Looking Back at Trash Shadows of Tim Noble & Sue Webster

You might not recognize their faces if you were to pass them on the street, but once you've seen the shadows of Tim Noble and Sue Webster, you're not likely to forget their forms. Like Christo and Jean Claude before them, this controversial couple work in tandem to create works that both critique and perpetuate the idea of art as spectacle. Pairing the language and imagery of advertising with the now often co-opted and commercialized opposition to commercialization, punk, the duo thrives off of conflict. Combining sex and violence, fame and infamy, trash and treasure, they evoke the initial wide-eyed response synonymous with that particular club of British art miscreants turned international art darlings, the YBA's (Young British Artists), unofficially chaired by the ever polarizing Damien Hirst.

Noble and Webster's garbage shadows first debuted over a decade ago. So far they have avoided the fate of purely contextual shock creations. Sure the naughty factor of the images themselves--- the artists simultaneously defecating, two rats humping etc--has passed into the conceptual purgatory of whateverland, but regardless of the fact that the exploitation and transgression of fads and faux pauxs is now ten years past its expiration date, nothing about the process and product loses any luster; using heaps of jagged junk to create vivid and crisp images with light still has the power to drop jaws.