The Tickle Factor

There is a farm auberge in the area of France, which I visit frequently with my wife, which has often been recommended to us. Invariably the recommendation came with a strange suggestion. Do visit the loo when you go there, we were urged. Eventually, we did eat at the restaurant, where we were not disappointed, and duly inspected the facilities. Everybody is immensely tickled by the lavatory of this establishment. Above the porcelain there are a series of shelves filled with toilet rolls with their pastel shades arranged in a specific pattern. It has been described as a work of art.

Once upon a time avant garde art was the preserve of the cognoscenti or an elite. No longer. Today the Tate Modern is much more popular than Tate Britain. Where provincial cities have galleries providing programmes of contemporary visual art, they are generally well attended and the sort of people who formerly would have been stating that they didn’t know much about art but that they knew what they liked and weren’t finding it, are often enthusing about what they have seen. The tickle factor has a lot to do with this.

Some individual pieces have become immensely popular. Rachel Whiteread’s cast of the inside of a house and Richard Wilson’s work where he covered the floor space of various rooms with a shallow tray of oil which acted as a mirror and completely changed the spatial feel of the place, are just two examples of unconventional works which have greatly tickled the public.

Constructing objects from unusual materials, a little house made entirely of books for example, always provides a high tickle quotient. The Scottish artist David Mach has completed a whole series of works of this kind, a submarine and a Parthenon from old tyres (the latter with its maquette made from polo mints), a steam locomotive from bricks, heads from metal coat hangers or match heads. The most internationally famous work of this kind is Jeff Koon's puppy dog constructed from growing plants, outside Frank Gery’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

Now, there is nothing wrong with amusing the public in this way. Obviously, it adds to the gaiety of nations. It could be said, as D. J. Enright said of pieces from another art (quoted in The Movement Reconsidered, edited by Zachary Leader), ‘the effects may be striking but they don’t strike very deep.’ But at least these works give the lie to the notion that contemporary visual art has nothing to give the general public.