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Making Art Work
Published in June 2007
Conceptualise this. You fancy yourself as a Young British Artist. You're sitting in a pub and you've just had this great idea (hic!) for a site-specific installation. You're gonna cover Nelson's Column with a giant condom! Yeah, what a statement. So you scribble it on the back of a fag packet and nest morning you think, er, how am I going to make that? Then you remember. You're an artist! You don't have to "make" things. You just call up the Mike Smith Studio and get them to make it for you. They'll work everything out, do the technical drawings, research the materials, source that special resin or whatever you need, and make that huge condom. They might even be able to suggest a title. Nelson's Condom, say, or Give Sheath a Chance. Hey, it might even win the Turner!
To judge by Making Art Work: Mike SmithStudio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley, £39.95), such a daft scenario is less far fetched than you might imagine. This book is a celebration of the work of the "star fabricator" Mike Smith, without whom most of the YBAs would not have been able to produce the conceptual detritus that clutters up the Saatchi and Tate collections and provokes so many satisfying column inches of art-rage.
Smith trained as an artist and is, arguably, still working as one. Over the last decade and a half he has been beavering- away in the Old Kent Road to produce works of art "by" Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread and others. Now he has decided its time for a bit of recognition. But the book goes further than that. By revealing in some cases how much of the input comes from Smith, it begs the whole question of who the author of these "seminal" works of art really is. It blows a long hard whistle on the pretensions of some of these great clients of his.
So who is Mike Smith?' He say’s he's in artist who decided he was "interested in a wider range of ideas than I could generate myself”. He sees himself as a problem-solver. Many of the artists who use him agree. They get him to fabricate their works because if they went to an ordinary metalwork shop or carpenter or engineer they'd get funny looks or he asked to pay in advance. Smith is attuned to their artistic way of thinking. He knows what they want sometimes better than they do themselves. "People come here with an idea of something they want to do," he says, "and they don't know how to do it." (Of course not, they're artists.) "They have an image of it," and Smith & Co have to "make the physical expectation of that image real".
A classic example of a Smith production was Rachel Whiteread's site-specific installation for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. "Monument" simply inverted a transparent copy of the plinth on top of the original. What a marvelous expression of the concept of utter vacuity! It's a plinth, and it's empty. Wow!
What most people don't realise is that this factuous visual gag took Smith three years to make and employed 23 people in the process. Smith had an "enormous sense of satisfaction", he says, "in managing to pull something off like that."
Smith was also responsible for Hirst's formaldehyde tanks and other big glass structures for artists like Gavin Turk and Alex Hartley. The latter rather ungraciously categorises a typical Mike Smith production as "minimalism with a twist" and "bombastic work with super slick finishes". Often it involves taking some ordinary object and simply making a very large version of it. Examples include Mona Hatoum's oversize vegetable grater, Michael Landy's giant wood chipper, and Darren Almond's huge flip-clocks and calendars. But Claes Oldenburg was making massive sculptures of household objects way back in the 60s. So if an artist has a not very original idea and gets someone else to do all the actual work of creating it, who deserves the credit.
William Furlong, whose interviews of Smith and his client form the bulk of the text, wonders whether, if artists are no longer making and doing things for themselves, they are more like Renaissance painters who employed a "studio" of assistants? This ignores the difference between mixing a few paints or colouring in the background, and completing the entire work. A better model might be the ghost or editor who actually writes the celebrity's book, or the record' producer who turns the budding (or fading) pop star's effort’s into a proper song. Furlong asks about the nature of the "collaboration" and whether Smith should be able to claim some portion of authorship of finished works. Naturally, the artists deny this hotly, though Whiteread is astute enough to suggest Smith should keep a copyright in his processes. (Presumably, if anyone then tries to rip something off Smith can litigate instead of the cash-strapped artist.) Patsy Craig, the studio's archivist, complains that the fine art world tends to be "just mildly egocentric where issues of accreditation are concerned".
Case in point being the ‘ANDY WARHOL ART AUTHENTICATION BOARD, INCORPORATED.’ Instead of embracing Warhol’s hands off approach to his art, this now infamous group are attempting to deny the fact that much of his work was made by assistants in studios which he had never visited. This robs Warhol of his rightful place in history as the artist who popularised the contemporary conceptual art scene and the recognition of being the major influence of the YBA’s. The board are relegating him to being a distant descendent of Rubens and David.
Smith himself is more equivocal about his claim to some of the limelight. "I want the studio to have recognition," he says, "but not at the expense of-not being in business." In other words, he knows which way his bread is buttered: by keeping his clients flattered. He freely admits: "I have made things which aren't that interesting." But he daren't say that to the artists, lest they take their funded commissions elsewhere or, like Dada Hirst himself, set up their own little Warholy factories.
PS: That fourth plinth is now empty again, with plans for a new installation every other year. The current shortlist includes a car covered in pigeon-shit (by Sarah Lucas) and a pair of phallic wooden torpedoes (by Stefan Gec). It'll be funded by the Ken Livingstone Foundation or "KLF" as it's known in the trade. Anyone with a wacky idea should perhaps send it to Mike Smith's studio. As his client Darren Almond says: "You can really have fun with Mike and suggest the most ridiculous of ideas and he will take them seriously and come back to you in two days with probably a solution."
To judge by Making Art Work: Mike SmithStudio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley, £39.95), such a daft scenario is less far fetched than you might imagine. This book is a celebration of the work of the "star fabricator" Mike Smith, without whom most of the YBAs would not have been able to produce the conceptual detritus that clutters up the Saatchi and Tate collections and provokes so many satisfying column inches of art-rage.
Smith trained as an artist and is, arguably, still working as one. Over the last decade and a half he has been beavering- away in the Old Kent Road to produce works of art "by" Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread and others. Now he has decided its time for a bit of recognition. But the book goes further than that. By revealing in some cases how much of the input comes from Smith, it begs the whole question of who the author of these "seminal" works of art really is. It blows a long hard whistle on the pretensions of some of these great clients of his.
So who is Mike Smith?' He say’s he's in artist who decided he was "interested in a wider range of ideas than I could generate myself”. He sees himself as a problem-solver. Many of the artists who use him agree. They get him to fabricate their works because if they went to an ordinary metalwork shop or carpenter or engineer they'd get funny looks or he asked to pay in advance. Smith is attuned to their artistic way of thinking. He knows what they want sometimes better than they do themselves. "People come here with an idea of something they want to do," he says, "and they don't know how to do it." (Of course not, they're artists.) "They have an image of it," and Smith & Co have to "make the physical expectation of that image real".
A classic example of a Smith production was Rachel Whiteread's site-specific installation for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. "Monument" simply inverted a transparent copy of the plinth on top of the original. What a marvelous expression of the concept of utter vacuity! It's a plinth, and it's empty. Wow!
What most people don't realise is that this factuous visual gag took Smith three years to make and employed 23 people in the process. Smith had an "enormous sense of satisfaction", he says, "in managing to pull something off like that."
Smith was also responsible for Hirst's formaldehyde tanks and other big glass structures for artists like Gavin Turk and Alex Hartley. The latter rather ungraciously categorises a typical Mike Smith production as "minimalism with a twist" and "bombastic work with super slick finishes". Often it involves taking some ordinary object and simply making a very large version of it. Examples include Mona Hatoum's oversize vegetable grater, Michael Landy's giant wood chipper, and Darren Almond's huge flip-clocks and calendars. But Claes Oldenburg was making massive sculptures of household objects way back in the 60s. So if an artist has a not very original idea and gets someone else to do all the actual work of creating it, who deserves the credit.
William Furlong, whose interviews of Smith and his client form the bulk of the text, wonders whether, if artists are no longer making and doing things for themselves, they are more like Renaissance painters who employed a "studio" of assistants? This ignores the difference between mixing a few paints or colouring in the background, and completing the entire work. A better model might be the ghost or editor who actually writes the celebrity's book, or the record' producer who turns the budding (or fading) pop star's effort’s into a proper song. Furlong asks about the nature of the "collaboration" and whether Smith should be able to claim some portion of authorship of finished works. Naturally, the artists deny this hotly, though Whiteread is astute enough to suggest Smith should keep a copyright in his processes. (Presumably, if anyone then tries to rip something off Smith can litigate instead of the cash-strapped artist.) Patsy Craig, the studio's archivist, complains that the fine art world tends to be "just mildly egocentric where issues of accreditation are concerned".
Case in point being the ‘ANDY WARHOL ART AUTHENTICATION BOARD, INCORPORATED.’ Instead of embracing Warhol’s hands off approach to his art, this now infamous group are attempting to deny the fact that much of his work was made by assistants in studios which he had never visited. This robs Warhol of his rightful place in history as the artist who popularised the contemporary conceptual art scene and the recognition of being the major influence of the YBA’s. The board are relegating him to being a distant descendent of Rubens and David.
Smith himself is more equivocal about his claim to some of the limelight. "I want the studio to have recognition," he says, "but not at the expense of-not being in business." In other words, he knows which way his bread is buttered: by keeping his clients flattered. He freely admits: "I have made things which aren't that interesting." But he daren't say that to the artists, lest they take their funded commissions elsewhere or, like Dada Hirst himself, set up their own little Warholy factories.
PS: That fourth plinth is now empty again, with plans for a new installation every other year. The current shortlist includes a car covered in pigeon-shit (by Sarah Lucas) and a pair of phallic wooden torpedoes (by Stefan Gec). It'll be funded by the Ken Livingstone Foundation or "KLF" as it's known in the trade. Anyone with a wacky idea should perhaps send it to Mike Smith's studio. As his client Darren Almond says: "You can really have fun with Mike and suggest the most ridiculous of ideas and he will take them seriously and come back to you in two days with probably a solution."
© My Andy Warhol 2008