Photography, Ways of Living, and Richard Wentworth's Making Do, Getting By

Abstract

‘The primary imperative’ of modern art, according to French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘could be thus formulated: make your life into an artwork’.2 The modern and contemporary artists in Bourriaud's narrative have rejected distinctions between lifestyle, life decisions, and the final production and circulation of their works. ‘To create means to create oneself’; gestures, behaviours, and attitudes are as important as the finished product; all styles and media are available to the artist in this quest. Portable and easy to use, the modern photo and video cameras have presented themselves as ideal tools for practices inscribing themselves ever more seamlessly in the everyday life and lifestyles of artists. Thus British sculptor Richard Wentworth, while still a student at the Royal College of Art, started around 1971 to photograph various arrangements of objects and signs encountered in the street, before even being aware that he could present them as a series of images in their own right. In their first presentation in a 1978 article for the journal Artscribe, he explained: ‘I began seven years ago to make casual notes with the camera, of situations, which attracted me. Intended only as personal reminders, they were often technically poor photographs’.3 Gradually, he realised that there was a thread running through them – ‘they were photographs of how people place things’. Nearly 40 years and many thousands of photographs later, the artist summarised the main subject of this ongoing series, entitled Making Do, Getting By, as ‘any form of adjustment or accommodation’.4