It was a pile of…fridges

Installation art bugs me, but I’m aware of this preconception. I’m fully prepared to be surprised and delighted by an installation, but it’s going to need to do more than make me nod my head at the artist’s sheer effort in bringing the thing to life.

The photo of Thomas Rentmeister’s installation in the Adelaide Festival Artists’ Week Guide looked for all the world like the last day of a scratch n’ dent sale at the Good Guys outlet. Why would the festival organisers ask a European artist to come over here and park some fridges in a room and smear them all over with cream when we’ve got a whole city full of perfectly good blokes with hand trucks (and probably dead fridges in their sheds) who would have been happy to lend a hand. (Although I’m not sure what they would have made of the cream bit.)

But then, I guess we still would have needed an Artist to say, Hey, let’s stack up these fridges in the corner of a gallery! And by the way, my airfare invoice is attached below.

So I went to see what kind of a pile we were talking about here. It wasn’t quite the pile I expected:

As the title says, Nearly 100 fridges stacked in a corner. Aaaaand?

Visually, it’s definitely interesting. I can see there’s order here, that the ‘forms’ are arranged with care and consideration. Plus, as a bonus, they’ve all been coated in some kinda cream that looks like spackle but remains soft. (Yes, I know this first-hand.)

But the only difference between this and using a bunch of white foam core to achieve the same effect is that the fridges more or less are passing judgment on us privileged gallery-goers for living in a society where fridges themselves have a use-by date.

But didn’t you know that before you even heard of Thomas Rentmeister? Most people I know are already consumed with worry about the world, the environment. I’m personally kind of tired of art that requires an enormous amount of effort to make a very small statement (if it can even be said to do that) and still doesn’t do what art is really, really good at: being beautiful, giving us hope, optimisim, glory, joy.

I think it’s wonderful that even a small piece of decorated paper in a little frame hanging humbly in a kitchen can do that, and yet the best a towering stack of high-art whitegoods in a gallery can do is echo the daily newspaper’s confirmation that the world is messed up and it’s all our fault.

Tags: art, fridges, installations, Rentmeister