Let’s stay in the world of the contemporary as we explore how artists have been invigorating the genre of the still life in more recent years.

It makes sense to start this chapter with one of the most remarkable – and loved – takes on the found object and the readymade in the 20th century, a film called The Way Things Go by Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. What happens in it? Well, what doesn’t?! A crazy chain reaction of household and industrial objects like ladders, tyres, kettles, chairs, metal drums, bulbs, pans, and fireworks (yes, there are pyrotechnics!) lean, crash, bump, and explode into each other in a massive warehouse.

Lasting half an hour, the cinematic sequence is made up of over two dozen clips filmed over a period of two years. As each new object takes centre stage and performs its part, there are consequences to the actions of each object – yet there is a resilience in the way the sequence continues. In the 1980s Fischli and Weiss became fascinated with states of impending collapse, and this example shows that tension between order and chaos!

Having progressed from sculpture, installation as an artform started to gather momentum through the 1960s. Usually, they are large-scale constructions made out all kinds of objects and materials, which can be personal, abandoned, collected, and sometimes literally rubbish, like junk or scrap. They also tend to be arranged as “environments” for audiences to walk around and interact with.

British artist Cornelia Parker made this installation by blowing up a shed – yes, blowing up a shed! – and then putting it back together. She even called in the British Army to do it. Why? To transform the objects into something new.

The shed is no longer a place where things are safe and stored, but something that has been exploded into hundreds of scattered pieces. And yet the pieces are suspended in the process of scattering, and the explosion becomes a thing of beauty and contemplation.

In the 1960s artists used video art and photography to capture their everyday, paving the way for Wolfgang Tillmans to photograph his socks! Clean ones thankfully…

This dull, domestic moment featuring some socks thrown onto the sofa, waiting for someone to put them away. It looks like a casual snapshot which has been taken almost by mistake. However, the photograph is deceptively casual. German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans makes highly staged compositions, putting a lot of time into setting up his still life arrangements. Tillmans is encouraging us to look at things without pre-determined values.

This film is another interpretation of the Still Life genre, made possible by the medium of film. Although its theme – time passing – is as old as the hills, this time–lapse video of fruit rotting may not have taken as long to make as a Dutch master painting, but still conveys grace in the decay.

Apparently some of the fruit, particularly the peaches, were so genetically modified that they took much longer to decompose than normal!

Sam Taylor-Johnson adds another hint that this is not a traditional still life, can you spot it?

It’s not unusual for artists to work with other people. For example, medieval and Renaissance artists had workshops packed full of apprentices, and Andy Warhol had teams of assistants to make his work. Let’s face it, most art “movements” are essentially about groups of friends – or sometimes rivals – exploring ideas and pushing boundaries together.

These days, it’s common for artists to make work with everyday people like you and me. Sometimes they just need extra pairs of hands, while at other times collaboration can give an artwork unique and special qualities.

American conceptual artist Mark Dion asked a group of volunteers in London to help him to scour the shores of the River Thames to see what they could find. Together, they collected hundreds of objects such as clay pipes, plastic toys, and animal bones, which were placed in this old–fashioned cabinet, full of stories and mystery.

Now these really were found objects!

Austrian artist, Erwin Wurm, has a quirky way of getting people involved in his art too. He invites participants and performers to react to written instructions involving everyday things like clothes, buckets, balls, you name it! They might end up squeezing into clothes, balancing on buckets, or even hugging a watermelon. And get this: there’s a strict one-minute time limit, so there’s no time to overthink!

To wrap up (sorry, terrible pun), let’s look at the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude who had a habit of wrapping objects, and not just small things like these cans, but cars, buildings, and even bridges!

During their career, Christo (1935-2020) and his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), wrapped the Reichstag government building in Berlin, and ran 200,000 metres of white nylon cloth across California.

These monumental projects created dramatic new ways of looking at cities and landscapes, transforming the familiar into something entirely new.

Most projects have taken decades to be realised, including L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped for which planning began in 1961 and was only completed after Christo’s death. This final undertaking involved wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with 700 ropes and masses of fabric.

With the materials moving in the wind and reflecting the sunlight, they wanted to create a “living object” so that “people will want to touch” it.