Tim Noble & Sue Webster
By Kate Farrington
Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s recent show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston showcased the main tropes of this yBa team’s work: the problemetizing of the artist-celebrity, and the troubled interrelationships of economics, media culture, and art. The work is provocative by being crudely smart. In one piece, vulgar words too nasty to print are inscribed into body areas of 10 ft. high, side-by-side neon portraits of a boy and girl. The lighted sculptural objects — such as Fucking Beautiful (Snow White), (2002), a five-foot blue neon heart written in repeating cursive script; Dollar Sign (2001), a six-foot-high lacquered brass dollar sign adorned with 204 flashing ice-white turbo reflector caps, or Excessive Sensual Indulgence (1997), a garish fountain of lights — all loudly announce the couple’s affinity for the opulent kitsch of what they refer to as "Vague Us" culture. While imbued with course defiance, the pieces are nonetheless highly sophisticated and formally successful objects.
The exhibit culminates with Sunset Over Manhattan (2003). Crumpled cigarette packets and tin cans shot with gun pellets are assembled on a wooden bench. Paper target sheets with bulls-eyes and a man holding a woman hostage at gunpoint are tacked to the front of the bench. A light source pointed at the work casts a shadow on the wall, revealing a soft evening skyline of Manhattan with the twin towers intact. Like the belted out chords of Liza Minelli altered by the horrors of WWII in the 1972 film Cabaret, this piece registers through the post 9/11 filter a significant shift in Noble and Webster’s work, a shift towards inclusion of a more somber look at our world.
