My Private Museum Without Walls

An oddity that I've pasted into my book from some newspaper or other is a photograph of a tree stump with sprouting twigs on which polystyrene cups have been impaled. I have some doubt that this piece, which works rather well, was just arrived at by a group of people finding a convenient way of disposing of the containers of a quick coffee. Each cup is attached in the same way with two piercings, which must have taken a bit of application. It is titled 'Rubbish art' and reminds me of the witty sculptures by Tony Cragg, in which pieces of furniture have been covered all over with cup hooks or screw-in wooden knobs. But while the coffee tree may be a careful contrivance rather an accidental artwork, perhaps there is such a thing as found art. In a morning walk over Calton Hill and round some of the swanky terraces of Playfair's New Town, I came across this image of a duck. This is a piece of accidental vandal art, formed from one of a number of sandbags tha...

Cornelia Parker in her appearance on BBC 4's series Great Lives , chose Marcel Duchamp. Throughout the programme she emphasised the artist's opposition to 'the retinal', which I take to mean that he wanted to appeal to the mind rather than the eye, conceptually rather than visually. I have in my scrapbook a photograph of Parker's famous work which involved the blowing-up of a garden shed. It was made into an installation by somehow suspending the wooden fragments and lighting them within an enclosed space, so that shadows are cast on walls, ceiling and floor. It seems to me that the result is definitely visual. And wonderfully so.  Looking at the careful arrangements of the elements of the shattered hut, with the placement of the intact window frame and the various planks standing out from an overall texture of small fragments, I would go so far as to say, that it is a triumph of calculated composition over aleatory effect. It is not the explosion that gives...

I have only one image by Marcel Duchamp in my scrapbook. It is the painting The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes , related to the more famous Nude Descending a Staircase . It shows Duchamp as a better painter than any of the Italian Futurists, though he  is much more famous for Fountain , the ‘readymade’ of a urinal signed R. Mutt, and The Large Glass. Cornelia Parker chose Marcel Duchamp for Radio Four’s series Great Lives . She mentioned in the programme Duchamp’s hostility to what he called the retinal, which I take to mean appealing to the eye rather than to the mind, visual rather than conceptual. Parker is famous for the work she achieved by blowing up a garden shed, and I happen to have a photograph of it in my scrapbook. The fragments of the shed are hung on wires, and it is lit so that they create shadows on walls, ceiling and floor. Nothing could be more retinal. Perhaps it could be reassembled, though, like so many current works attracting attention...