Melvyn Minnaar: Wine as conceptual art

By , 4 October 2024

A dead ash tree in Anya Gallaccio: Preserve at Turner Contemporary, Margate. Image: TheGuardian.com.

An interesting exhibition opened at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate, Kent in the UK a few days ago. The show is a substantial overview of the career of the 61-year-old Anya Gallaccio, a British artist who is renowned for her conceptual work, mostly with and in nature.

In other words, much of her art speaks to and of the natural environment. The passing of time, the ephemeral nature of things, change and demise are central features of her art philosophy. Decay, in a manner, of speaking is part of the concept. Only documentation and memories remain of her art.

The Art Newspaper recently wrote: “For nearly four decades Anya Gallaccio has been making work from organic, unpredictable materials such as fruit, flowers, vegetables, ice, salt and chocolate—all of which can change, decay or even disappear over the course of a single exhibition.”

This, in a number of ways, is a complete opposite of the view that artworks have a permanent value that increases in both cultural and social significance. Of course, as the contemporary power and influence of money have increasingly devalued that worth in public spaces, the vibrant modern art auction has increased its hold, and is now more often than not the arbitrator of the significance (and meaning) of art pieces.

The parallel with wine is easy to see.

So it is interesting to return to the concept that wine, by nature (!), has a temporal existence. At some stage that highly-paid-for bottle of auction wine will be wine no more. So why this gamble with the transient?

Well, Gallaccio – whose current exhibition carries the delightful paradoxical title preserve – faced this issue head-on. In 2004 she started to collaborate with Zelma Long, the well-known American winemaker and founder member of local winery Vilafonté, on a wine project in California.

The art project was finally released as a boxed set of six wines made from five different Zinfandel vineyards in Sonoma and one blend. Titled Motherlode, her artwork was part of a project, Terrain Terroir, by San Francisco’s New Langton Arts institution to “produce a portrait of the Sonoma county, using the essence of the land: its soil and the fruit it bears”.

At the time Gallaccio, who was to become an arts professor at the University of California in San Diego, spoke of capturing the “essence of the landscape”. But she – and Long – were certainly very aware of the paradox involving wine.

“Buying wine seriously is an act of faith that I believe replicates the act of buying the work of a living, evolving artist. Wine is alive in the bottle and continues to develop and change.”

“Once the bottle is opened it has to be consumed. Even though you can only speculate whether it is at its prime, this can be a very expensive gamble. I always have felt that there are similar conditions at play with collecting contemporary art. Wine being a living thing, a material in flux, representing a process with an anticipated conclusion but not one guaranteed of course struck a chord with me.”

This last sentence of Gallaccio’s seems to me to sum up also that gamble during the hectic wine auction bidding.

But the best wine – made for the experience of drinking pleasure – is surely always a conceptual work that reflects whence it comes: the vineyard, the intention of the crafty winemaker and its final presentation to those who will pour it.

Some bottles of Long and Gallaccio’s Motherlode Zinfandel 2005 may still be out there. (I think some ten cases were released in a limited edition.) Whether drinkable? Who knows?

As part of her retrospective at the Turner Contemporary, Gallaccio has the art project for schools titled An Apple a Day which aims to explore Kent’s heritage, terrain and history through the county’s apple orchards.

  • Melvyn Minnaar has written about art and wine for various local and international publications over the years. The creativity that underpins these subjects is an enduring personal passion. He has served on a few “cultural committees”

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