KVT’s January Briefs… Bottle caps and Minimalism @ HMOFA

The art museum hosts a pile of beer bottle caps

In 2001 Martin Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize with a work that consisted of a gallery with bare walls in which the lights turn on and off in intervals of five seconds

[youtube width=”700″ height=”393″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpDHQCmHltE[/youtube]

At the 1998 Sydney Biennale his exhibit title ‘work No.88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball’ had many viewers apoplectic

A recent retrospective of Creeds work (all of which are numbered) was titled:

And I guess that’s what some views may think when they come across that pile of beer bottle tops at HMOFA (my acronym for the local museum) installed by Phan Phuong Dong

I’m a fan of Creed’s art work and also of Phan Phuong Dong’s since I saw an exhibition way back in 2010 at a suburban art gallery now defunct https://hanoigrapevine.com/2010/12/kvt-solo-exhibition-of-phan-phuong-dong/

Urban fact or myth has it that Phan Phuong Dong made a trip to New York City in the depths of winter, and like most people who see snow for the first time was fascinated with it… and this artist, so it’s said, saw cars in a parking lot being covered with soft snow and as he continued to observe during the day, when cars departed the lot they left behind a negative space, a void.

The image and idea of the void stuck with him and finally he decided to use beer bottle caps to metaphorically illustrate his conceptual mindset

And it all came together in a gallery adjoining the one containing the pile and ended up looking like this:

And some of you may say about the cap scattering as many said in 1993 about Creed’s ‘Work 79, a piece of blue tack stuck to a wall’: WHAT’S THE POINT!

One critic of the retrospective pointed out that in minimalism there is a very fine line between the mindfully simple and the simple minded – the latter being what a lot of casual viewers call Creed’s works.

Minimalism is Phan Phuong Dong’s preferred genre and some viewers may re-iterate the PR poster outside the gallery when they ask if the exhibition can possibly be termed art… surely it’s a con!

Though others may meditate on the pile and the scatter and come away with profound interpretations, even of environmental pollution. Others may be in tune with the artist’s exhibition statement.

Me? I’m still ambivalent. Being a fan of floor fields (as I call them) in art, my druthers would be to see the scatter much larger in dimension to give it an eyeball searing dramatic impact

The exhibition is only piled and scattered for another day and provides the reason that I decided to break my resolve about only having one cultural opinion this week because there’s nothing better than scattering an itsy controversy around.

If you get along to see the bottle caps, make it a double banger by gallivanting a couple of hundred meters up the street to Goethe for a photo exhibition that could have the purists hopping and the hoi-poloi ooohhhing and aaahhhing