Before his death late last year, Keith Arnatt was most often associated with a circle of 1960s- and ’70s-era British Conceptual artists and art groups, like Victor Burgin and Art & Language, for whom photography and text allowed a clinical, if vague, perspective on a range of fractured, messy, and difficult issues (such as the Vietnam War, socialism, and imperialism). Emblematic of this period is Arnatt’s Self Burial with Mirror, 1969, a black-and-white photographic self-portrait in which his whole body, save his head, is buried. In it, the back of his head faces the camera, while a mirror placed opposite his visage reveals its reflection to the viewer. While the photograph was critically received as a work about authorship and the role of the contemporary artist, this exhibition recasts the premise of this work and others by demonstrating that Arnatt was first an accomplished sculptor.
Exploring an intense interest in self-containment, Self Burial with Mirror was predated by a series of mirrored cubes (including Mirror Plug, 1968), freestanding objects placed on the ground outside. This same issue is taken up in another photograph, Liverpool Beach Burial, 1968, in which Arnatt’s students are buried on the beach outside Liverpool, their heads forming a long, seemingly infinite, line of colored dots. If this work shares an affinity with expanded sculptural practices like Earthworks and Happenings, so, too, does it call for a reevaluation of the presumed variations in Minimalism between nations. The exhibition also bridges his known work with a recently rediscovered set of drawings for sculptures. Executed between 1962 and 1965, these pastels are bright, many with contrasting colors that show one way Arnatt conceived of interior space: as hues that become forms. These pieces are complemented by documentary photographs of red, green, and yellow sculptures installed outside his home in Yorkshire. The works lightly and playfully dot the landscape, rightly calling attention to the complexity and eclecticism of Arnatt’s practice.
