ARTISTS TALKING

"Career? I don't use the word career. I am amazed now artists have one." Richard Wentworth appears as unassuming as the seemingly insignificant objects that inhabit his photographs. Although he has enriched our cultural landscape as a leading figure within New British Sculpture and as an observer of the irreverent components of our urban environment, he refuses to think in terms of a CV. "Who wants to be a passport?"

"When I was at school, it became obvious that everything I did had something to do with art." After Hornsey School of Art he joined the Royal College of Art looking for a greater complexity. During the summer of Sgt. Pepper, 1967, he worked for Henry Moore. "I was a cog in a wheel. I could see how a certain kind of art could be a certain kind of business. Moore ran quite an enterprise. I learned a lot and one of the pieces I made is in the Tate."

After his MA, Wentworth rented a studio, an old church near Southwark Park, for one pound a week. "It was an incredibly important moment, the beginning of a sort of reality. A year of doing all the clichés, painting and decorating houses, all the odd jobs." Soon he was offered a teaching job at Goldsmiths. For over fifteen years he evolved within this stimulating space. For Wentworth, "art in the 1970s was without the illusion of commerce. You could invent ways of working and it was undoubtedly much easier to survive. London was not an expensive city then. Part-time teaching gave you an adequate framework to play".

Wentworth's first opportunities to exhibit came through recommendations by other artists. "It is usually artists who suggest other artists. Everybody knows that this is ultimately the most animated critical space, which both helps and induces you to work." In the early 1980s, Nicholas Logsdail of Lisson Gallery began to represent him. "It was like a little dance. It always is a little dance. Artists should understand that life is made of dances. It's not made of sending your slides in with a pleading letter. Even though he has never felt censured by a gallery, he would recommend developing direct contacts. Now that there are so many more art structures, perhaps you have to work more broadly, even harder. There is also debate which says the commercial gallery is out of date."

At the Lisson, he met Karsten Schubert, then freshly arrived in London and working as an intern; he breathed a "bourgeois intellectual curiosity from mainland Europe". Wentworth enjoyed Schubert's frank openness: "Creative friendships are the most valuable things you can have." Over the following years, Wentworth became friends with the Swiss curator, Hans-Ulrich Obrist. He was soon invited to partake in Obrist's first exhibition, in his St Gallen kitchen. "An unknown kitchen in an unknown town, but a hunch that Obrist could make it work. Although one way of being a successful artist is to carefully police everything you do, you should also play some wild cards."

In the 1970s, his discovery of Walker Evans was a major influence on his thought processes. "A lot of photographs I was taking I didn't understand. Walker Evans' work helped confirm what they were. Sometimes you need a little hand, which comes out of the wall and squeezes you." In 1998, Wentworth curated 'Thinking Aloud' in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery showing artists such as Francis Al?Ceal Floyer, Walker Evans mixed up with eclectic objects mostly borrowed from the Imperial War Museum. "'Thinking Aloud' had the same level of arbitrary content as the street has. It was a success because people really enjoyed that arbitrariness." He achieved his primary artistic intention: recreating the street's power structures within a gallery space. With An Area of Outstanding Unnatural Beauty, his latest project, commissioned by Artangel, Wentworth explored further the path laid out by 'Thinking Aloud'. The visitors had to negotiate their way around tennis tables as they would to navigate around London.

They could stay and play a game – the space was theirs. "The underlying subject matter was essentially theatrical, just like being a participant in a city."

Wentworth insists on the necessity to look abroad. "In the UK, there is a lack of comparative thinking which leads to the belief that there is a ready-made art scene." A trip to Kosovo immediately succeeded the Artangel commission. After any intensive working period, he needs some breathing space; time to think. "Everyone is aware of power structures and what their relationship to them might be. You know that from a code as simple as crossing the road. There is a fast bit that has got cars in it that would kill you and a pavement that is less dangerous. Which one is more interesting?"

UPDATE 2006:
Richard Wentworth’s recent solo shows include Tate Liverpool, 2005, Lisson Gallery, London, 2005 and ‘Glad that things don’t talk’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2003.