Andrew Graham-Dixon on Richard Wentworth's new show at the Riverside
A FEW years ago, a beer advertisement featured a group of beleaguered tourists being whisked round an art gallery by a stout Germanic guide, a man who clearly considered culture a tiresome interruption to the serious business of drinking lager. One of his flustered charges pointed to an object in the corner of a room and asked him if it was modern art. "Nein," the guide responded testily, "zat iss a fire bucket"
Richard Wentworth makes sculpture that occasionally gives rise to this kind of contusion. Queue reads the card pasted to a wall at the entrance to his exhibition, and it Is hard to work out (for a moment) whether this is an instruction; whether it refers to a line of battered old vinyl-covered chairs along whose seats and between whose legs snakes a long, twisted tube of metal; or whether it describes a red cylinder fastened to the wall. The latter, it turns out, is a fire extinguisher, the chairs and tube a Wentworth sculpture called Queue.
But once you enter Wentworth's exhibition, his sculptures — incorrigibly odd juxtapositions of the made and the found, like his shiny steel dog kennel sitting upside down in a discarded schoool assembly chair — are unmistakeably sculptures. Against the far wall of the gallery towers a giant wheel made of rusting metal, around whose edge Wentworth has arranged a chronological sequence of newspapers. Called Impedimenta, it looks like a massive, theatrical joke about the expendability of news, a humbling reminder of our ultimate descent to flsh-and-chip wrappingness.
When Wentworth isn't making sculpture, he is out taking photographs. On Sunday he gave a talk at the Riverside Gallery, which he illustrated with some of his favourite pictures. Wentworth is fascinated by the...
