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British Art Show - Bedwyr Williams (2) - The Open College of the Arts

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British Art Show – Bedwyr Williams (2) thumb

British Art Show – Bedwyr Williams (2)

williams_century_egg6I am extremely lucky with this year’s British Art Show that two of my favourite artists have been selected to take part. One of those is the welsh artist Bedwyr Williams, currently represented by the Limoncello Gallery in London and shortlisted for the Artes Mundi 2017 prize.
Bewdyr Williams loves a story. He reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous line ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. William’s blends fiction, memory, absolute porkers and so called facts in ways which are engaging and have something of the immersive richness of children’s imaginings.
In person his speech is littered by absolute statements that he can’t possibly mean, often followed by an immediate retraction (for example ‘I hate all curators. well, I don’t hate all curators’) which leaves the thing as a kind of thought object for us to experience the visceral jolt of part one, without being able to draw any limiting potential judgements due to the subsequent swift erasure.
His piece about the hotel built with 70 deg angles is a classic. Was there such a hotel? He tells a convincing tale about driving past it and has the original plans etc. and yet the idea seems too odd to be true. When he speaks of being a child wishfully looking up at the glamorous hotel he would never be able to go inside, and then imagining as an adult artist rushing at the acute angled corners until his face was squished to a fleshy anvil I am again reminded of the pleasure his art gives me and how that is related to the pleasure it appears to give him.  He has said “I am not a thinky artist – I don’t get a concept and translate it into art like a Jpeg” But of course he is a thinky artist – he just orchestrates a much broader range of modes of thinking in his work – and I am thankful for it. A brief google trawl brings up a 2006 BBC article about the demolition of the 70 degree hotel – this proving that the tallest tale I have heard from Bedwyr turns out to be completely true.
For the British Art Show Williams is showing the results of a residency commissioned from him by the Cambridge University Museums. This was a brave commission and I applaud the panel. Unfortunately artist’s residencies are a breeding ground for mediocrity. Many artists make a decent albeit lacklustre career from them but the commissioning is often unfocussed and characterised by an underlying conservatism. William’s on the other hand has burst in like Grayson Perry’s unreliable younger brother and made a subversive and powerfully imagined video piece about how museums capture objects and meaning and how that selection and categorisation itself becomes historical as the objects endure but meaning and significance move across them like cloud shadows.


Posted by author: Emma Drye

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