Art Or Trash? These Handpainted Beer Cans Illustrate The Fine Line

After an unfortunate disposal at a Netherlands gallery, Victor Mather explores the fine line between art and rubbish.

A work of art consisting of two empty beer cans was displayed at a museum. Quick quiz: What happened next?

No prize at all if you guessed the obvious. It got thrown out by accident.

The artwork, titled All the Good Times We Spent Together, was created in 1988 by Alexandre Lavet, who has described his style as “mixing minimalism, contextual and conceptual art legacies”. It was displayed at Lam, a museum dedicated to food and eating in Lisse, Netherlands, a town roughly 40km southwest of Amsterdam.

The artwork was not merely two used cans, as the museum took pains to point out on its webpage.

“If you look closely, you will discover that the dented and empty cans are hand-painted,” the museum said in describing the work. “Every detail has been painted onto the cans with precision using acrylic paint.”

It added, rather plaintively: “Lavet’s piece required a lot of time and effort to create.”

The confusion over the artwork was compounded by its placement.

“Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light,” the museum director Sietske van Zanten says on the website. “By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes.”

The thing about elevators, though, is that they sometimes need to be visited by a mechanic. And sometimes that mechanic is perhaps a tidy person who just wants to do his bit and pick up some litter that may have “been left behind during construction”. And that’s what happened at Lam this month.

The museum said it wasn’t angry with the elevator mechanic, who had been covering for the regular mechanic. “He was just doing his job in good faith,” van Zanten said. “In a way, it’s a testament to the effectiveness of Alexandre Lavet’s art.”

But there is a happy ending to the story: After a search, a curator found the cans in a rubbish bag, which had not yet been taken away. The cans needed some cleaning but were otherwise undamaged.

For now, they will be displayed in a “place of honour”, the museum said, on a pedestal by the entrance.

Life can be perilous for an unconventional work of art.

Prominent British artist Damien Hirst assembled a work in a London gallery in 2001 that included lolly wrappers, newspapers, coffee cups, ashtrays and, yes, empty beer bottles. After a gala opening night, the work lasted only a few hours before a cleaner chucked it. Much of the work was saved from the bin, however, and Hirst said he found the episode amusing.

A 1.5-metre-tall cake sculpture from 1979 by Pat Lasch vanished from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it was determined years later, and the consensus was that it had probably been tossed. “It’s like losing my mother,” Lasch lamented.

Work by artists Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari at Museion, a museum in Bolsano, Italy, consisted of 300 empty Champagne bottles, confetti and cigarette butts, to give the look of the remnants of a wild party. Quite a job for the janitors, but they nonetheless conscientiously cleaned it all up in 2015, even sorting the glass separately for recycling. Enough of the work was recovered for reconstruction.

There was a sadder end for an installation by German artist Gustav Metzger at the Tate Britain in 2004. Part of the work was a bag of rubbish. Unsurprisingly, it was taken out with the other rubbish and thrown in a crusher. It was fished out, but was considered too badly damaged to repair.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Victor Mather

Photographs by: LAM Museum

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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