A bit of context: I love this slightly condescending piece in 'the Volksrant' but to fully appreciate it you have to know some of the background. The organisers of this group show had led the artist's to believe that the budget was going to be bigger than it was. As you can imagine, finding this out half way through the development of the artwork and having to start again was very annoying. I decided to use my frustration as the central component of the piece. Irritation was compounded further by the inaccurate accompanying catalogue for this exhibition which the journalist has obviously used as a reference. To gloss over the real financial issues at the core of the work, the catalogue instead makes tenuous references to 'Dutch frugality' and 'sheep' in it's interpretation. The couple who ran the farm were lovely but the article in the paper also quotes her as saying "I can keep it!" - A clue that suggests the organisers had misled them as well. The work actually had to go back to England where someone had already agreed to buy it.
Artists on the edge of the country by Fred De Vries
The pig pen of the fat black boar
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...And the day trippers on their folding chairs will shrug their shoulders when they see the work of the English angry young man Chris Dobrowolski. Cheap Cheap is a sound installation set up in the petting zoo, in the pig pen for the fat black boar. The enticing 'cheap, cheap, cheap' sounds, in different pitches, come from two bird boxes covered with pennies.
It is an indictment by Dobrowolski against the contemporary art world, where everything is quickly considered 'too expensive', but also a reference to Dutch frugality and to the sheep mentality of man ('cheap' sounds a bit like 'sheep'). "I can keep it," says the woman who manages the children's farm. "In the beginning I was driven crazy by that ssip sip sip, but now I don't hear it anymore. Quite a lot of people pass by, with the route map in their hand. Others want to know if they should put money into it. Then I say it's art...It's just a pity that the goats ate the explanation plate." |
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