Rebecca Warren

Audio Guide Transcripts

The Turner Prize 2006 audio guide is available from the ticket office outside the exhibition.
Listen to three clips from the audio guide below.

Audio guide transcripts: Rebecca Warren JJ Charlesworth on Rebecca Warren Andrew Renton on Rebecca Warren

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Rebecca Warren

(REBECCA WARREN) Working with bronze has been interesting and I was trying to treat the bronze in a very similar way to the way I might treat clay. So keeping it very true to its ‘originalness’: that it’s just bronze. Although there are little interventions, the paint interventions. It’s essentially trying to keep the feel the same, so its just bronze, really, in that way. In the most simple way. Because normally it would have a patina. People are used to seeing them as very heavy and black.

And the other interesting thing about the bronzes is that when they’re cast they go to the foundry, and when they come back, they send back the original clay piece and then the cast-- which is then in bronze-- which you have a mould made form. What I saw is when the original ones came back, the clay one was sort of smashed up. And then I’ve re-fixed them, reworked them and then sent them back to the foundry again so that they come back again.

What happens is that you’ll start to see similarities between one from the other. That bits remain exactly the same, they are just recast and bits are added on. So they start to mutate from one to the other. You imagine that you could keep going with that process, so then that one gets sent back, so that they just get further and further away from the original.

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JJ Charlesworth on Rebecca Warren

(JJ CHARLESWORTH) My name is JJ Charlesworth, I am a freelance art critic and writer on contemporary art. I have known Rebecca’s work for a couple years and have always liked it.

NARRATOR: We asked him: what attracted you to the work originally?

(JJ CHARLESWORTH) Rebecca’s work was very much against the grain of what I would call politically correct art. This is a woman artist making work about women’s bodies, but in a way which was anarchic and funny and both self-deprecating and also self-celebrating.

With the vitrines Rebecca puts together things which are entirely ephemeral and everyday and ordinary and, in fact, quite worthless, but once you do put them together and present them as if they have some collective meaning, do eventually take on some role of performing relationships between themselves.

Rebecca’s work is inherently difficult for people who want to stay serious about art all the time because although she is a very serious artist she does have a sense of the playful and the anarchic. She is quite an anarchist in a way. And the humour is precisely to do with shaking up the sense of seriousness. And the way in which she kind of grabs hold of what often, especially in the clay and bronze sculptures, was a male medium. I think that’s where it gets exciting because there’s a kind of short circuiting of this very kind of contemporary idea that sculpture is now something that we don’t really want to get our hands dirty with because that’s what macho old drunk men used to do in the 20th century. And so there’s a sense in which what she is doing is quite inappropriate, it’s a little bit embarrassing. Women shouldn’t be messing around with these rather anachronistic modes of expression. And that’s precisely where I think it gets its energy and its humour and its subversive charm. And I think that is very powerful and it gives it a very intense drive and presence.

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Andrew Renton on Rebecca Warren

(ANDREW RENTON) Rebecca was nominated for a body of work that seems to connect itself just brilliantly to a whole history of art making. It looks like sculpture, it looks like the history of art, but not quite. And that twist is where the work really lies. It’s not well finished, it’s not well made, it shows you how its made because its not really properly resolved. And what’s really kind of thrilling is to see an artist who is actually operating on quite a conceptual level, but nevertheless grappling with it and solving the problems with an incredible physicality in terms of the work.

NARRATOR: And we asked him how the vitrines on the wall fit in with her freestanding sculptures:

(ANDREW RENTON) Again a critique of how we look at things in the museum, the vitrine that’s meant to guide our eyes, that’s meant to protect this rather precious object that is inside it. But her vitrines are kind of funky, slightly manky, lopsided, some of the stuff that should actually be inside the vitrines is actually plopped on top.

She likes to subvert our expectations. She’s made works in video, in photography, there’s a whole body of work that she has been recognised for. And I would say more than anyone else you could say of Rebecca that she was an artist’s artist.

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