About my posts: For a few years I’ve been posting images to FB & Insta of discarded art, or what I call “Outstallations”. Art as a former possession, commodity, property, goods and chattels. Where for some reason the Use-By date has expired and these once loved, or unloved artworks have been thrown onto the street, disposed of, discarded by it’s owners. I’ll often come across piles of refuse on my walks, the contents of a vacated household, or a selection of unwanted items to be collected by a recycling service, the garbage service, a hoarder, collector, scavenger. Sometimes, amongst all this there’ll be iconic artworks, reproductions by the greats, or by the not-so-greats, or the hobbyists, or the Sunday painter, the once ambitious student, the watercolorist, the photographer, face up amongst the detritus of the now estranged or perhaps deceased, or missing, or liquidated, or sea-changing, or tree-changing, or renovating owners.
When I come across these “Outstallations”, for me they sometimes recall Beuys, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Ed and Nancy Kienholz. I see a three-dimensional-in-the-round organic arrangement of discarded and unwanted items, pots and pans, dish racks, cups, shoes, planter boxes, hand-tools, old bags full of old clothes, and old boxes full of old ….stuff. Ordinary remnants of a former household, companionship, business, tenant, bed-sit, a life. I see an inadvertent group gathering, an exhibition, a meeting, a conversation, a jarring, discordant clash between Warhol, Hart, Klimt, Rockwell, Disney, Nolan, Krasner, Dali, Whiteley, Done, a Pre-Raphaelite, a caricature, a portrait, a framed cartoon, a Riley, a Streeton, a Roberts or Rembrandt, tossed onto the street, landing on their tragic backs in their rotting, moulding frames, helpless, sad, pathetic, like a cockroach or turtle that can’t right itself. Follow Me on Instagram #rsj_barker.
