Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Wales Trinity Saint David (joint submission with Cardiff Metropolitan University and University of South Wales)
Blank Cheque :
Artefact: Artist’s Wallpaper, (10.05 x 0.52 m rolls) printed by Graham & Brown, available from the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Graham & Brown.
Exhibition: SG Gallery, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy.
Two books: Blank Cheque (2010); Walls are Talking - Wallpaper, Art and Culture (2010)
Funding: Wales Arts International, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica and SG Gallery, Venice, Italy, Whitworth Art Gallery, V & A, Graham & Brown, University of Leeds, SMU.
Blank Cheque is an artists’ wallpaper commissioned for the Walls Are Talking – Wallpaper, Art and Culture survey exhibition of artists’ wallpapers held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (co-organized by the V&A Museum, London), 2010, and included in the accompanying book (University of Chicago Press, 2010). It was also the principal work in the Taylor and Wood retrospective exhibition Blank Cheque at SG Gallery, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy, 2010, with an accompanying book that reviewed the artists’ collaborative practice. The Venice show and publication are offered here as the principal iteration of the work for consideration by the REF panel.
Blank Cheque was created as part of the ongoing collaboration between Craig Wood and Chris Taylor. As with Witness, Wood’s other submission, the formation of the initial research question and the realization of the design were shared equally by Taylor and Wood. Situated between conceptual art, craft, and public art, the work furthers their use of formats that have become ubiquitous to comment on recent events. The work harnesses the tradition of repeat pattern, but challenges its status as mere decoration. By using the repetition of the image of the cheque, the culture of printing money with nothing to substantiate it and with no regard for consequence is made visible. Against the possibility of its being read as a celebration of financial mismanagement, all indications of wealth and financial quantity are eschewed in favour of blanks, lines and rectangles, with the inner grids of the cheques mirrored by the grid of the wallpaper, signalling a disregard of consequence. In this way, a practice and space ordinarily regarded as decorative become forms of economic critique. The work’s subversion of the domestic artefact is discussed in Walls Are Talking – Wallpaper, Art and Culture, pp. 84-85.
