Desert Island Top Five

I like art.  You may have noticed already.  I tend to talk about it quite a bit.  As a result, I sometimes get asked what my favourite artworks are, and to be quite honest I have real trouble answering.  There’s heaps of art I really, really like, and I tend to be able to find the positive points of pretty much anything, but I struggle when it comes down to pinpointing the artworks that are my personal favourites.  At best, in the style of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I can narrow it down to a ‘desert island top five’ artworks I’d want to have with me if stranded in some deserted corner of the globe.

 

Art is experiential.  To count as a real favourite, I think you have to have seen it in the flesh.  In 1917, when Marcel Duchamp titled a store-bought porcelain urinal Fountain, and declared it as art, he pretty much became the ultimate granddaddy of conceptual art (where the ideas being pushed by the artwork are more important than the way in which it was made).  Even though it’s been hugely influential on my arts career, I haven’t actually seen it (well, any of the certified copies on show around the world at least), so I don’t think it should count as a favourite.

 

I feel a bit bad about admitting this, but none of my Desert Island Top Five is Australian.  Or produced by a female artist.  I’m a victim of the European, male-centric history of art.  No need to let me know, I’m well aware...    

 

 

Ken Leslie’s Desert Island Top Five Artworks (in no particular order)

 
 

Donald Judd

Untitled (1972)

http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/donald-judd-untitled-1972-tate-modern-1345216430_b.jpg


 
Donald Judd’s artworks are what you might call an acquired taste.  They’re interesting in an intellectual way.  In a nutshell, Judd’s theory was that he wanted to make artworks that were somewhere between painting and sculpture.  He called these artworks Specific Objects, and they operate in their own little sphere of art.  Untitled (1972) is a perfectly produced brass box sitting in the middle of a huge room in the Tate Modern in London.  You can see how it was constructed, and you can tell that it’s been produced to exact specifications.  Because of its sheen, you can see a blurry, shadow-like reflection of yourself as you approach it.  The artwork is reminding you that you are a viewer in a gallery looking at a piece of art.  It’s the most honest artwork you’ll find.  Art about art, how am I not going to like it?



Mark Rothko

Untitled (c.1950-52)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7TSbE7p08RE/S-2V15

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Another artwork I experienced at the Tate Modern to hit my list was Mark Rothko’s Untitled (c.1950-52).  I’ve talked about this experience before, but I’ll recap for those of you who aren’t regular readers.  When I was at uni, I looked quite closely at Rothko’s work through art journals and slides.  The writing always mentioned the spiritual experience of sharing a space with one of these big, blurry paintings, and in the back of my mind I always thought they were blowing their response way out of proportion to make their article sound ah-may-zing.  Until I stood in front of one myself. Holy guacamole, they were right all along!  It was like a spiritual experience, and I could have stood there for hours just staring.  If my wife didn’t physically move me away (true story), it would have been the security guards at the end of the day.  This was probably the most moving art experience I’ve had to date.

  

Stonehenge

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/stonehenge/whole.jpg

Alright, so Stonehenge isn’t really a piece of art.  It’s definitely not contemporary art, but it’s my list and I’ll include it if I want to.  I was lucky enough to be one of the lucky few to be part of a tour group allowed to actually go up to the stones and touch them.  At a distance, it’s a beautiful arrangement of things in a beautiful landscape; up close, the history and (dare I say it) magic seems to ooze out from the stones themselves.  It’s an amazing experience.  Walking around the stones, I found some graffiti scratched into one of the surfaces.  I was blown away when I worked out that it was a date from the 1800s, but a few moments later I couldn’t believe my eyes when we found a date in Roman numerals.  Running my fingers in those perfectly arranged grooves, I realised that the monument was thousands of years old when the millennia-old graffiti was new and crisp. 

 

Ai Weiwei

Table with two Legs (2005)

http://arttattler.com/Images/Europe/Germany/Munchen/KunstvereinMunchen/

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Ai Weiwei is the artist du jour.  Despite my usual reluctance to jump onto any bandwagon, here he is!  I saw his Table with two Legs (2005) at the Queensland Art Gallery, and immediately loved it.  Made from 350 year old furniture, it’s beautiful sacrilege.   This is an artwork that’s full of contradictions.  Its creation has destroyed a slice of antiquity, but now that it’s in the care of a major gallery, it will be kept in pristine condition in a controlled environment, much better than any private ownership ever would, protecting it forever.  The beautiful, useful object has had its functionality stripped.  It no longer has a utilitarian purpose; its only purpose now is beauty, with no function.  If you asked any history buff, they’d say that the table has been destroyed, but the manner in which the ‘destruction’ occurred was with precision, great care, and perfect craftsmanship.

Andy Warhol

Campbell's Soup Can (1962)

Photographic image of QAGoMA Catalogue

 

To those who know me, seeing Andy Warhol on this list should come as no surprise.  The artwork, however, might be.  When I visited the Warhol retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, there were a few stand-out pieces.  The huge (whole wall sized!) painting full of motorcycle parts and Catholic imagery was amazing, and the famous Disaster Series was so much more powerful than I had expected,  but there was a single ‘soup can’ painting that I thought was head and shoulders above anything else there.  Campbell’s Soup Can (1962) is an incomplete painting, but a complete artwork.  It’s outlined, but not filled in and still has masking tape across it.  I think it tells a hidden story about Andy Warhol himself.  Warhol tends to be branded by his own propaganda, the whole ‘I want to be a machine’ and public obsession with celebrity and fame paints him in a very superficial light, but the thing that often gets forgotten (or ignored) is his incredible eye for design and beauty.  This half-done artwork shows bravery that many artists lack.  Knowing when an artwork is complete, and understanding that that moment doesn’t always happen when your plan says it should is a very, very difficult skill to develop.  Andy got it.
 
So, that’s it.  My Desert Island Top Five.  I’ve got two honourable mentions though... Gimhongsok’s Canine Construction (2009) and Tony Tuckson’s No Title (c.1970s) (That title doesn’t help you in any way, but it’s one that I saw exhibited at the Museum of Brisbane in the early 00s.  Just know that it’s probably the best example of Abstract Expressionism ever.  Ever.).  This idea of favourites really interests me.  I’m quite sure that if I wrote this list again in a year’s time, it would be very different.  Maybe I will and we’ll see what it looks like.
 
I’d love you to add some comments here with your own Desert Island Top Five.  Even a partial list will do.  Share the love, people and let’s see what floats your boat! 

 

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Thanks to Sharne Wolff for her help with this one.  Follow her on twitter, well worth it. @sharnewolff. 

And thanks to the lovely Daena Scheuber whose idea this post was.  Follow her on twitter too!  @DScheuber.

 

The images used in this post were taken from web sources.  All care has been taken to link / credit those sources.  This blog is a not-for-profit type thing, in fact I haven't even added any of those annoying little ads down the side of your screen.