Hetain Patel, dressed in one of his Spider-Man outfits, beside his grandmother Laxmiben, in Baa’s House (2015) © Hetain Patel
The fine lines between art and life have long been a focus point for Artangel, the commissioning body known for staging Jeremy Deller’s re-creation of the famed Battle of Orgreave (2001), Rachel Whiteread’s concrete cast of an East End house(1993-94) and Taryn Simon’s testament to grief, An Occupation of Loss (2018). Now, the organisation is pushing the envelope in a radically different way with an open call to take part in the largest exhibition ever dedicated to the UK’s hobbies.
The Hobby Cave, devised in collaboration with the London-based artist and film-maker Hetain Patel, asks members of the public across the country to share their hobbies—whether it's crochet, cosplay costumes, wood carvings or robotics—via a form on a dedicated webpage. Thousands of craft objects will then be selected for display at a yet-to-be-decided venue in the UK. To coincide with the show, meanwhile, Patel will produce a film that showcases people's pastimes with “a visual language usually reserved for Hollywood films and luxury advertising”, according to a release.
Patel and Artangel are inviting contributions from hobbyists ranging from puppet makers to origami artists
Photos: Esme Buxton and Darryl Bedford
Patel is himself an avid hobbyist, having started working on cars with his father and now focusing his energy on perhaps his greatest passion, Spider-Man—whose instantly recognisable outfit the artist has handcrafted into several suits. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, he explains that it was his love for the Marvel character that sparked the idea for the project.
“At the beginning [of the process], partly I was thinking, ‘man, I would love to get all of the world's Spider-Man costumes into one room together, just for my own pleasure.’ And then, through interrogating that with Mariam [Zulfiqar, the director of Artangel], we started thinking, what's the essence of it? For me, it was about something real, something close to the bone. And I felt like that applied to a massive gamut of other making and creating.”
As well as a creative exercise, Patel sees The Hobby Cave as a form of protest, of pushback against forces of authority and control, including in the contemporary art sector. “The power dynamics that we talk about in this project extend to everything—to all of those things that impose rules on us, and the art world is part of that,” he says. “There’s gatekeeping and pressures and judgements, so it's important that this project isn't just a nod to the art world. It’s the hobbyists that are at the heart of it.”
Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly a canon of contemporary art that he is entering; previous Artangel projects have secured the reputations of some of the leading artists working today, with Whiteread’s House, for example, winning her the Turner Prize. Zulfiqar says, however, that this points to the radical nature of the organisation’s projects rather than any form of conformity. “I think it's easy to look back on Artangel's portfolio of work and say, well, of course that's art. But at the time it was really groundbreaking; it completely transformed the language by which we were prepared to talk about and understand what the art of the museum or gallery looked like.” Patel’s project, she says, shouldn’t be any different.
Both Zulfiqar and Patel acknowledge, too, that The Hobby Cave is launching at a time when people around the UK are feeling the strain of a cost-of-living crisis, a fraught socio-political environment and horrendous international conflict. Patel hopes the initiative can take on a positive role in this context. “We often feel powerless, out of control of our time or what we're doing, and that's compounded by war and all of these things happening in the world,” he says. “I think the hobby is a hopeful act and I feel like we could do with that right now.”
• The public can submit details about their hobbies via https://thehobbycave.org.uk/