Mark Wallinger

Sadly I couldn't find a picture of this one. Mark Wallinger's A Real Work of Art (1995) was a horse. A racing horse that he bought, named A Real Work of Art and entered into races.

The idea was to take further the idea of a readymade, not only by claiming a thing as a work of art but by just letting it go about its normal business (running races, doing horsey things). He saw the idea of bringing a readymade into a gallery context nowadays as a rather conservative gesture, kind of hiding under Duchamp's skirts.

So, what was to happen would be that his 'work' would get 'disseminated' into bookies nationwide. Sadly, the horse was injured after one race and had to be retired, so that didn't really happen.

The fascinating thing about naming a live animal as a work of art is that from that point onwards everything it effects in any way is arguably part of the work. The work has no existential limitations(!) in a way that I can only compare to Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave, which also implements living humans directly as part of the titled 'work'. Mind job.

Jeremy Deller

The Battle Of Orgreave (2001)

Here's where I regurgitate what I learned from my Intertextuality essay.

Deller's work rarely (if ever) goes in galleries. Documentation does, but not the work itself (like much of Richard Long's work, Sarah!). A lot of his work is so collaborative that his collaboration makes up most of the work, and it is often temporary/performative so it defies exhibition. The Battle of Orgreave is a good example - a massive re-enactment of one of the most violent clashes between miners and police in the 1984/5 miners' strike. It's actually easy to miss that he's an artist at all, and his work still stands up if you forget that it's art.

ESSAY QUOTE!

For Deller, the ‘art’ side of his work takes a back seat to his sense of social responsibility. Or to look at it another way, the art is so closely entwined with the social or political in his work that if you negate the art it doesn’t leave a gaping hole in your experience or interpretation. The participants in Orgreave didn’t need it to be an art event for it to be significant, although as Deller states, it wouldn’t have happened without him [he says that being an artist puts you in an interesting position where you get to do things that wouldn't happen normally]. It takes little effort to conceive of any of Deller’s works removed from the art sphere and for them to retain all credibility as socially involved, dialogical, if sometimes a little wacky, public endeavours.

So I reckon Deller's work is so far outside the white cube (as a concept) that it's only just art. Or you could argue that it's more like art than any other gallerised stuff. It's definitely constructive, which I fucking love.