic merging of the old and new. If the other part of the sculpture - a smaller rotating version of the same form - didn't work as well, they were at least partially successful.
Matt and Eugenie had a series of concrete islands in a boating lake to work with and came up with the playful idea of set-dressing them as animal enclosures, as if in a zoo, but without the animals. This was the one that Charles Saatchi liked best but, to me, it seemed more like an elaborate joke than a successful work.
My favourite was Ben and Saad's "Ghost Huts". They had been given a site where there were a number of eerie tall wooden huts and initially struggled with finding an idea until Saad discovered that there had originally been two more huts but these had burned down in a fire. Using black scaffolding and netting they recreated the ghosts of the huts in their original spaces and it was really very effective. It reminded me a little of Do Ho Su's work in the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward a couple of years ago.
There were two parts of the program that I found especially amusing. The first was when they rolled in Martin Creed to give his opinions of the works in progress. I always find it amusing that Martin Creed is so highly rated given that his works include a crumpled up sheet of A4 note paper, an empty gallery with a bit of blutac stuck to the wall and - my favourite - another empty gallery with the lights going on and off. This guy has minimalism nailed!
The other amusing thing was a single comment and it was amusing because some years ago there was an episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor had parked the TARDIS in the Louvre and two art lovers (John Cleese and Eleanor Bron, if memory serves) started to discuss how the art of the piece was in the separation of its form from its functionality - a remark echoed almost word for word by one of the judges tonight, underlining both the accuracy of the original satire and the essential vacuity of art criticism.
Next week they have to create works that will sit well alongside the old masters in a stately home. That should be fun!
Each group came up with a different idea and, while the reality of the executions never matched the ideal of the concept, I liked all of them. Suki and Sam produced a two part instalation based on the geometric form of a radar reflector, built on a much larger scale and placed into a crumbling and rotting beached boat. It was quite beautiful and it worked as a symbolic merging of the old and new. If the other part of the sculpture - a smaller rotating version of the same form - didn't work as well, they were at least partially successful.
Matt and Eugenie had a series of concrete islands in a boating lake to work with and came up with the playful idea of set-dressing them as animal enclosures, as if in a zoo, but without the animals. This was the one that Charles Saatchi liked best but, to me, it seemed more like an elaborate joke than a successful work.
My favourite was Ben and Saad's "Ghost Huts". They had been given a site where there were a number of eerie tall wooden huts and initially struggled with finding an idea until Saad discovered that there had originally been two more huts but these had burned down in a fire. Using black scaffolding and netting they recreated the ghosts of the huts in their original spaces and it was really very effective. It reminded me a little of Do Ho Su's work in the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward a couple of years ago.
There were two parts of the program that I found especially amusing. The first was when they rolled in Martin Creed to give his opinions of the works in progress. I always find it amusing that Martin Creed is so highly rated given that his works include a crumpled up sheet of A4 note paper, an empty gallery with a bit of blutac stuck to the wall and - my favourite - another empty gallery with the lights going on and off. This guy has minimalism nailed!
The other amusing thing was a single comment and it was amusing because some years ago there was an episode of Doctor Who in which the Doctor had parked the TARDIS in the Louvre and two art lovers (John Cleese and Eleanor Bron, if memory serves) started to discuss how the art of the piece was in the separation of its form from its functionality - a remark echoed almost word for word by one of the judges tonight, underlining both the accuracy of the original satire and the essential vacuity of art criticism.
Next week they have to create works that will sit well alongside the old masters in a stately home. That should be fun!
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