This review was originally published in March 2005 / No 284, p30-31.

Richard Wentworth

Mark Wilsher

A group of students in Kosovo, after seeing Richard Wentworth present slides of his popular photographic series 'Making Do and Getting By', understood them to reveal that not everything always runs smoothly in the UK. In San Francisco they were thought to be making 'lysergic' connections, while his dealer Nicholas Logsdail reckons they expose the 'quirky peculiarities of our culture'. In a catalogue interview for this exhibition the neuroscientist Mark Lythgoe links them to the deeply imbedded practical knowledge of the material world that long predates cultural forces, like language or symbolism. A ladder blocking a door or a plastic cup shoved into a crack might mean many things to many people, but this persistent series of found street photography (started in the 70s and still ongoing) has meant most to generations of young art students who have used it as the model for a thousand pale imitations. Richard Wentworth's inquisitive documentation of the improvised and contingent nature of material culture forms the backbone of his practice, suggesting happy coincidences for sculptures and adding ethnographic gravitas to his roles as teacher, trustee, panellist

So it is appropriate that this prominent artist, who has made his influence felt at many different levels, should finally be rewarded with a large retrospective on the upper floor of Tate Liverpool. In spite of his successes there is often a feeling around Wentworth that his work is too polite or somehow prissy. The meticulousness with which he deploys his vocabulary of crockery, glass shelves and weathered junk can border on mannerism. His work doesn't tend to generate excitement, but rather the quiet satisfaction of recognition. There are few rough edges and little in the way of spectacle, just one gently punning effect after another. But this is perhaps because we are simply too close to his particular idea of 'the everyday'. Wentworth worked as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 60s, scaling up maquettes to be cast in bronze, and his Englishness tends to obscure the real texture of his achievements. We would look on his work very differently if it came out of the Arte Povera tradition of Italy, for instance, or a grungy loft in New York.

The world is made of many things, and one way of dealing with the world is to deal with the physical things of which it is made. So a piece like Spread, 1997, is simply a large circle laid out on the floor made up of mismatched plates, saucers, platters and the occasional bowl. The overall shape rhymes with that of the components, your eye takes in the whole and skips across the surface, enjoying the shine of the glazes and the variety of colours, picking out whatever details appeal. List (15 months), 1994, is a pair of glass shelves displaying a row of metal drinking cups. The cups, the kind used for camping, are again pleasingly mismatched, but the joke here is that the upper shelf sits suspended by the two tallest on the shelf below. Habitual expectations are gently prodded, and we see objects for what they are, with fresh eyes.

Against this material reading of the world runs a current of semiotic theory, where the meaning of objects lies rather in the mind that links them together in such and such a way for such and such a purpose. This was most eloquently stated in the work Tract (from Boost to Wham), 1993, where chocolate bar wrappers were put to use as bookmarks at the appropriate pages of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. The succession of later dictionary pieces, involving anything from a tangle of plastic hoops to watches and electrical cord, could never match up to that initial sugar-rush of inspiration, and laid out on the floor here under protective perspex cases they singularly fail to take off. Wentworth's practice can be frustratingly hit and miss at times. He is at his best when he lets himself go a little, as in Cumulus, 1991, where white china plates on a high shelf become clouds at the top of a ladder. The parts may be mundane but the image is powerful, a reinscription of ordinary things that suggests the endless possibilities of cultural invention. 'All this is man's space', says Roland Barthes quoted in the catalogue, 'in it he measures himself and determines his humanity, starting from the memory of his gestures.'

This dialectic between quiddity and meaning, substance and sign, is unresolvable. There is no one right way to see the stuff of the world. Practice is the place where such tensions can be worked through, both as an artist in the studio and out in the messiness of real life. As he moves on to curatorial projects, architecture and regeneration, Wentworth is constantly testing both modes of engagement. Sometimes he makes mistakes, such as the spectacularly duff maze he has drawn with temporary tensile barriers that fills half the gallery and falls flat on its face. A huge bale of straw at its centre is no enticement to navigate the route. Sometimes, on the other hand, he creates an effect that is so charming that you completely forget it has nothing to do with his rhetoric and simply revel in the experience. His False Ceiling, 1995, does exactly this. A ceiling of second-hand books hung flat from steel wire, each floating free but together making a wonderful intangible layer overhead. It certainly says nothing profound about books, and nothing in particular about suspended ceilings. But as pure effect it is delightful.

Richard Wentworth was at Tate Liverpool from January 21 to April 24.

Mark Wilsher is an artist and curator.

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