Making Art Work

Making Art Work

Conceptualise this. You fancy yourself as a Young British Artist. You're
sitting in a pub and you've just had this great idea (hic!) for a
site-specific installation. You're gonna cover Nelson's Column with a
giant condom! Yeah, what a statement. So you scribble it on the back of
a fag packet and nest morning you think, er, how am I going to make that?
Then you remember. You're an artist! You don't have to "make" things.
You just call up the Mike Smith Studio and get them to make it for you.
They'll work everything out, do the technical drawings, research the
materials, source that special resin or whatever you need, and make that
huge condom. They might even be able to suggest a title. Nelson's
Condom, say, or Give Sheath a Chance. Hey, it might even win the Turner!

To judge by Making Art Work: Mike SmithStudio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley,
£39.95), such a daft scenario is less far fetched than you might
imagine. This book is a celebration of the work of the "star fabricator"
Mike Smith, without whom most of the YBAs would not have been able to
produce the conceptual detritus that clutters up the Saatchi and Tate
collections and provokes so many satisfying column inches of art-rage.

Smith trained as an artist and is, arguably, still working as one. Over
the last decade and a half he has been beavering- away in the Old Kent
Road to produce works of art "by" Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman,
Michael Landy, Rachel Whiteread and others. Now he has decided its time
for a bit of recognition. But the book goes further than that. By
revealing in some cases how much of the input comes from Smith, it begs
the whole question of who the author of these "seminal" works of art
really is. It blows a long hard whistle on the pretensions of some of
these great clients of his.

So who is Mike Smith?' He say’s he's in artist who decided he was
"interested in a wider range of ideas than I could generate myself”. He
sees himself as a problem-solver. Many of the artists who use him agree.
They get him to fabricate their works because if they went to an
ordinary metalwork shop or carpenter or engineer they'd get funny looks
or he asked to pay in advance.
Smith is attuned to their artistic way of thinking. He knows what they
want sometimes better than they do themselves. "People come here with an
idea of something they want to do," he says, "and they don't know how to
do it." (Of course not, they're artists.) "They have an image of it,"
and Smith & Co have to "make the physical expectation of that image
real".

A classic example of a Smith production was Rachel Whiteread's
site-specific installation for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar
Square. "Monument" simply inverted a transparent copy of the plinth on
top of the original. What a marvelous expression of the concept of
utter vacuity! It's a plinth, and it's empty. Wow!

What most people don't realise is that this factuous visual gag took
Smith
three years to make and employed 23 people in the process. Smith had an
"enormous sense of satisfaction", he says, "in managing to pull
something off like that."

Smith was also responsible for Hirst's formaldehyde tanks and other big
glass structures for artists like Gavin Turk and Alex Hartley. The
latter rather ungraciously categorises a typical Mike Smith production
as "minimalism with a twist" and "bombastic work with super slick
finishes".

Often it involves taking some ordinary object and simply making a very
large version of it. Examples include Mona Hatoum's oversize vegetable
grater, Michael Landy's giant wood chipper, and Darren Almond's huge
flip-clocks and calendars. But Claes Oldenburg was making massive
sculptures of household objects way back in the 60s. So if an artist has
a not very original idea and gets someone else to do all the actual work
of creating it, who deserves the credit?

William Furlong, whose interviews of Smith and his client form the bulk
of the text, wonders whether, if artists are no longer making and doing
things for themselves, they are more like Renaissance painters who
employed a "studio" of assistants? This ignores the difference between
mixing a few paints or colouring in the background, and completing the
entire work. A better model might be the ghost or editor who actually
writes the celebrity's book, or the record' producer who turns the
budding (or fading) pop star's effort’s into a proper song.

Furlong asks about the nature of the "collaboration" and whether Smith
should be able to claim some portion of authorship of finished works.

Naturally, the artists deny this hotly, though Whiteread is astute
enough to suggest Smith should keep a copyright in his processes.
(Presumably, if anyone then tries to rip something off Smith can
litigate instead of the cash-strapped artist.) Patsy Craig, the studio's
archivist, complains that the fine art world tends to be "just mildly
egocentric where issues of accreditation are concerned".

Case in point being the ‘ANDY WARHOL ART AUTHENTICATION BOARD, INCORPORATED.’ Instead of embracing Warhol’s hands off approach to his art,
this now infamous group are attempting to deny the fact that much of his
work was made by assistants in studios which he had never visited. This
robs Warhol of his rightful place in history as the artist who
popularised the contemporary conceptual art scene and the recognition of
being the major influence of the YBA’s. The board are relegating him to
being a distant descendent of Rubens and David.

Smith himself is more equivocal about his claim to some of the
limelight. "I want the studio to have recognition," he says, "but not at
the expense of-not being in business." In other words, he knows which
way his bread is buttered: by keeping his clients flattered. He freely
admits: "I have made things which aren't that interesting." But he
daren't say that to the artists, lest they take their funded commissions
elsewhere or, like Dada Hirst himself, set up their own little Warholy
factories.

PS: That fourth plinth is now empty again, with plans for a new
installation every other year. The current shortlist includes a car
covered in pigeon-shit (by Sarah Lucas) and a pair of phallic wooden
torpedoes (by Stefan Gec). It'll be funded by the Ken Livingstone
Foundation or "KLF" as it's known in the trade. Anyone with a wacky idea
should perhaps send it to Mike Smith's studio. As his client Darren
Almond says: "You can really have fun with Mike and suggest the most
ridiculous of ideas and he will take them seriously and come back to you
in two days with probably a solution."


Making Art Work. Mike Smith Studio (ed Patsy Craig, Trolley, £39.95)