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Rethinking Art: Ken Aptekar at the V&A
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Ken Aptekar |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
GIVE & TAKE was a collaborative exhibition initiated in 1998 by the Serpentine Gallery, London, in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum. The purpose of the exhibition was to invite contemporary artists to perform 'interventions' in the museum's collections. The process involves the creation of conceptual work that comments on and alters our perception of old familiar works. The issues this exercise raises are the issues of modern society itself: diversity and renegotiations of power. Below we take an in-depth look at the work of Ken Aptekar, an artist who has made significant contributions in this field. |
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| Aptekar on his methods. | |
 en Aptekar appropriates--borrows--imagery from historic works of art to form the basis of his paintings. He transforms the original images by, for example, reducing them to fragments or depicting them in brown or grey tones to suggest faded reproductions. He paints the final works on wood panels in the manner of the 'old masters'. Aptekar's own painting style is not intended as a direct copy of the originals, but rather strives to evoke or refer to them. |
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| Aptekar invites participation. | |
Aptekar's paintings also include texts about the artist's life or derived from discussions with museum visitors invited by Aptekar to respond to historic paintings. These responses, which often reveal deeply personal aspects of the participants' identities, are sandblasted onto glass panels, which are bolted to the surface of his paintings. In this way the verbal responses of the viewer and the visual responses of the artist are brought together. |
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| The artist's intention is only half the story. | |
For Q&A, V&A, Aptekar organised group discussion sessions with individuals reflecting the cultural diversity of the V&A's visitors, for example art school graduates and Afro-Caribbean senior citizens. The paintings discussed were selected by Aptekar from those usually on display in the Henry Cole Wing of the V&A, together with other paintings from the collection, some previously in store. Aptekar creates his pictures by first making studies on a computer, manipulating scanned images of the original paintings and overlaying the edited texts. |
For the installation of his work, Aptekar has chosen to maintain the historic style of display of the European Galleries in the Henry Cole Wing, in which the paintings are hung in a pattern to articulate much of the wall space (the fixing holes still visible in the walls are the ghostly traces of the paintings that normally hang here). He has placed his works alongside most of the original paintings that were his sources. As was once common, each gallery is organised according to subject matter such as landscapes, animal paintings, literary themes or portraits. Aptekar titled the four galleries displaying his work: Landscapes Short on Land, The Thing About Tea, Man's Best Friend and Who's Who--categories that directly relate to perceived foreign stereotypes of British culture as an insular; tea-drinking nation preferring animal to human company, and entrenched in the hierarchies of the class system. |
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| How rewarding are 'interventions'? | |
Aptekar's categories also draw attention to the fact that the collections of the V&A are grouped according to country of origin, thus segregating objects of British manufacture from those made by 'foreigners', many from British colonies. Examples of non-British objects are generally seen in relation to British examples that form centrepieces of the collections. This method of presenting cultural artefacts no longer reflects the evolving demographics of post-colonial Britain. The texts included in Aptekar's paintings underscore the rich cultural difference that characterise British identity today. |
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