Art Aesthetic Magazine
D.S Graham, “The Rise Art Prize,” Art Aesthetic Magazine, Jan 2018
Elizabeth Waggett’s drawings are superbly accomplished. She then applies a thin layer of gold leaf to finish the work. In this way, she presents a challenge to the viewer to re-think the concept of ‘value’ as presented in the artwork and the wider world.
Manifest Destiny-The Peacemaker (2016) reminds me of the images that circulated around the world in October, 2011. Col. Gaddafi had just been killed and a young seventeen year old, Mohammed Elbibi, was waving the old dictator’s gold-plated Browning 9mm. It’s something about the conjunction of money and violence in the same object that’s so brazen and thus unsettling. Waggett’s Skull 2 might remind you of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007) but it’s closer to Medieval theology in its bare skull with the gold crown of thorns, the earth-bound reliquary of a halo. The Curse of Being Magnificent (2017) is particularly neat, it depicts a lobster, which is a delicacy, of course, with a gold elastic band trapping its claws. You’re aware that she’s trapped by her own finery, her own deliciousness, her own wealth.
Waggett wants to draw attention to ‘value’ in the modern world. It’s acknowledged that ‘art’ proves the exception to the Labour Theory of Value. It’s not a question of working hours, days, or even years… David Graeber presents a plausible theory that the advent of gold/money as a universal equivalent begot two categories of value: that which could be exchanged; and that which could not. You can’t compare, say, love, which cannot be exchanged, with the simple commodity. It’s no mere coincidence that a peculiarly modern form of love arose at the same time the very category of aesthetics and, actually, alongside capitalism. For they’re the obverse of the latter’s emergence. You can’t truly compare one painting’s value with another, yet there is this other ‘value’ measured in currency that attempts exactly that. It’s this duality that can't help but attend most, if not every, artwork. For this reason, Waggett’s works are a challenge to the artist, critic, collector, and curator. She slaps this universal equivalent straight onto the objet itself. It’s an affront, yet it’s value too. You can’t pretend this hypocrisy isn’t there and that we’re all, desperately, caught in it.
