During the jolly season of Christmas, a group of Year 12 and 13 A Level Art students embarked upon a trip to the Saatchi Gallery of South West London; previously accredited the fifth most visited exhibition in London. With the standard and quantity of work presented this year, how entry is still free is beyond me. The current theme displaying until 30th April 2012 is Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany featuring 24 German artists generously spread across 14 substantial galleries, each confusing the viewer in one way or another. To say the Germans adore junk is an understatement; with artists such as Ida Ekblad throwing together random bath utilities and roadside residue into concrete, I wouldn’t be surprised if her clothing accessories consisted of materials she couldn’t be bothered to recycle. But it works. This unconventional art is what makes Saatchi special, it’s far from boring which keeps us as viewers intrigued and find ourselves fascinated by simplistic objects made extraordinary. Elsewhere, inevitably, there is some strong two-dimensional work. André Butzer representing nothing other than the epitome of Expressionism art boasts 12 large scaled impasto paintings, the majority so rackety that Butzer refused to offer them a title. Generally, I felt the sculptors had the largest effect; Markus Selg inspired my artwork, justifying my use of organic materials to add a little umph to my clay. Nevertheless, I found myself excited by the experimentation and invention on show in almost every single room.
Once we had finished perusing, the students were taken into a small room which provided us with magazines, newspapers, scissors and glue. Inspired by Kirstine Roepstorff, our task was to create our own interpretation of ‘You Are Being Lied To’ with relevance to the theme we were currently studying. Even though the concept of cutting and sticking onto a piece of paper seems a little amateur even for Primary school kids, we were forced to use the full potential of our imagination. We had limited resources available to represent our themes and make this obvious to our audience. Even Roepstorff used this technique but couldn’t elicit a definite interpretation. In our pairs, we worked together combining our themes: Year 12 students represented their idea of Sanctuary while the Year 13s represented their individual Unit 3 themes. I paired with Matilda whose theme at the time was ‘Gluttony’. My theme being ‘Religious Controversy’ didn’t exactly merge in with Matilda’s very well, but we made it work. Gathering whatever scraps we could of food, greed, ostentatious objects, religious symbols and anything depicting ‘followers’ (we used sheep) were glued onto a forced-Hockney-style background. In the end, the collage was vague but with our explanation of the themes, the piece became effective. I valued this experience because it showed that we can truly make art out of anything, we just have to rummage through our complicated minds to make it relevant.
