ABSTRACT
Richard Wentworth has played a leading role in British sculpture since the 1970s. His artistic practice revolves around ‘the semantics of the everyday world, taking readymade and frequently incongruous objects and arranging them in a fashion that forces them to recognise the drama inherent in that which researchers too easily dismiss as routine’. The concept of socialized affordances elucidates the reciprocal relation between meaning-making and the material world around them. It sees space as produced and modified over time and through its use, invested with symbolism and meaning. Furthermore, it signifies that meaning can neither be ‘privatized’ mentally nor materially. Rather, meaning is based on the interdependence of body and world. The primitive look of the containers established at once a distance and proximity to the objects. The bundles could be seen as strange artefacts from a historically distant cult, enabling a critical analysis as if studying a foreign culture.
