提姆·諾布爾與蘇·韋伯斯特

Stuart Shave/Modern Art Inc., London

Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 2001)

Sale: Sotheby’s, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 12 October 2007, Lot 20

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Tim Noble & Sue Webster: Instant Gratification, 2001, another example exhibited, n.p., installation view

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, 2004, another example exhibited, n.p., illustrated in colour

Dresden, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Die Zehn Gebote: Politik – Moral – Gesellschaft, 2004, p. 45, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition and full working order. Close inspection reveals some minor chips and scratches to the side edges and and a few hairline scratches to the face of the metal plating which look to be inherent to the artists' working process.
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Illuminated by a cacophony of 204 dazzling ice white flashing bulbs, Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s eye-catching $ is an alluringly seductive sculpture that owes much of its potency to the processes of the advertising industry. Resplendent and extravagant, the theatrical crescendo of bulbs blinking in an orchestrated sequence is the ultimate altarpiece to decadence, excess and desire. Brandishing the definitive symbol of wealth, success, want, need and greed this work is utterly instinctive and direct. Executed in the same year as Noble and Webster’s wittily titled Instant Gratification exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, which prominently featured another example from this edition, $ succinctly addresses the history of art through its appropriation of a popular icon. Relating to a tradition that spans back to the inauguration of Pop art, $ brandishes the ultimate symbol of popular culture as transported into the realm of high art via Noble and Webster’s subversive bent. A pointedly ostentatious and conspicuous hyperbole of kitsch culture, $ jubilantly celebrates the glitz, brash casinos of Las Vegas and its British siblings; Piccadilly Circus and the Blackpool illuminations. $ is bold and daring, illuminating a new kind of relationship with the viewer, who is forced to acknowledge the audacity of its raw and electrifying power.      

In 1997, after the artists’ first major and wildly successful solo exhibition, the duo celebrated by taking a trip to Las Vegas to marvel at the very museums of low culture that had inspired their work. Stimulated by the direct and accessible glamour of Sin City, on their return to London Noble and Webster continued to create work that dealt with the cheap thrills of illumination with a renewed sense of vigour and passion. The fusion of brash seduction and poignancy so integral to their art comes to its ultimate conclusion in the present work: $. The simplest and yet most powerful of icons, the dollar sign is deeply cemented in the global consciousness as the immeasurably potent and ultimate symbol of currency. The concept of wealth holds different meanings for different people such as independence, opportunity, and choice to name a few. It is this eclectic fusion of opposites; high culture and anti-culture; form and anti-form; and wealth and poverty, that provides $ with its stunning power. Deliberately positioned astride two ostensible antipodes – highbrow art on the one hand and consumer society’s lowbrow kitsch on the other – $’s complex pastiche emphasises the surprising similarity between the two.

Unlike many other artists of their generation, Noble and Webster meticulously craft each of their light sculptures without the aid of assistants. As a teenager Webster spent many hours helping her electrician father repair cigarette vending machines, a skill that would give her the practical nous to construct the complex electrical arrangements evidenced in the Sisyphean light system of $. Noble and Webster first experimented with lights in their now infamous Flash Painting in 1993, which consisted of a three foot by fifteen foot canvas surrounded by sequenced white fairground lights, and was exhibited in a show they staged in a Brick Lane warehouse for their peers, among them Chris Ofili. Returning to light and neon works in earnest in 1996, $ is a later and more fully resolved example of their iconic light pieces. Taking the fluorescent light sculptures of Dan Flavin as a clear source of art historical inspiration, $ completely overhauls the clarity of minimalism by combining sculpture, theatre and persona in a mesmerising spectacle. In $, the artists have attained their ultimate goal of making their lives and those of the viewer part of their art.