- Artist
- Amikam Toren born 1945
- Medium
- Glass, glue, wooden shelf and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Overall display dimensions variable
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 2012
- Reference
- T13682
Summary
Simple Fractions 1975 comprises two elements: a glass milk bottle that appears to have been smashed and glued back together, which sits on a small wooden ledge fixed to the wall, and a framed line drawing. The broken milk bottle was found by the artist on a London street. Toren gathered the shards of glass and, applying an archaeological approach to this most humble of objects, carefully reassembled it. In so doing, he was essentially re-making a readymade object. Toren used black glue to restore the milk bottle, in a practice at odds with the customary desire of the conservator or archaeologist to render such repairs invisible. By contrast, the dark lines this creates emphasize the joins between each fragment, forever pointing to the object’s former shattered state. The line drawing that is shown alongside the bottle is a painstaking copy of the lines of black glue that criss-cross the bottle. The historian Richard Dyer has written, ‘it is this lyrical meander that Toren has drawn with infinite care, as if he were mapping the various territories of some unknown country.’ (Dyer 2005, p.155.) Dyer also points out that this ‘“museumification of the utilitarian”, this transformation of the lowly object into high art … will be a recurring theme in Toren’s art’ (ibid.).
The relationship between destruction and the creative act is central to Toren’s practice. Since the 1970s he has been making work that explores the relation between form and content, object and representation by examining the links between destruction and reconstruction. Thus, in his series ‘Of the Times’, he pulps entire copies of The Times newspaper and uses the resulting paste to make paintings (see, for example, Thursday, July 20, 1989 1989 [Tate T13666]); or in his series of ‘Armchair Paintings’, he cuts words and phrases into the surface of paintings found in junk shops (see, for example, Armchair Painting: Untitled 2006 [Tate T13668]). In so doing, he has pursued an extended interrogation of the relationship between sculpture and painting.
Further reading
Richard Dyer, ‘Ceci n’est pas un tableau: The Work of Amikam Toren’, in Third Text, vol.19, issue 2, March 2005, p.155.
Helen Delaney
May 2012
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Explore
- abstraction(8,615)
-
- from recognisable sources(3,634)
-
- man-made(999)
- vessels and containers(2,157)
-
- bottle(289)
- inscriptions(6,664)
-
- map(56)