This witty sculpture takes its cue from the small often barely noticeable translucent signs that museums temporarily erect when works are not available for display. In a playful and slightly irreverent gesture, Peter Saville and Anna Blessman have remade the signs and re-presented them in a context that gives them the status of the original artwork. These works provide a temporary interruption in the logic and flow of the display in a museum, while resting on the premise that not only was the object once there but it will be returned (and business will return to usual). The slightly archaic language and the distanced authorial curatorial voice raise issues such as the power and authority of the museum as an institution; the boundaries between an art work and the way it is presented for display, and the audience’s readiness (or unwillingness, perhaps) to engage with a conceptual work.
Anna Blessman began noticing and photographing these placeholders in museums and galleries more than a decade ago. Her interest lay in how these signs raised ideas of possession and collection, as well as the endless scope they provided for the imagination.
