Duck egg blue, the McDonald duck project
Setting up tensions between the impersonal and humane, the exotic versus the domestic, the elegant and repulsive - this installation utilises a sense of play and the unexpected to undercut the traditional austerity of installation work.
Arranged in five sections, the centrepiece titled "Ducks From China But Not China Ducks" relies on contrasting the formal execution with the quirky nature of the found objects on display.
Entering the Mori Gallery, rows of yellow objects could be seen arranged symmetrically on a podium in the centre of the far room. lt seemed that the topic in hand was the old favourite - consumerism, the utilisation of multiples being evident at that distance.
On approaching, the objects transpired to be five hundred toylike ducklings, standing in a militaristic formation on upturned packing cases bearing "Made in Shanghai" stickers on their webbed feet. These seeming soft toys, could provoke nothing but laughter, as their cute familiarity offset their precision placement.
Yet on closer scrutiny, laughter gave way to nausea as the twisted necks and beady eyes of the ducklings, revealed that these were no toys.
Dead ducklings cannot be viewed, in the same terms as, say, a Duchampian readymade. McDonald's objective was not to pose a question about what constitutes art, or to engage in an exercise in depersonalising the art object, for here a narrative, humanist element, is evident. The detail of the twisted necks relates something about duck history, providing a link between fowl and man-related death.
Human barbarism towards duck is explicit throughout the work. Peking Duck, a front room wall display featured the pages from a recipe book for the dish Peking Duck, amid a ring of Chinese plates