Richard Wentworth: Making Do Getting By

Richard Wentworth:
Making Do
Getting By






Since the mid 1970s London-based artist Richard Wentworth has been documenting aspects of everyday life in an on-going project called Making Do and Getting By. As well as an outdoor video projection, a selection of photographs were exhibited at Jonathan Smart Gallery, High Street. In 2001, these same works were placed in dialogue with photographs by Eugène Atget who documented life in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century - the exhibition Faux Amis (The Photographers' Gallery, London) revealed an on-going fascination with city life. For Atget it was fin-de-siècle Paris, a working, living city with its newly constructed boulevards and tiny laneways: for Richard Wentworth, a century later, it is the discoveries he makes in
built-up city environments
where simple everyday objects
are made to do unlikely but
extraordinarily useful tasks.
If Atget's images capture the 'adaptable, recyclable city', Wentworth's are a celebration of the pragmatic, of an irrepressible DIY human ingenuity. As one writer has suggested, 'no object exists in the world that cannot be used, reused, disassembled, altered, or adapted once it has served its original purpose...no, even while it serves its original purpose'. The fact is, economising and improvisation are basic human traits...or as Wentworth says: it's about making do, getting by.