Counter-Culture II - Common Culture

Commissioned installation for the opening of the National Museum of Art, National Museum Cardiff, Wales. Counter Culture II is an installation by the artist group Common Culture. The work is made from light-boxes displaying menus normally seen in fast-food outlets.The installation brings the high street takeaway into the white box of the modern art museum. This mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture draws attention to the formation of social class and taste. The menus themselves comment on the diversity of modern Britain, and by extension the way ideas of ‘Britishness’ are formed and expressed. The simple, prefabricated forms of the light-boxes reference the work of American artists such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Yet the menus themselves, with their kitsch commercial aesthetic, deliberately undermine the minimalist purity to which these artists aspired.