Institute of Contemporary Arts

The Cut meets The Hut

Date: 4 August 2008

Ronnie Grebenyuk

The Hut Project is a collaboration between 3 artists: Chris Bird, Ian Evans and Alec Steadman. At the launch, which was our first visit to Nought to Sixty, we were surprised to find The Hut Project had decided to exhibit every single piece of work they'd ever made in one room. It was very different to what I'd seen before and there was a real mix of stuff there was in the gallery; films, sculpture, drawing and text and images that they drew when they were little. My favourite piece of work at the show was the 3D statue. It shows that art can be anything you want it to be. Making art from everyday is a bit like Pop Art. I like Pop Art, it's bright and colourful. Best of all I like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

It was interesting to see The Hut Project's lifetime of art and how it changed and improved, but also weird looking at someone's whole artistic life in a room. We liked the sellotape because if you look really closely at the tape they had hand done it and literally shrinkwrapped the whole thing. It must have taken ages! I wondered what inspired them to come up with these ideas. The Cut decided to find out more so we spoke to Ian Evans from The Hut Project.

What inspired you to do this retrospective?

'Old Kunst' does several things for us. Firstly it's a parody of the trap that artists often fall into with their first 'big gig' - chuck everything at it and end up with a gargantuan incoherent jumble - and a response to the 'emerging' tag-line of Nought to Sixty which is a symptom of the art world's perennial fetishism of the 'new new'. So we took the idea of emerging to its logical extreme by showing all our 'art' from very early childhood onwards: scribbles, baby footprints, glove puppets, GCSE works, indulging in the epic stupidity of hanging this massive show for only a week.

It was also a way to see if we could detect the influence the of the ICA within the works we had made whilst we were learning to make art. We're interested in the way art functions as a system in relation to society and wanted to explore the ways in which art's language trickles down through history, both internally as a visual language learned by artists and also externally as it feeds into the culture outside of art. So there's a question here about the ICA - if this institution has been pivotal in platforming key artists over the last 60 years then could we find the traces of those artists' work in this personal archive of art-making?

What's your favourite bit of work in your show?

For me Alec made all the best (which means worst) work in the show. I think Chris and I were far too serious. Alec made all the clangers. I particularly like the red pineapple painting which I thought he'd done when he was six or something but turned out to be from his GCSE, and also his portrait of the queen in the style of Andy Warhol.

That said my favourite thing about the show is that it exists as a single object outside of the individual works in the show. 'Old Kunst' as a work of art really exists as a single image that we had taken of the show. We insisted that this mass of stuff be presented and understood as a single object, an idea in relation to the context (which also happens through the title), so the work functions on a tension between an exhibition experience for the viewer - probably an underwhelming one, hopefully an amusing one - and this image which captures the whole show and gives the work a function and a life outside of the experience of the show as an editioned work for sale, inserting itself back into the visual 'trickle-down'.

Why is working in a team better than working alone?

That's quite a complex question! We understand that no-one works in isolation, that all art-making comes from a discursive, so it seemed natural to us to formalise the discussion we were having in the form of a collaboration..

Recommend a Friend: You favourite creative website right now?

UBUWEB. Mainly because it hosts a work called 'The Pressures of the Text' by Peter Rose, check it out:

www.ubu.com/film/rose_pressures.html

 

 

 

In order to post a comment, please log in:

E-mail:

Password:
Login
Forgotten your password?
Then enter your e-mail in the box above and click: Send Password

Not Registered? Then register here now.