A slice of pickle taken from a fast-food cheeseburger became the centre of a familiar argument about artistic value when Matthew Griffin installed it on the ceiling of Michael Lett gallery in Auckland.
The work, titled Pickle, appeared in the 2022 group exhibition Hosting Fine Arts, Sydney.
An ordinary object inside an art system
Griffin described the work directly as a sculpture consisting of a pickle slice flung onto the ceiling. Its material required almost no specialist production, making the gallery context essential to the way it was understood.
Fine Arts Sydney director Ryan Moore argued that viewers were free to reject the object as art. For him, the relevant distinction was not whether anything could automatically become an artwork, but whether an object or action could be used, discussed and encountered as one.
The work therefore depended on collective interpretation. The artist’s gesture, the gallery’s decision to exhibit it and the audience’s response all contributed to its status.
Humour and unstable value
Griffin’s wider practice combined humour with inexpensive materials, photography, video and installation. Earlier works included a plastic chair balanced on a ceramic dolphin and an interactive object that fired ping-pong balls when a viewer approached.
These pieces used comic situations to question authenticity, visual culture and the construction of value.
Pickle attracted attention because it was easy to reproduce materially but difficult to reproduce institutionally. Anyone could throw a pickle at a ceiling, but the work’s meaning came from its placement within a named exhibition and a continuing artistic practice.
The sculpture did not resolve the question of what counts as art. It made the social mechanisms behind that question unusually visible.