Why I sent my Autumn painting to the ART BIN

By OCA student Alice Vale

Have you heard about Michael Landy’s Art Bin?  It’s at the South London Gallery until 14 March and anyone can take along a work they wish to be shot of and dump it in a 600 square metre skip.   The press might be latching on to this happening as proof that all contemporary art is rubbish, but that is not the intention of the event.  As a ‘monument to artistic failure’, the Art Bin gives artists the chance to recognize a failed work and do something constructive with it, ie. chuck it!  How much more liberating this is than turning it to the studio wall and hoping it will improve by itself, or endlessly repainting till it’s as dead as a doorpost.  To quote Michael Landy  (he who destroyed all his earthly goods in 2001 in a performance called Break Down), “There’s nothing more joyous that getting rid of something that’s in the way of creativity”.  Peter Blake, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Tracey Emin have already contributed.

My tutor had liked my proposal for the Autumn painting, so I didn’t give the idea a second thought.  The preliminary work didn’t go well from the start, and I fiddled endlessly with the composition, but it never crossed my mind to reconsider the whole concept of the picture.  I ploughed on hoping if I improved the colour here and the composition there it would pan out.  It didn’t.  My tutor, perhaps not wishing to discourage me so early on, suggested some tweaking.  Only weeks later, when I was reading about Art Bin, did it hit me that the whole painting was misconceived from the start.  What a relief to dump it, what a weight off the mind!   Now I feel free to come up with something fresh, something completely different, and this time I will think about it a lot more before I dive in.

To submit a work for the Art Bin visit art-bin.co.uk  If you can’t get to the Gallery in person you can send your work in by post. But hurry, there is only two weeks to go.

Tags: Art Bin, Creative Destruction