Frieze art fair

picture of Tue

Tue Greenfort commission for RSA

 

If you were one of the thousands who visited this year’s Frieze art show in London this October, you may have unwittingly contributed to an artwork commissioned by the RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre.

If, as you were leaving, you threw away some of the mountains of flyers and leaflets you were handed during your visit, or maybe tossed an emptied water bottle into the bin as you exited, your debris may have ended up in one of the three large Eurobins placed surreptitiously by the exit by the Danish artist Tue Greenfort.

Greenfort had already been commissioned to create a piece of new work inside the fair. An artist whose work often deals with our relationship to the environment, his ‘official’ Frieze piece, Body Water Condensation was a secluded, darkened room, cooled by a massive dehumidifier. Visitors, lulled inside by the calm of Greenfort’s room, watched as the moisture from their bodies was quite literally sucked out, to be dripped, before their eyes, into recycled plastic bottles. More than just a dig at the environmental cost of the bottled water industry, it was a hymn to the preciousness of water.

The RSA-commissioned artwork was equally about what you left behind; in this case, rubbish. ‘I was interested to see the amount of leftover material which comes from the fair,’ said Greenfort, who lives and works in Berlin, ‘and to see the types of material… plastic cups, bottles.’

He’s one of a number of artists who make work about the environment that sends out unashamedly unambiguous messages. Greenfort has long been interested in why London recycles less efficiently than say, Germany, or his native Denmark. For this piece, Greenfort took three standard Eurobins, cut away the sides, and replaced them with clear plastic. The art curator Max Andrews who worked on commissioning this untitled work wrote: ‘Transparency, frequently the jargon-credential in a democratic process, becomes a sculptural fact.’

Greenfort sees his work connecting back to a longer tradition of environmentally-informed art. ‘I work in a long tradition from the 1970s, which is connecting art and ecology,’ he says, ‘and my main thing is to do art which expands the notion of what art might be.’ It’s work in progress. At the end of the fair, Greenfort ended up with three giant Eurobins full of rubbish; to Greenfort this too is potential material, awaiting further work.

You can read about Tue Greenfort further on the new RSA Arts and Ecology Centre.