Graham Green to prove that art is not a progression, but an addition creating a culture
-
- Brad Troemel, »FOUNTAIN«, 2008, 8 foot tall pyramid of assorted beer cans, gold paint poured from the top outwards, tea light candles.
-
- Cyprien Gaillard, The Recovery of Discovery (The Beer Pyramid), 2011, 72.000 bottles of Efes beer).
-
- Jeffu Warmouth, JEFFUMarket Pyramid, 2001, aluminum cans with custom labels.
-
- Rob Pruitt, Sculpture for teenage boys (Miller pyramid, 1990.
-
- Peter Sutherland, 2014. Courtesy of The Still House Group.
As Mr. Simchowitz has noticed, the pyramid recently presented by Peter Sutherland in occasion of his solo show at The Still House is similar to a piece by Rob Pruitt dated 1990. Is this similarity diminishing Sutherland’s idea? We don’t thinks so, and this passage from “Travels with my aunt” by Graham Green explains you why:
Tooley sat with me and drank one of her cokes. I asked her what her boyfriend’s project was.
“He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment – say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity – do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate – you wouldn’t break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in another.”
The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, “Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?”
“Not Heinz, Campbell’s,” Tooley said. “That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. ‘Of course,” I said, “Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell’s are long like English pillar-boxes.’ I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn’t the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age – only he didn’t call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn’t have been any use at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.”
Graham Green, “Travels with my aunt”, 1969 (chapter XIV).
January 9, 2015
