BOLDTYPE ISSUE #39: Artwork By

The cover of this issue of Boldtype is a detail of Toxic Schizophrenia,1997, a sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster from the book Wasted Youth, published by Rizzoli in 2006. The monograph captures the union of two rogues at their most sublime and most depraved. For example, the silhouetted couple kiss as the first man and woman in the lovely, lush The Original Sinners, 2000. Their foils appear later in the book as our swarthy, hairy, anthropoid ancestors in The New Barbarians, 1999.

A range of layered media effectively communicates the artists' emotional spectrum. A metal sculpture, comprised of scrap materials associated with modernist sculptors such as Anthony Caro and David Smith, casts sharp shadow images of the couple defecating on an adjacent wall (He and She, 2004). Neon scrawls in unexpected environments— as in the tender, bulging, cursive letters of "Forever" above a bus stop replete with oblivious bystanders— mesh traits of sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and photography (Forever, 1996).

The duo — then a couple of British teenagers from divergent backgrounds — met in 1986, in the Fine Art Department at Nottingham Trent University, and have been exploring and exposing their love ever since. Their first solo exhibition, at London's Independent Art Space, in 1996, progressed to shows at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Early in Wasted Youth, an image of light bulbs spells out “Vague Us” (Vague Us, 1998), inadvertently describing the authors. In that same series, a neon image of the phrase “fucking beautiful” (fuckingbeautiful (snow white/ hot pink), 2000) pins them just as accurately.

- Lauren McKee