Piles of bricks became art. Bags of rubbish became art. An empty room with flickering light bulbs was so arty that it won a £20,000 prize. It seemed that only curators and critics knew what art was, but two weeks ago even they were caught out.
The Royal Academy selected for its Summer Exhibition a plinth that had become separated from its sculpture. Overnight it went from a slate slab and bone-shaped stand to an item worthy of display alongside works by Damien Hirst and Eduardo Paolozzi. In the words of David Hensel, its astonished creator: “It became art because it was chosen by eminent artists.”
Now Times readers can decide just how worthy it is by bidding for it in our online auction. Not only is it a piece of art history, but half of the proceeds will go to charity.
Hensel, a 64-year-old sculptor and jeweller based in East Grinstead, Surrey, was a relatively unknown artist until he created One Day Closer to Paradise. Now he is an international celebrity because the plinth has become a symbol of the follies of contemporary art.
“I do get the strong impression that even curators and eminent artists don’t understand art fully,” he says. “To rely on experts in the arts, which is about clear vision, is to reveal the dangers of experts.”
The artist, an easy-going gent with messianic hair and roaming stubble, believes that some art critics should be “boiled down for soup for the homeless”, but has a more liberal attitude towards art itself.
The plinth is art, he says, because you can identify with it. “It has got some kind of presence. The people who selected it thought that it works. It has got that kind of balance of certainty and mystery, freedom and control.”
It took Hensel two months to create One Day Closer to Paradise, a 45cm (18in) resin cast of a laughing face. He spent 60-odd days perfecting the head, but realised that he had to find a way to stop it from rolling over. He spent an afternoon fashioning the now famous stand from a block of slate and a bulbous piece of wood.
The piece — which he hopes will fetch more than £3,000 — is the culmination of a 40-year career that began when he gave up medicine for art. Until he reached university, Hensel was destined to be a doctor. “My father was a doctor. My mother was a doctor. My older brother and sister had both become doctors and got married to doctors.”
He applied for, and won, a place at King’s College, Cambridge, to study medicine, but decided after two years that being a physician was not for him. “I realised I didn’t want to do medicine because I hated people and didn’t want to make them better. Different people need different communication channels. I’ve been much more happy interacting with people through art.”
Two years ago he had his first exhibit in the Summer Exhibition. The Old Bush Award, a bronze cherub pleasuring himself, was intended as an award for bungling politicians. “I imagined it as a trophy for the great world leaders in honour of George Bush. It could be awarded to people for self-gratification and making a complete balls-up.”
But balls-ups are art too. The academy’s blunder is a piece of performance art in the same way that Duchamp’s urinal was, he argues. “The people in the selection committee are eminent artists. They have been given the right to exercise their aesthetic sense. A piece of garbage on the floor can [be art] if you look at it in a certain way.”
David Mach, the academician who jointly approved the plinth, agreed that the piece has merit even though it was unintentional. “It’s a quirky little piece like that. We were quite puzzled by it, and that’s why we liked it.”
Hensel has renamed the plinth Another Day Closer to Paradise, echoing the spirituality in the original title because he likes the idea that the head itself has been whisked away to paradise. “Perhaps that is what happens when you ascend to Heaven. You become invisible like my sculpture.” The head has not gone to Heaven as such. It descended, after its day of judgment, to the basement of the Royal Academy, where it is awaiting collection by its owner.
The plinth will remain on display until the Summer Exhibition ends on August 20, when it will go to its new owner.
THE SEVEREST ART CRITICS? WELL, IT’S USUALLY THE GALLERY CLEANERS . . .
Gustav Metzger’s Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, a transparent binliner stuffed with paper and cardboard, was also the victim of a cleaner when it went on display at Tate Britain in August 2004. RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON's VERDICT
It stands on a shelf between a slightly stocky bronze whippet and some complicated little piece of sculptural origami. And, to be honest, you wouldn’t notice it. Your eye skips straight past it. It is so understated: just a piece of shaped wood on a low plinth of slate.
But then art, you remember — despite the antics of the Brit pack — is not always about shock tactics. Sometimes, it’s supposed to be subtle. And perhaps you go back and take a second look. Perhaps — like the selecting panel of the Summer Exhibition — you decide that a submission so manifestly quirky must have a hidden point.
The plinth, after all, is an important element of art — employed since antiquity not simply as a support but as a way of dignifying, of exalting and elevating an art work beyond the common plane of experience. The plinth is the sculptural equivalent of the painter’s frame. And the way in which it relates to a form, sets up rhythms and echoes and expectations.
Alberto Giacometti famously made the plinth a sculptural element in its own right. His emaciated matchstick figures, already so ephemeral, seemed to shrink ever more unreachably into the distance when compared with the solid blocks upon which they were set. David Hensel could almost be using the same tactic in his submission. The tiny piece of wood is so small in comparison with the expanse of slate. It captures the idea of something disappearing.
The original title of the work backs up this impression. One Day Closer to Paradise it is called. Is the artist trying to evoke that gradual diminution that leads towards death? Does that abstracted fragment of bleached bone refer to all the remains of the body as, slowly, it sheds the impediments of the flesh? Even the fine piece of twine that binds it begins to assume significance. Is this the last fragile cord that ties us to this earth? Will it fray and snap?
The surface of the plinth is scratched and scarred and marked with rusty stains. Could these markings evoke the faint residues of a now vanished life? The whole piece begins to seem a little unnerving. The sculpture echoes this unsettled feeling by ignoring conventional rules of composition. The piece of wood seems so randomly placed, so unbalanced that maybe we begin also to feel a little out of kilter — though probably not half as uneasy as we feel when we realise that this piece wasn’t even meant to be an artwork in the first place.
This, after all, might prove — albeit unwittingly — an important art work. It speaks of the foibles of the critic and judge.
HOW TO BID
Click here to bid for David Hensel's plinth
The proceeds will be divided equally between the artist and the leading cancer information charity, Cancerbackup. Shipping costs within the UK will be paid by The Times. The auction begins at 9am today, and ends at 1pm on Thursday, June 29. It is a sealed bid auction and the reserve price is £1,000. The Auction is conducted by Auctionair. Delivery after August 20.
