Artwork which is relevant to Dirty White Trash

Lowe's poster ads for the John Lewis Christmas campaign

 

 

Lowe’s advertisement borrows the idea of Tim’s shadow sculpture artwork, Dirty White Trash. We can see that they both use different materials to form the assemblage and then point light to create projected shadows on the wall. However, there is a slight difference between these two artworks. Lowe uses lovely and happy things, such as Christmas gifts to make the assemblage while Tim only uses strange or seemingly useless materials to make the assemblage. In other words, the materials of Lowe’s work are related to the meaning or feeling of the projected shadow but Tim’s artworks do not follow this principle. Therefore, they use different medium to form the assemblage but use the same idea of medium which is light to perform the final work.

 

 

reference link:

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/november/the-ever-blurring-line-between-art-and-advertising

DIRTY WHITE TRASH (WITH GULLS), 1998

 

  This is an artwork created by Tim Noble and Sue Webster entitled ‘Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)’ in 1998. Tim Noble is famous for taking ordinary things, including rubbish and scrap metal or sometimes even taxidermy animals, to make assemblages and then points light to create projected shadows. So, in this work, he used the rubbish he and his partner produced in six months to make the assemblage.

 

  I think this artwork demonstrates a good example of contemporary art. The use of lighting is one of the signatures of contemporary art. Tim Noble made use of light as the medium to project the object which showed two people, a man and a woman, lay against each other enjoying a cigarette and a glass of wine. He needed to master the use of light in order to project the correct image. However, if we have a closer look at the assemblage, it is not hard to find that there seems to be another story there. We can see that there are two seagulls searching food from the rubbish. In addition, if we combine the whole picture together with the object projected in the wall, it is like two people, Tim and Sue, are celebrating in front of their artwork. Therefore, I really like the idea of his artwork which shows that nothing is as it seems. We can have our own thinking about his artwork based on how we look at it.

 

  Moreover, I find the use of the medium very interesting. He made trash to be the medium of this artwork which reminded me of the saying by Marshall McLuhan: ‘medium is the message’. I think this artwork can vividly show how the saying works. In this artwork, trash was used to be the medium. Why he chose rubbish to be the medium? Maybe Tim is telling us that though trash seems to be nothing special, they are special for him. They remarked the memories of him because they explained that times they spent including their experiences, feelings of they spent in six month. So, medium could be the message of the artist.

 

  Finally, in this work, light redefines abstract forms by transforming them into some relatively concrete objects. This is really interesting because his artwork is consisted of both abstraction and concrete objects. However, the object is shadow which is, by nature, virtual. It is not easy to simply distinguish the nature of this artwork. But this is how contemporary art could be. The idea itself is more important than the details. Therefore, Tim’s artworks fit well in the content of contemporary art.