Werner Trittleiter

One of my recent art projects has been uploading some of my original photographs to various Wikipedia pages. It started with the Folly Boat, whose Wikipedia page I was surprised to find did not have an accompanying photo. Then I uploaded one of my sketches to the Staunton Wikipedia page. This was a little risky, since sketches are typically seen as personal expression and Wikipedia only wants you to upload pictures that impart factual information. But my drawing is an objective depiction of the traffic lights at the intersection of Churchville and Central Avenues in Staunton, and I placed the image in the Infrastructure section, next to the paragraph identifying the major highways that pass through Staunton. Churchville Avenue is coterminous with U.S. 250. This drawing was uploaded on July 24, and it is still there.

Next I posted one of my photographs of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to that sculpture's page. This one was also tricky, since Spiral Jetty is somehow owned by the Dia Art Foundation, and they supposedly own the copyright to images of the work. But the Wikipedia entry itself said it was okay, and the image has remained up since I posted it on July 29.

I have since added five more photographs to the Staunton page, as well as photos to pages for Jackson Pollock, the Brandywine River Museum of Art, Bubblegum Alley, Cadillac Ranch, and more. It got to the point where I created two pages—Folly Mills Creek and the old Staunton Coca-Cola bottling plant—just to be able to place my photos on them! 

I have some pictures taken at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and with these I decided to get a little mischievous. The pictures were taken before I was informed that interior photography was prohibited at the gallery, so even though a Wikipedia page is not an official website, I figured there might be people associated with the gallery watching the page who might delete photos of the interior. The first picture I added was a really nice pic I got of Peggy observing some large-scale photographs by Andreas Gursky. For the caption, I wrote, "Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Madison Ave., featuring the work of Andreas Gursksy," including a wikilink to Gursky's page. Nothing snarky here. 

Click on image to enlarge it.

But then I added a picture of an empty gallery, a space where artworks are usually displayed that just happened to be empty at the time. In the world of "contemporary art," this room could be perceived as a work of art in itself, which is a little snarky as it mildly sends up Conceptualism. And I placed it in the section on Legal Issues, subsection Tax Evasion, as in, "If you don't get your affairs with the IRS in order, this is what your galleries could look like." A little snarky.

 

I let these two pictures stand for a week to see if anybody would delete them. Nobody did. So then I got real snarky and uploaded a photo I had taken of a utility space in the gallery that was visible to the public with a stepladder leaning against a wall.

For the caption I used the same format I had used for the first picture: "Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Madison Ave., featuring the work of Werner Trittleiter." Sounds like a real artist's name, right? Werner is the worldwide leader in the manufacture and sale of stepladders, and "trittleiter" is the German word for "stepladder."

Of course, this is an homage to the pioneering example of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Duchamp inaugurated the idea of the "readymade," the idea that any man-made object can be perceived as a work of "art" if it is placed in an "art gallery." This is an early commentary on the absurdity of the idea that "art" is an order or class separate from all other man-made objects, and that the "art world" is the sole arbiter of what qualifies as "art." 

So, I wanted to see if art world types would automatically assume that the stepladder is a work of "contemporary art" and/or to see if they would be too embarrassed to admit that they were unfamiliar with the work of Werner Trittleiter. The picture was posted on October 23, and it's still there. So maybe I got 'em. Or maybe it's just Wikipedia and nobody cares.