For the 2009 Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Awards, Dane Mitchell submitted a work titled COLLATERAL (pictured below), which was chosen as the winning entry.
In essence, this work was a display of discarded packaging from all the other award entrants collected together in a pile. As per normal entry requirements, Dane Mitchell sent an email to the Waikato Museum staff with directions for his work. However unlike other entrants, he was relying on staff members to physically create his piece because he was away in Berlin, Germany.
After the announcement, the controversy ran on many levels…..
Is a pile of waste material Art?
Is it worth the $15,000 prize money?
What is new about a pile of rubbish?
and most of all,
How can someone win who didn’t actually physically create their own work?
Having read various newspaper articles and blogs on the subject, and from my own response to the artwork, I’m impressed. Not that it’s a collection of trash but that Dane Mitchell responded to the competition in a unique way. Said by Professor Maserati (in this blog response – http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2009/09/09/you-be-the-judge/#comments), “It’s hardly new/s that art can takes as its subject matter the art system. It’s hardly new/s that artists give instructions to others on the physical compilation of work. It’s hardly new/s that artists don’t always use high cost materials.”
What is new to a winning entry, is the use of the internet as a tool in making art.
The whole process of an awards competition is now largely based on the internet, from submissions, to some judging, to catalogues of the exhibition and perhaps most importantly publicity. And now globalisation has caught up – with artworks created and awarded sight-unseen from the other side of the world.
The person responsible for the award decision, Charlotte Huddleston, curator of Contemporary Art at Te Papa Tongarewa, blogs that she was impressed by Dane Mitchell’s “inspired response to the situation of entering a competition remotely via the internet.” (http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2009/09/09/you-be-the-judge/) But many others felt that his absence from physical construction meant he wasn’t the artist and certainly didn’t deserve so much money.
I think I agree with a blogger called Sam I Am – http://www.artbash.co.nz/article.asp?id=1421
Sam I Am comments that, “dane’s work only works , really works, if it wins (…) what is really contentious here is that dane’s work was not just dane’s work. dane’s work was a collaboration. dane’s work was begun by dane but finished by charlotte. in fact, before it won dane’s work hardly existed at all. it was not even art – it was a challenge. a challenge made directly to charlotte and one she chose to accept.”
Asking whether or not Dane Mitchell’s work is ART is beside the point, there has always been controversy and in the global world of today anything goes and anything is worth trying. As a new student to the arts world I took heart from the introductory quote to Waikato Museum’s online catalogue for the 2009 National Contemporary Art Awards:
“The good thing about art is… it’s good to try out this kind of experiment because it doesn’t matter what happens , it’s not dangerous, it’s not life, if you don’t like it you can switch it off, or rent another DVD. Art is something we deliberately let ourselves enter into because we know we can take some mild psychic risk.” Brian Eno, Keynote Address, Luminous Festival, Sydney, June 2009
So, does anyone have any feedback for me?
