BETHAN HUWS
(Regno Unito, 1961)


Untitled, 2006
word vitrine, aluminium, glass, rubber and plastic letters
100 x 75 x 4.5 cm, Courtesy Bethan Huws Studio, Paris
© Bethan Huws & A.D.A.G.P. Paris 2008
Courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris–New York





The “word vitrines” of Bethan Huws are black showcases with white plastic letters typically employed in administrative contexts (such as offices or schools) to communicate information to the public. By using daily objects as vehicles for her statements, she is renouncing to any aesthetic seduction, addressing her audience merely mentally. With the provocative question What’s the point of giving you any more artworks when you don’t understand the ones you’ve got? she questions the ability of the audience to understand art. By focusing on the act of communication between the artist and her audience she refers not only to the encounter with the artwork itself, which transforms art as an object into art as experience, but also to the necessity for an agreement on what it is that constitutes the artistic value of the object. Huws seems to express one of the crucial questions of the current art system, in which the value of art is increasingly detached from its cultural meaning and defined in monetary terms instead.





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