Crossing the Road: The Career of Richard Wentworth
[Published in A-N Magazine in March 2003]
From his favourite café on the busy “Cally” Road, Richard Wentworth takes Stéphanie Delcroix safely on his journey to the other side of the street.
“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 Sargent Pepper, 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. You could invent ways of working and it was undoubtedly much easier to survive. London was not an expensive city. Part-time teaching gave you an adequate framework to play. There are now hundred of trophies, more things hanging on trees that people might want to pick.” read more
