Adele Beattie Art

Artist or Curator?

Article by Lillian Innes

‘Planet Earth Complaints Department’; a place where you send your complaints about the world or anything and as if by magic, they are turned into art. Far Fetched? Apparently not.

The Artist Adele Beattie has set up this project to facilitate the public with a way of breaking through the barriers of the art world to freely express the small, whining artist in all of us. The complaints are turned into a [twice yearly] book and a video is made of the complaints being ‘released’ onto a body of water. But where does the art happen? What is it about this project that does not make it simply a social experiment?

The whole idea of public art has been around for a while now, as we see in the work of Roxanne Permar and Susan Timmins who collaborated with the public to create a notion of exchange and making things precious in their project ‘Domestic Dialogues’. This is a similar story. The complaints are collected from the public, at the public’s own pace, and then turned into these precious little glimpses into people’s minds. They are still essentially just people ranting. The kind that your mother will ring you to tell you or that fall upon deaf ears on a cold Monday morning back at work, but by suddenly appearing in a gallery, in the hands of an artist, they become art.

In an interview with James Bettaney, Beattie explains that ‘anybody should be able to create art and appreciate it…I want to create art with the public so that they are more enticed by it’. This statement implies that the public do not go and look at art or understand it as art has become so over run with complicated conceptualisation, and I do not disagree. When speaking to relatives about art I find myself having to almost ‘dumb it down’ so they do not feel so frightened and disheartened by it, because they feel that there is no way that they can understand it. So, in this way, Beattie’s work is successful. She shows the public that essentially the most important concept is the one that the viewer can see. If this differs to that of the artist who created the piece, how good can it really be? ‘Planet Earth Complaints Department’ really does leave it up to the viewer to make their own decisions but all the piece is deeply concerned with is getting people back into galleries. It is not about people spending vast amounts of money on it (certainly not as it is all currently consists of a book available for £20) and it is not about big, complicated meanings other than to get people back into art and to make the viewers see that without them, there really can’t be any art.

However, whilst all this is going on and the public are joining in, feeling free to take part in art and interact, we forget what the artist is actually doing. As far as I can see, there isn’t much more than curation happening on Beattie’s behalf. Is she just playing on the naivety of the public and getting by not doing any work at all? It may seem this way at first. Take, for example, Frank Warren’s ‘Post Secret’ books. They started off with just one man offering up an address for people to write their secrets to and now it has become almost like a craze. If you open one of his books you see page upon page of people’s art, yet no visual input by him. It is the thought behind it that counts. As you read through each person’s ‘secret’, you begin to find yourself amongst them, with your own secrets jumping up to the front of your brain, allowing you to feel released by the fact that someone has told it for you. It is the same with the complaints. There are all sorts of complaints in the book, and they all look completely different. And like ‘Post Secret’, you can place yourself amongst the complaints of others when reading through. But these are things that people don’t want to listen to. It is in human nature to want to know or tell something you can’t. This is why ‘Post Secret’ is selling millions of copies all over the world and to art snobs is not considered art. But with complaints, you will not find anyone listen to them. People feel like they can’t complain, especially in Britain, because nothing will come of it, if anything, negative things will happen. This is why it is so interesting. We need to be able to release the complaints that your friends are tired of hearing or that are simply too touchy to bring up in conversation. And this is where it happens-Planet Earth Complaints Department.

Basically, it is up to you. If you are looking for a way to get into art then perhaps this is for you. But what I will say on a personal level is that it has opened my mind to what art really is. I no longer am interested in all of this overcomplicated conceptualisation. I want to know what the piece is doing for me. How do I feel? How is this going to stick in my head? And will, most of all, it live up to its meanings. I hope this one does.

‘Planet Earth Complaints Department-Edition One’ is available at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/635999