British Art Center lures kids with candy
In the entrance court of the Yale Center for British Art, three monks garbed in white, heavy drapery fabric and white wig caps each carry a square plastic tub of 180 individually wrapped Twizzlers. Each methodically draws one Twizzler at a time from their tub and stoops down to place it on the ground, arranging it in a series of concentric rings to create a circular labyrinth.
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“It’s the contextualization of art objects,” said Lee. “Once it’s put into a sacred space, a Twizzler is no longer a Twizzler.”
This is, of course, very old hat. See, e.g. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." The problem here, however, is that these "artists" are attempting to make the point without the richness of Duchamp's subtlety. For the real question is whether the Twizzler remains a Twizzeler recontextualized, or even what are the bounds of the recontextualization. Thus, some of the richness of Duchamp's "Fountain" is didactic, causing an infinite regress of questioning, awakening the viewer to the possibility of the non-saturability of any "context" and therefore, the ineluctable contingency of "Fountain's" status as "work of art." This cannot be invoked cleanly with blank pronouncements of status.
Moreover, the use of an object such as a Twizzler might seem to mute the message. For a Twizzler, in or out of the museum would seem to many to have a clear status regardless of that context, as "that which is to be eaten." What one might employ more effectively therefore are what Duchamp referred to as objects to which we are "indifferent." The urinal of no use as such lying on its side in the museum, the snow shovel, "In advance of a Broken Arm" hanging from the ceiling, or even more elusive, the mere shadows of those objects as in T'um in your very own Yale Art Gallery. Of course, nothing could possibly be of true "indifference," but the act of selection (the real heart of the issue, folks, as in a critique of those who would lodge the "creative act" of a landscape artist on the selection of the scene) in the face of this supposed indifference is the way Duchamp uses an absurd though commonplace pronouncement to initiate a cycle of self-reflection.
The costuming seems a bit heavy handed, though fun. Ritual as a force imbuing works or objects with power is also explored many places, again very effectively by Duchamp in his "Standard Stoppages." Here, however, the target is science as opposed to religion, and this ground, less trodden, is perhaps richer for it.
KT