Tim Noble and Sue Webster
Encyclopedia
Timothy "Tim" Noble and Susan "Sue" Webster (born 1967), are two British artists who work as a collaborative duo, and are associated with the post-YBA
generation of artists.
) respectively. The two first met in 1986 as Fine Art
students at Nottingham Trent University became good friends through shared interests, particularly their tastes in music.
After graduating from university in 1989, they moved to Bradford
, West Yorkshire, and from 1990-1992 they worked in residency at the sculpture studios in Dean Clough
.Their time in Bradford had a profound effect on their artistic development, inspiring much of their early work. They later moved to London when Noble began an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art
, which marked the pair's entrance into the London art world.
Their first solo exhibition, entitled ‘British Rubbish’, was at the Independent Art Space (ISA) in 1996.This led to them being invited to participate in numerous exhibitions, including ‘Fool’s Rain’ at the ICA
in 1996, in which they showed what they consider to be their first light sculpture; ‘‘Excessive Sensual Indulgence’’ (left).
In 1997, while working for the artists Gilbert and George
in order to support themselves, they developed their signature imagery, experimenting with the assemblage of personal items and household rubbish out of which came their first shadow sculpture, ‘Miss Understood & Mr Meanor’This work featured in their solo exhibition, ‘Home Chance’, mounted in their own Rivington Street studio in London. The exhibition attracted large audiences, including Charles Saatchi
, who bought two of the three works on show.
The artist’s work was included in ‘Statuephilia – Contemporary Sculptors’ at the British Museum
, London, 2008-2009 and in ‘Apocalypse – Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art’ at the Royal Academy
London, 2000. They have had solo shows at a number of other galleries in London,and since 2000, they have enjoyed international recognition with solo exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Boston, Moscow, New York
, and Seoul.
Their work features in a number of public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
, New York.
In 2007 they were awarded the prestigious Arken Prize, and in 2009 they received Honorary Doctorates of Art from Nottingham Trent University
, their former college, in acknowledgement of their artistic achievements to date.
They are represented by Gagosian gallery and work with BlainSouthern
through its Berlin
gallery.
The influence of music on their art, particularly punk rock
, has been of great importance to them since they began their earliest collaborations: Says Noble:
Adds Webster:
Sir Norman Rosenthal
, the former Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy, writes:
Their first shadow sculpture, ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’, 1997 (right), came into existence through experimentation with the assemblage of personal items and domestic trash.The silhouettes are formed by lights shining on mounds of rubbish, which includes broken sunglasses and pin badges for rock bands. In this particular work the artist's heads are severed and impaled on stakes. The work was destroyed in the 2004 Momart
warehouse fire, along with a number of other well-known works from the Saatchi Collection.
Through their shadow sculptures they managed to fuse the abstract and the representational, a pursuit that consumed the likes of Jackson Pollock
, Willem de Kooning
and Francis Bacon
.This became even more apparent with their second major shadow sculpture, ‘Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)’, 1998 (left), which expanded the innovations of ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’. This work is composed of a new kind of self-portrait, sculpted out of six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish; the remains of everything they needed to survive during the time it took to make the work. A single light source illuminates the pile of rubbish thus casting a portrait in shadow, which contrasts sharply with the materials used to create it; the artists leaning against each other, back to back, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigarette.
Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, writes:
Another work, ‘British Wildlife’ was created after Noble’s father died in 2000. Using his collection of taxidermy animals, it is an assemblage of forty-six birds, forty mammals, and two stuffed fish, including a whole swan and even the pet crow Noble kept as a child.The shadow formed by this mass of animals fittingly depicts back to back busts of the artists in a pose of grief.
In September 2000, they were invited to participate in ‘Apocalypse’, the Royal Academy
’s follow up to the infamous Sensation exhibition
of 1997. For this they presented ‘The Undesirables’, which comprises a mountain of detritus collected from outside Tim and Sue’s house with a shadow image of the artists hovering above. The appearance of a huge pile of rubbish in one of the largest galleries within the Royal Academy was intentionally radical and shocking, created to challenge viewers’ assumptions about art.
In 2006, an exhibition of their work was held at the Freud Museum
, entitled ‘Polymorphous Perverse’.'Black Narcissus', a sculpture made of black silicone casts of Webster’s fingers and Noble’s penis in various states of arousal, was placed in Sigmund Freud
’s study next to a bust of Freud himself. When illuminated the sculpture cast a double profile portrait of the artists, illustrating how sexuality influences our perception of reality reflecting the sexuality that Freud discovered at the core of human life. Another work, 'Scarlett', 2006 (see below video on 'External link') was a "worktable on which numerous bizarre mechanical toys are working and seemingly in the process of being made; a nightmarish setting of repressed sexual and sadomasochistic fantasies and transgressions."
, Las Vegas
and Times Square
.
As with almost all of their work, many of the Light Sculptures are meant to be contradictory, and to produce conflicting feelings in the viewer. This is certainly the case with their early light sculpture, ‘Toxic Schizophrenia’, 1997 (right). The relentlessly flashing heart with a knife stuck through it fuses a Christian emblem with a cliché rock ‘n' roll tattoo. As with the shadow sculptures, duality lies at its core; the work represents romance and pain, love and hate, friendship and alienation, negative and positive.
The same contradictions resonate at the centre of their later work, ‘Sacrificial Heart’, 2008, a three dimensional rotating version of ‘Toxic Schizophrenia’, which, like the earlier work, is both repellent and strangely alluring.'Toxic Schizophrenia (Hyper Version)' was their first permanent public sculpture, unveiled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, May 2009.
Contradictions and irony abound in the works exhibited at the Gagosian, Beverley Hills exhibition, ‘Instant Gratification’, 2001.The twenty foot long revision of their original 1997 ‘Forever’ is inextricably linked to the artist’s earlier trips to Las Vegas, playing with the traditional connotations of the word, as the constantly flashing lights reinforce the idea of ‘forever’.
With ‘A Pair of Dollars' they attempted to form an ironic response to the art market and art fairs, creating what Noble described as a ‘vulgar’ artwork, in order to demonstrate their annoyance with this system.However, he has since acknowledged the failure of this irony, due to the huge success of the piece.
‘Puny Undernourished Kid & Girlfriend from Hell’ (Puny Undernourished Kid shown left), represents another return to earlier work, as it derives from cartoon-like drawings that Noble and Webster had made of each other ten years before. These large neon figures are covered with neon tattoos of aggressive and forceful statements, clearly demonstrating the influence of punk rock on the artists.
and Anthony Caro
, while they actually work to reverse this abstraction into figuration.‘The Crack’, a vertical column-like form, is possibly the most difficult of the artists’ shadow works to decipher. Instead of focusing on the usual black silhouettes cast on the wall, the viewer must instead focus on the white space around the shadow, which reveals the naked bodies of the artists facing each other. This perceptual challenge brings to mind Ernst Gombrich
’s discussion of perception in his famous 1960 book, ‘Art and Illusion’. ‘The Crack’ displays at one moment an abstract shape that is perhaps reminiscent of a heroic mountain landscape by Clifford Still, with its cracks and gullies; gradually we begin to perceive the full-length naked profiles of our friends approaching each other, nipples touching, as though they are about to make love again for the millionth time.’’
to help them create a life-size sculpture of themselves as australopithecines. Called 'The New Barbarians' (left), the work is based upon a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History
, New York, which shows a reconstruction of two early ancestors of the human species.The artists produced a version of these figures overlaid with their own facial features. The sculptures are installed so that they stand in isolation in an apparently infinite space. Their hairlessness evokes conflicting connotations; they could be the first humans or the last – cave people, or the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Thus, the work continues the artist’s concern with conflicting themes of impermanence and immortality. A year after beginning ‘The New Barbarians’ they made another version of the work, ‘Masters of the Universe’, 1998-2000. This uses the same sculptural model as the earlier work but is covered with hair.
‘Electric Fountain’ (see 'External links' below for video clip) represents the artist's take on the world’s oldest form of public art, the fountain. Said Webster: “Electric Fountain mimics the tradition of a fountain as a monument found in public squares around the world, but its magic lies in the emulation of light where water should be.” The fountain can be seen as both a celebration of contemporary culture and an ambiguous comment on the nature of consumer society, embodying themes that are often present in the duo’s work.
to design the building, which he named ‘The Dirty House’, a reference to the medium they use in many of their works. The original brickwork was painted a dark brown, offset by two rows of window openings, and a 'floating' roof that appears to hover over the upper level of glazing and recessed decks.
' infamous 'Jubilee party'; in fact it was on the same day as the Pistols' party, 31 years later. The service was conducted by their friend and fellow artist Tracey Emin
.
Sue Webster was shortlisted for a presenter's job on the seminal 1980's music show The Tube (TV series)
.
Her friend, the chef Mark Hix
, has named a dish after Webster, 'Webster's Fish Fingers,' which are on the menu of his Soho restaurant Hix.
Citations=
Post-YBAs
Post-YBAs refers to British artists emerging in the 2000s after the Young British Artists.Post-YBA artists include Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Carey Young, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, David Thorpe, Eva Rothschild, Mike Nelson and Darren Almond....
generation of artists.
Early lives and careers
Noble and Webster attended fine art foundation courses at Cheltenham Art College (now the University of Gloucester) and Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort UniversityDe Montfort University
De Montfort University is a public research and teaching university situated in the medieval Old Town of Leicester, England, adjacent to the River Soar and the Leicester Castle Gardens...
) respectively. The two first met in 1986 as Fine Art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
students at Nottingham Trent University became good friends through shared interests, particularly their tastes in music.
After graduating from university in 1989, they moved to Bradford
Bradford
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, west of Leeds, and northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897...
, West Yorkshire, and from 1990-1992 they worked in residency at the sculpture studios in Dean Clough
Dean Clough
Dean Clough in Halifax, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England is a group of large factory buildings built in the 1840s–60s for Crossley's Carpets, becoming one of the world's largest carpet factories...
.Their time in Bradford had a profound effect on their artistic development, inspiring much of their early work. They later moved to London when Noble began an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
, which marked the pair's entrance into the London art world.
Their first solo exhibition, entitled ‘British Rubbish’, was at the Independent Art Space (ISA) in 1996.This led to them being invited to participate in numerous exhibitions, including ‘Fool’s Rain’ at the ICA
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
in 1996, in which they showed what they consider to be their first light sculpture; ‘‘Excessive Sensual Indulgence’’ (left).
In 1997, while working for the artists Gilbert and George
Gilbert and George
Gilbert & George are two artists who work together as a collaborative duo. Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have become famous for their distinctive, highly formal appearance and manner and their brightly coloured graphic-style photo-based artworks.-Early life:Gilbert Proesch was...
in order to support themselves, they developed their signature imagery, experimenting with the assemblage of personal items and household rubbish out of which came their first shadow sculpture, ‘Miss Understood & Mr Meanor’This work featured in their solo exhibition, ‘Home Chance’, mounted in their own Rivington Street studio in London. The exhibition attracted large audiences, including Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
, who bought two of the three works on show.
The artist’s work was included in ‘Statuephilia – Contemporary Sculptors’ at the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, London, 2008-2009 and in ‘Apocalypse – Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art’ at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
London, 2000. They have had solo shows at a number of other galleries in London,and since 2000, they have enjoyed international recognition with solo exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Boston, Moscow, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, and Seoul.
Their work features in a number of public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, New York.
In 2007 they were awarded the prestigious Arken Prize, and in 2009 they received Honorary Doctorates of Art from Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham Trent University is a public teaching and research university in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was founded as a new university in 1992 from the existing Trent Polytechnic , however it can trace its roots back to 1843 with the establishment of the Nottingham Government School of Design...
, their former college, in acknowledgement of their artistic achievements to date.
They are represented by Gagosian gallery and work with BlainSouthern
BlainSouthern
Blain|Southern is a contemporary art gallery established in September 2010. The gallery is located at 21 Dering Street, and 6 Hill Street, London, W1....
through its Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
gallery.
The Work
Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s work can be divided into the ‘Light Works’ and the ‘Shadow Works’, though Webster does not see them as completely separate. She says:The influence of music on their art, particularly punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, has been of great importance to them since they began their earliest collaborations: Says Noble:
Adds Webster:
Sir Norman Rosenthal
Norman Rosenthal
Sir Norman Rosenthal is a British curator. He was Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy from 1977 until 2008. His encyclopedic programme of exhibitions which stretched from Egyptian antiquities to recent art production, included the exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection of contemporary...
, the former Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy, writes:
Shadow Sculptures
The Shadow Sculptures incorporate diverse materials including household rubbish, scrap metal and taxidermy animals. By shining light onto these assemblages they are transformed into highly accurate shadow profiles of the artists.Discussing their shadow works, Webster commented: “Our work is incredibly unsocial. There has to be complete darkness because you need to give the light and then to take it away again.”Their first shadow sculpture, ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’, 1997 (right), came into existence through experimentation with the assemblage of personal items and domestic trash.The silhouettes are formed by lights shining on mounds of rubbish, which includes broken sunglasses and pin badges for rock bands. In this particular work the artist's heads are severed and impaled on stakes. The work was destroyed in the 2004 Momart
Momart
Momart is a British company specialising in the storage, transportation, and installation of works of art. It has been owned by Falkland Islands Holdings since 5 March 2008....
warehouse fire, along with a number of other well-known works from the Saatchi Collection.
Through their shadow sculptures they managed to fuse the abstract and the representational, a pursuit that consumed the likes of Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
and Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
.This became even more apparent with their second major shadow sculpture, ‘Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)’, 1998 (left), which expanded the innovations of ‘Miss Understood and Mr Meanor’. This work is composed of a new kind of self-portrait, sculpted out of six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish; the remains of everything they needed to survive during the time it took to make the work. A single light source illuminates the pile of rubbish thus casting a portrait in shadow, which contrasts sharply with the materials used to create it; the artists leaning against each other, back to back, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigarette.
Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, writes:
Another work, ‘British Wildlife’ was created after Noble’s father died in 2000. Using his collection of taxidermy animals, it is an assemblage of forty-six birds, forty mammals, and two stuffed fish, including a whole swan and even the pet crow Noble kept as a child.The shadow formed by this mass of animals fittingly depicts back to back busts of the artists in a pose of grief.
In September 2000, they were invited to participate in ‘Apocalypse’, the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
’s follow up to the infamous Sensation exhibition
Sensation exhibition
Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists, which first took place 18 September – 28 December 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art in London and later toured to Berlin and New York...
of 1997. For this they presented ‘The Undesirables’, which comprises a mountain of detritus collected from outside Tim and Sue’s house with a shadow image of the artists hovering above. The appearance of a huge pile of rubbish in one of the largest galleries within the Royal Academy was intentionally radical and shocking, created to challenge viewers’ assumptions about art.
In 2006, an exhibition of their work was held at the Freud Museum
Freud Museum
The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, was the home of Sigmund Freud and his family when they escaped Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. It remained the family home until Anna Freud, the youngest daughter, died in 1982. The centrepiece of the museum is Freud's study, preserved...
, entitled ‘Polymorphous Perverse’.'Black Narcissus', a sculpture made of black silicone casts of Webster’s fingers and Noble’s penis in various states of arousal, was placed in Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
’s study next to a bust of Freud himself. When illuminated the sculpture cast a double profile portrait of the artists, illustrating how sexuality influences our perception of reality reflecting the sexuality that Freud discovered at the core of human life. Another work, 'Scarlett', 2006 (see below video on 'External link') was a "worktable on which numerous bizarre mechanical toys are working and seemingly in the process of being made; a nightmarish setting of repressed sexual and sadomasochistic fantasies and transgressions."
Light Sculptures
The light sculptures, created in tandem with their shadow investigations, are constructed out of computer sequenced light-bulbs that perpetually flash, sending out messages of, often simultaneous, love and hate. The sculptures reference the iconic pop culture symbols of Britain and America, recalling carnival shows and signage typical of working-class sea-side Britain, Piccadilly CircusPiccadilly Circus
Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London's West End in the City of Westminster, built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with the major shopping street of Piccadilly...
, Las Vegas
Las Vegas metropolitan area
The Las Vegas Valley is the heart of the Las Vegas-Paradise, NV MSA also known as the Las Vegas–Paradise–Henderson MSA which includes all of Clark County, Nevada, and is a metropolitan area in the southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada. The Valley is defined by the Las Vegas Valley landform, a ...
and Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
.
As with almost all of their work, many of the Light Sculptures are meant to be contradictory, and to produce conflicting feelings in the viewer. This is certainly the case with their early light sculpture, ‘Toxic Schizophrenia’, 1997 (right). The relentlessly flashing heart with a knife stuck through it fuses a Christian emblem with a cliché rock ‘n' roll tattoo. As with the shadow sculptures, duality lies at its core; the work represents romance and pain, love and hate, friendship and alienation, negative and positive.
The same contradictions resonate at the centre of their later work, ‘Sacrificial Heart’, 2008, a three dimensional rotating version of ‘Toxic Schizophrenia’, which, like the earlier work, is both repellent and strangely alluring.'Toxic Schizophrenia (Hyper Version)' was their first permanent public sculpture, unveiled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, May 2009.
Contradictions and irony abound in the works exhibited at the Gagosian, Beverley Hills exhibition, ‘Instant Gratification’, 2001.The twenty foot long revision of their original 1997 ‘Forever’ is inextricably linked to the artist’s earlier trips to Las Vegas, playing with the traditional connotations of the word, as the constantly flashing lights reinforce the idea of ‘forever’.
With ‘A Pair of Dollars' they attempted to form an ironic response to the art market and art fairs, creating what Noble described as a ‘vulgar’ artwork, in order to demonstrate their annoyance with this system.However, he has since acknowledged the failure of this irony, due to the huge success of the piece.
‘Puny Undernourished Kid & Girlfriend from Hell’ (Puny Undernourished Kid shown left), represents another return to earlier work, as it derives from cartoon-like drawings that Noble and Webster had made of each other ten years before. These large neon figures are covered with neon tattoos of aggressive and forceful statements, clearly demonstrating the influence of punk rock on the artists.
Metal Sculptures
‘The Crack’, 2004 (right), is one in a series of welded metal sculptures which appear at first glance as abstract works in the tradition of David SmithDavid Smith (sculptor)
David Roland Smith was an American Abstract Expressionist sculptor and painter, best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.-Biography:...
and Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...
, while they actually work to reverse this abstraction into figuration.‘The Crack’, a vertical column-like form, is possibly the most difficult of the artists’ shadow works to decipher. Instead of focusing on the usual black silhouettes cast on the wall, the viewer must instead focus on the white space around the shadow, which reveals the naked bodies of the artists facing each other. This perceptual challenge brings to mind Ernst Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...
’s discussion of perception in his famous 1960 book, ‘Art and Illusion’. ‘The Crack’ displays at one moment an abstract shape that is perhaps reminiscent of a heroic mountain landscape by Clifford Still, with its cracks and gullies; gradually we begin to perceive the full-length naked profiles of our friends approaching each other, nipples touching, as though they are about to make love again for the millionth time.’’
The New Barbarians
In 1997, Tim Noble and Sue Webster commissioned a sculptor from Madame TussaudsMadame Tussauds
Madame Tussauds is a wax museum in London with branches in a number of major cities. It was founded by wax sculptor Marie Tussaud and was formerly known as "Madame Tussaud's", but the apostrophe is no longer used...
to help them create a life-size sculpture of themselves as australopithecines. Called 'The New Barbarians' (left), the work is based upon a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, New York, which shows a reconstruction of two early ancestors of the human species.The artists produced a version of these figures overlaid with their own facial features. The sculptures are installed so that they stand in isolation in an apparently infinite space. Their hairlessness evokes conflicting connotations; they could be the first humans or the last – cave people, or the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Thus, the work continues the artist’s concern with conflicting themes of impermanence and immortality. A year after beginning ‘The New Barbarians’ they made another version of the work, ‘Masters of the Universe’, 1998-2000. This uses the same sculptural model as the earlier work but is covered with hair.
Electric Fountain
The 35 foot tall ‘Electric Fountain’ (right), constructed from steel, neon tubing and 3,390 LED bulbs, was exhibited at Rockefeller Plaza, New York, February 2008.This monumental work is clearly reminiscent of the Bellagio fountains in Vegas and, much like ‘Toxic Schizophrenia (Hyper Version)’, it draws from their first light sculpture, ‘Excessive Sensual Indulgence’, a pop fountain with the impression of flowing water created from the use of lights flashing in a chasing effect.‘Electric Fountain’ (see 'External links' below for video clip) represents the artist's take on the world’s oldest form of public art, the fountain. Said Webster: “Electric Fountain mimics the tradition of a fountain as a monument found in public squares around the world, but its magic lies in the emulation of light where water should be.” The fountain can be seen as both a celebration of contemporary culture and an ambiguous comment on the nature of consumer society, embodying themes that are often present in the duo’s work.
The Dirty House
In 2001, Tim Noble and Sue Webster bought a dilapidated early twentieth-century furniture factory in the East End of London, which would become their studio space. The artists commissioned David AdjayeDavid Adjaye
David Adjaye OBE is a British architect.-Early life:David Adjaye was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The son of a Ghanaian diplomat who has lived in Tanzania, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon before moving to Britain at the age of nine, he led a privileged life and was privately educated...
to design the building, which he named ‘The Dirty House’, a reference to the medium they use in many of their works. The original brickwork was painted a dark brown, offset by two rows of window openings, and a 'floating' roof that appears to hover over the upper level of glazing and recessed decks.
Personal lives
Tim Noble and Sue Webster were married on June 7th, 2008. The wedding party was held on board the Queen Elizabeth, the boat that was used for the Sex PistolsSex Pistols
The Sex Pistols were an English punk rock band that formed in London in 1975. They were responsible for initiating the punk movement in the United Kingdom and inspiring many later punk and alternative rock musicians...
' infamous 'Jubilee party'; in fact it was on the same day as the Pistols' party, 31 years later. The service was conducted by their friend and fellow artist Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin
Tracey Karima Emin RA is a British artist of English and Turkish Cypriot origin. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs ....
.
Sue Webster was shortlisted for a presenter's job on the seminal 1980's music show The Tube (TV series)
The Tube (TV series)
The Tube was an innovative United Kingdom pop/rock music television programme, which ran for five seasons, from 5 November 1982 until 1987...
.
Her friend, the chef Mark Hix
Mark Hix
-Career:In April 2008 Hix opened Hix Oyster and Chop House, in the Farringdon area of London. He also opened Hix Oyster & Fish House in Lyme Regis, Dorset and most recently Hix Soho in the West End...
, has named a dish after Webster, 'Webster's Fish Fingers,' which are on the menu of his Soho restaurant Hix.
Interviews with Tim Noble and Sue Webster
Selected articles
Selected bibliography
- 'Instant Gratification (2001) Text by Larry Johnson, The Beacon Press ISBN: 1-880154-64-1
- 'Tim Noble and Sue Webster: The Joy of Sex (2005) Texts by Mark Fletcher and Tina Kim, Kukje Gallery Inc ISBN-10: 899554774X
- 'Wasted Youth (2006) Essays by Norman Rosenthal and Jeffrey Deitch, Rizzoli International Publications ISBN-10: 9780847828166
- 'Polymorphous Perverse (2008) Texts by Linda Nochlin and James Putnam, Other Criteria ISBN: 978-1-904212-24-9
- 'British Rubbish will be published by Rizzoli in Autumn 2011
External links
Citations=