Praised as an ‘epiphany of the humble and the rejected’, Dan Arps’s installation Explaining Things won the prestigious 2010 Walters Prize. 2010’s judge, former director of the Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli, chose Arps from an excitingly youthful line up of nominees that included Alex Monteith, Saskia Leek and Fiona Connor. From scummy plastic furniture to YouTube clips, Arps’s noteworthy installation of degenerate found objects presented a complex framework of different cultural motivations, aspirations and failures.
Explaining Things relied on the peculiar appeal of the abject readymade. Arps collects the kinds of disaffected images and objects that sit at the margins of popular culture. Often reworked with rudimentary sculptural materials, he carefully arranged his found objects on makeshift plinths and pieces of furniture. In one corner of the room a glowing orb illuminated a cheap owl statue which was covered in paint splodges and half wrapped in newspaper. On a nearby wall dog-eared posters of tropical island destinations were smattered with globs of blue-tack and smeared with paint. Another wall piece included small photos of people having sex with someone dressed in an ET costume.
Explaining Things presented a conglomeration of the divergent values that produce these objects and images. Glorified holiday destinations, pornographic fetishes and hackneyed art exhibition conventions, each present alternate ways of organising the world. The resulting installation offered a quasi-map that charts the different trajectories of this pop-cultural detritus.
Aside from Arps’s installation the other standout collection of works in this Walters Prize was Saskia Leek’s Yellow is the Putty of the World. Leek’s series of beautifully hung paintings offered a reprieve from some of the more boisterous works on show and many were disappointed that she