The Asset Strippers
Mixed-media installation commissioned for the 2019 Tate Britain Commission, which offers an artist the opportunity to create a new artwork in response to the Duveen Galleries.
- Submitting institution
-
Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-74-1726
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Tate Britain, London, U.K.
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- March
- Year of production
- 2019
- URL
-
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/mike-nelson
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
-
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Asset Strippers (2019) was commissioned for the 2019 Tate Britain Commission, which offers an artist the opportunity to create a new artwork in response to the Duveen Galleries. For the exhibition, Nelson transformed the Duveen Galleries into a hybrid between a sculpture court and an asset stripper’s warehouse. The work was informed by the Galleries’ origins as the first purpose-built sculpture galleries in England(1937), turning them into a warehouse of sculptural monuments to the lost era of post-war Britain.
The title is intended to suggest a narrative potential like a Harold Pinter play, a ‘kitchen sink drama’. Through focusing on the decline of manufacturing and the post-war welfare state in the UK, Nelson developed a method of amassing objects to reflect our historical moment: buying through online auctions of asset strippers and company liquidators – a laborious and time-consuming process. The auctions provided a fatalistic structure through which to select the ‘rejected’ matter and, through their display as monumental sculpture, comment on the complex relationships between industry, art and commerce. The objects Nelson acquired symbolise the UK’s shift from manufacturing to service industry.
Nelson’s research visits to the British Museum, V&A and Tate’s sculpture collection allowed him to draw out visual connections with twentieth century British sculpture, Surrealism, Arte Povera and Land Art. The Asset Strippers (2019) also revisits aspects of his family connections to East Midlands industry, encouraging empathy for a shared industrial past and those who laboured at these machines, while also showing the brutality of the objects themselves. The symbiotic relationship between machine and sculpture is emphasised when the objects displayed are viewed in close proximity. Ancient artefacts and sculptures raise the question, ‘Who were the people that made or used these objects?’ evoking an imagining of these absent people through small clues in the making.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
