It was a treat and a privilege to share time with Richard Wentworth on 21 May. A sculptor and photographer who delights in the constant encounter between ourselves and the world, and between objects themselves, he extended a similar warm attention to us, his ncas audience assuming an informed and genial complicity between his world view and ours. He relied on us to follow the allusive twists and turns of a talk full of sprightly anecdotes and references (unlike the graceless President Trump, Wentworth knows how to 'weave' his delivery!).
Confronted with the external world, a mainly urban one for Wentworth - as for most of us – the creative act is primarily the dual acts, successively, of discovery and assembly. His inveterate curiosity about the things in his surroundings typically leads him to identify the commonplace, the mundane, the mass-produced, the overlooked and the prosaic; the poetry comes from the putting together he does – or maybe finds - among the chosen elements. The materials of Wentworth's sculptures are mostly ready-made objects like utensils, buckets, packaging, bricks, toys, boardgames, utilitarian chairs and tables.... It's what he does with them: upending, wrapping, cutting up, disfiguring, discolouring, marrying up …. that reveals their metaphorical potential, and prompts our surprise and joyful recognition.
Among so much that was charming about Wentworth's presence and performance were his lightly worn erudition, sly humour, left-field politics (if politics is understood in the broadest sense). Likewise was his regular referring back to the mind and cognitive responses of the child to the world as touchstones for acuity and authenticity. Related to childhood and particularly engaging with Wentworth is his appetite for casual chat. He acknowledged that this could lead him into scrapes, like a few days previously in a local supermarket when he had made uncalled for comments to a young Romanian mother about her baby eating a toy giraffe in its pram!
Since the seventies, Wentworth has taught generations of students in some of the country's most prestigious art schools. Apparently they like to say that, after talking to him and getting to know his work, 'it's like a film of dirt being removed from one's eyes' and that one 'begins to see the world as a Wentworth’, meaning that one suddenly has a heightened awareness of the position of objects in one’s environment, and a refreshed curiosity in how they came to be there and how we might interpret them. That's certainly how it felt to us the other evening. It's surely time now to count Richard Wentworth among our National Treasures along with Hockney and Blake!
Review by Robert Short