Grant's junk culture is tip top

Jan 22 2008 Art

Terry Grimley meets an artist with an individual take on the throwaway society.

Alistair Grant's exhibition at the Mac is rubbish. Or, at least, it's made up entirely of rubbish.

The Birmingham artist, who has recently been collaborating with Stuart Mugridge on their project "The Museum of Lost Heritage" at the former Science Museum site in the Jewellery Quarter, has the distinction of being the final exhibitor at Mac's below-stairs Cotton Gallery before it disappears in the centre's £13.6 million rebuild.

"I've wanted to do a show here in this strange subterranean hexagon for years," he says. "I always wanted to turn it into Santa's Grotto. It being the last show was an opportunity to paint it black."

The exhibition, The King Shoddy Show, is part of Grant's larger ongoing project Land-skip, which has to do with the threat of rubbish-dumping, both official and unofficial, to Britain's landscape. Its title is a pun on the fact that the word "landskip" was an 18th century version of "landscape".

"I've been looking at this since about 2003," he explains. "I did a residency on Brownsea Island as part of the Salisbury Festival, and I got really taken up by how much rubbish gets washed up on the beach. The National Trust got interested in that and their estate management took me under their wing. King Shoddy grew out of that."

Grant has spun an elaborate pseudo-archaeological fantasy which offers us the opportunity to look back on ourselves with the historic hindsight of the future.

"I've always wanted to do an exhibition with a strong narrative. Something like the experience we have when we go to a National Trust house. The idea is that in the future Britain will cease to be Britain and will become the Ugly Islands because it's so overrun with rubbish. Everyone who is wealthy enough will leave and Britain will be sold off as landfill, ruled over by King Shoddy."

The black labyrinth he has created is something like the installation he and Mugridge presented at the old Science Museum where, as he says: "We tried to to have a surprise round every corner."

After an initial display of photographs showing some of Britain's mounting tide of rubbish in situ (particularly memorable are the large, rock-like lumps of cooking fat Grant calls "fatbergs", washed up on Newborough Beach on Anglesey), the second space is dedicated to King Shoddy's art collection, a diverse range of abandoned items accumulated by Grant while working on public art commissions in various parts of the country.

They include abandoned toys, crushed drink cans and cigarette packets, a shattered wing mirror and a ligature left by an intravenous drug-taker. There is part of an estate agent's sign which has had the corner ripped off so that it declares the single word "GREED".

All these are carefully displayed in well-made frames, bestowing an incongruous sense of preciousness. And actually some of it does look like art: one exhibit which at first glance appears to be quite an interesting abstract painting or print is in fact a sheet of board which has been randomly stained.

There are also two pairs of extremely grubby but neatly framed knickers.

"An awful lot of alfresco sex goes on," Alistair remarks. "The police are wonderful for information on the most popular places - for example, Desborough Island, a beautiful island on the Thames.

"You find a lot of condoms and knickers. I don't know why women leave their knickers behind - I've never found one pair of men's pants. Another mystery is that you only ever find one shoe."

There's a mildly fetishist boot with a stiletto heel, which he found in the middle of a wood in Oxfordshire where, police told him, prostitutes from Oxford take their clients. It has been strangely ripped, as though by a wild animal. So far Alistair has never found a body.

But much of the rubbish slowly taking over our green and pleasant land is more mundane.

For instance, Grant points out the irony of the fact that one of the most successful environmental campaigns of recent times has been persuading people to bag-up dog poo. While a nuisance if you tread in it, it doesn't actually harm the environment if left on the ground, whereas once placed in a plastic bag it will either be surreptitiously dumped or else end up in landfill.

Nowadays landfill sites are lined and capped, which means that they are time bombs ticking away until the moment when the "leachate" finally leaks out into the water table.

And the feeling of satisfaction we have when sorting out our rubbish for recycling may be misplaced, since recycling centres often can't cope and the material ends up going to landfill anyway.

"The thing about recycling is that the infrastructure isn't really there in this country. I was in upstate New York where there is no public waste collection at all. You have to take all your rubbish to a privately-run dump, and anything the guy can't make money from you have to pay for. It's amazing how you suddenly think about what you consume."

The final room includes King Shoddy's throne (a vintage commode Grant found abandoned on his street) and various other personal items. You can sit at Shoddy's desk and read his poems - on condition that you rip them up afterwards.

Throughout the exhibition, everything is tagged with wide-ranging literary quotations which can tend towards the obscure: for example, Voltaire's "No one has ever found or will ever find."

But something the alert visitor can find is the origin of King Shoddy's name. It comes from a quotation from William Morris, berating the poor quality of Victorian consumer goods: "Shoddy is King".

* The King Shoddy Show is at Mac, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, until April 6 (daily noon-6pm; admission free). A related installation, A Fruitful Crop, is on display in the Outer Courtyard until April 6.