Vulture Magazine The Michaelmas Issue 2013 | Page 7

Is the spectator supposed to be amused
or repulsed by the incongruity?
My journey through the remainder of
the art fair is slightly different after this
discovery; exploring each piece in relation to my own experiences and own
meaning, it’s somewhat therapeutic.
I approach Jennifer Rubell’s ‘Portrait of
the Artist’, a vast white model of a woman
lying on her side with a deep hole where
her womb should be. People are queuing up to curl up inside the hole and
return to the state of an embryo. Is this
a projected and materialised expression
of maternity? Or a desire within man
to return to his original innocent state?
Everything was feeling a bit laboured until I reached David Shrigley’s sculpture of
a woman doing a particularly small poo:
all you can do is laugh at its unadulterated
facetiousness. In a similar vein, I also appreciated Doug Aitken’s ‘you you’ mirror.
Though it’s quite clear that it’s a mirror,
it’s so difficult to make out a reflection in
it that all I observe is my own frustration.
Aitken has anticipated my annoyance by
reflecting the word ‘you’: it is as though
only the concept of myself can be subverted, not my actual self. Very clever.
Art appears in so many forms and formats, the Frieze Fair merely serves to
prove that it is impossible to claim the
superiority of any form over or above any
other: it is the diversity of offerings and
the array of responses from sometimes
bewildered, sometimes amused spectators that reflect its final artistic value.
Beth Hibbert