An upturned urinal, a spade hanging from the ceiling, an unmade bed, a banana duct-taped to a wall… and now a load of old rope. British artist David Shrigley’s conceptual installation, consisting of ten tons of discarded rope heaped on Stephen Friedman Gallery’s floor, is the latest work to question the value of art.
Titled “David Shrigley: Exhibition of Old Rope,” the solo show opened on Thursday in London. The artist, who is known for his overtly simple paintings branded with even simpler logical fallacies, is the art world king of one-liners. And this show is just that: “a pile of old rope.” The work will set you back £1 million ($1.3 million), which is a snip compared to the $6.2 million paid for Mauricio Cattelan’s readymade duct-taped banana last fall in New York.
Shrigley spent months searching the UK for cast-off rope, much of which was destined for the landfill. A lot of it had a maritime use “from thick cruise ship mooring lines, to slim cords on marker buoys, long lines and crab and lobster pots,” the exhibition text reads. “Other have been salvaged from climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, scaffolders and window cleaning firms.”
So what message is the artist trying to convey? He said the show started with an idiom that old rope has no use. “It’s also hard to recycle, so there’s a lot of it lying around,” Shrigley explained in the exhibition notes. “I thought: what if I turn that into a literal exhibition of old rope. And then say, yes, this is art, and yes, you can buy it for £1 million. The work exists because I’m interested in the value people place on art, and the idiom gave me an excuse to explore that. I think £1 million is a fair price, partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.”
It’s a typically deadpan stance from him. The installation is like a physical manifestation of his work on paper, and it’s easy to imagine the show rendered in his painting style; a rudimentary line drawing of the piled-up rope under the phrase “Money for old rope.”
The exhibition will polarize opinion, like most conceptual art, but its shock value will surely be dampened by the fact this kind of stuff is no longer surprising in the art world. “Readymades,” the term coined by Marcel Duchamp, have been around for more than a century, with the likes of Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, and even Pablo Picasso jumping on the bandwagon long before Tracey Emin’s My Bed made headlines in 1998.
The Guardian’s art writer, Eddy Frankel, made a good point that I think is worth repeating. “Making a snarky comment about the value of art in a gallery that’s struggling to survive financially (Stephen Friedman Gallery announced some pretty huge losses earlier this year) does feel a bit awkward, too,” he wrote. “It’s like Shrigley is saying: ‘You lot would buy any old crap, wouldn’t you?’ Yet this is a gallery that’s having quite a hard time selling any old crap.”
It remains to be seen who, if anyone, is willing to pay £1 million for the “old crap.” But timing is everything, and with another eye-catching Cattelan work hitting the auction block this month in New York, his 18-karat, 100-kg golden toilet, the appetite for conceptual art will be tested.
