Woolgather's 'Art Vend'
Date uploaded: April 17, 2013
Art collective, Woolgather, have commissioned thirty artists from across the UK to create 150 works each - creating a total of 4,500 new works. The artworks include still life lemons on tiles the size of Scrabble pieces, the 'world's smallest action painting' and a contract for an artist to make the purchaser a personalised 'ident' in the style of a company logo. The miniature artworks are being sold from vending machines in Leeds for £1 each. The vending machines provide a platform for their practice whilst also developing an audience and consumer for the works.
Art Vend offers people an art experience in everyday life. By placing the machines in public venues such as shopping centres, bars, cafes and at public events, Woolgather hope to maximise the chance of reaching people who may not usually engage with the arts. Ultimately, the aim is that the product received will provide a more satisfactory or challenging reward than the standard interaction with a vending machine whilst offering an open door to a contemporary art scene. Art Vend aims to question the commercial value and commodification of artist products and to give space to more informal artistic ideas as opposed to formulaic, finalised grandiose works - with a little room for fun.
John Slemensek from Woolgather explains: 'For £1, you're able to buy very rare pieces. It really shaves off those ideas of 'out of reach artwork' or 'I could never own a piece of artwork. Hopefully if someone gets, say, a Sean Williams painting of a lemon, they might look further into him and then suddenly they've got a gateway into the art world that they never knew they would be allowed. These capsules are almost keys for people to dip their toes into the water and see if they like it. Every pound that goes into the machines goes back into the commissioning of the next artist so it will hopefully have an ongoing longevity.'
Woolgather is a contemporary arts organisation that works with creative practitioners to develop new work and dialogue in all visual and live art forms. The art collective has been behind a number of initiatives Leeds, including a new art award - The Woolgather Art Prize - which saw nominees' work exhibited in an empty high street shop and the winner chosen by a public vote. 'We've always wanted to get art to as wide a public as possible,' said Slemensek.
Join the Woolgather website by using #woolgatherart through twitter or instagram with your pictures and comments of the artwork you discover inside.
This project has been made possible by the support of Leeds Inspired, Leeds City Council, East Street Arts, all the venues that will host the machines and many individual efforts.
The notion of vending machines being used to sell art has a legacy: there were used in the 1960s by the Fluxus movement and in Yoko Ono's 1966 Sky Machine, for which she designed a vending machine to dispense cards representing pieces of sky.
