Dear James
A Letter by Richard Wentworth
You asked me for a title. How's An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty? King's Cross is baffling. We've been chasing it for three years and it's still eluding us. I both admire and fear it, but in the right proportions that's exactly the combination which makes a project take off. This week all the magnetic filings are beginning to line up - meetings with table tennis manufacturers (French, of course), organisers of table tennis tournaments, people who make stairwells in second-hand shipping containers, periscope makers, the people who used to draw the A-Z freehand, street by street, and, vitally, you securing our use of the abandoned plumber's chants on York Way, Coincidentally, demolition began yesterday in Railway Street, so the feeling of instability is moving to the next phase. ‘Lost Property’ writ large and physical.
Image: A map of King's Cross, London covered in pins. Photograph: Richard Wentworth
This is art as geography, as social history, as mass observation. – Richard Dorment, The Telegraph
Selected Press
Thanks to Wentworth’s engaging, humorous take on everything he touches, the show is hugely entertaining - so much so that I forgot to ask myself what it all had to do with art. Then, after I’d left the show and stepped out into York Way, I realised that the work of art wasn’t to be found on the premises of General Plumbing Supplies, but in the streets around me. ... Wentworth’s genius is to make us see the world from the fresh and original perspectives that he does, and to make us aware that, if London is a living city, it is simultaneously a dying one. Places we have known all our lives will become a memory in 10 years’ time. – Richard Dorment, The Telegraph, 4 September 2002
The project’s title subverts the dreary legislation of preservation, and raises the question: should we, or can we, preserve what is wonderful about this place? The past is at the centre of Unnatural Beauty, but if it merely indulged in picturesque decay it would be no more that National Trust nostalgia. In fact Wentworth has achieved the opposite: a joyous riposte to those who think change means loss, and for whom character and identity (particularly Englishness) exist only in the past. – Michael Copeman, The Architects’ Journal, 26 September 2002
A British Library employee and a cab driver are hotly tipped to meet in the final of an unlikely art project in King’s Cross. In an old plumbing supplies centre in York Way, art has made a giant leap to meet table tennis in a quirky bid to celebrate the area’s diverse identity before it is lost to redevelopment. Ping, as it is called, has become a hot phenomenon with residents and workers, and the knockout tournament’s leader board reads like a list of local companies and landmarks. – Fiona Sibley, Highbury & Islington Express, 25 October 2002
Richard Wentworth
Richard Wentworth is a sculptor and photographer, urban explorer, walker and talker. He has played a leading role in New British Sculpture since the end of the 1970s. His work, encircling the notion of objects and their use as part of our day-to-day experiences, has altered the traditional definition of sculpture. By transforming and manipulating industrial and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification. These sculptural arrangements and assisted ready-mades play with the juxtaposition of objects that bear no relation to each other, as well as with a range of materials taken out of their original contexts.
Wentworth has lived in King's Cross, London for more than 25 years.
Images: (left) Richard Wentworth and James Lingwood on the roof of General Plumbing Supplies, 2002. Photograph: Unknown. (above) Plastic bottle wedged between young tree and its support, York Way, King's Cross. Photograph: Richard Wentworth
Who made this possible?
Credits
An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty was supported by Bloomberg
Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England, Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
