Crumbs and all: Prince Harry, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard have cutlery swiped for exhibition
For 15 years activist Van T Rudd, nephew of the former PM, has been collecting used forks from the worlds most powerful
Collecting unwashed forks might seem like a strange artistic practice but, with friends in the right places (read: working at luxury catering companies), it takes on a whole new meaning.
For the past 15 years, the Melbourne artist and activist V-T-R, real name Van Thanh Rudd, has been overseeing the swiping of cutlery from high-class hotel restaurants and function rooms, where the worlds richest and most powerful have been wined and dined. And now a selection of these forks in all their greasy, grimy glory are ready to be ogled by the rest of us.
When the 1% eat in various luxury hotels around the world, theyre served by thousands of hotel workers who have access to the cutlery they use, Van, the nephew of the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, told Guardian Australia. I worked in that particular area of the hospitality industry in the late 1990s and, to some of us, swiping their dinner forks from under their noses didnt seem out of the question.
And so we find greenish goop rusted on to a silver fork once held by Prince Harry; a tiny strip of meaty fibre munched on by Clive Palmer, clinging to the lower two tines; Hillary Clintons pilfered prongs left almost bare but for a few yellowing crumbs.
Its voyeuristic, bizarre and more than a little grotesque but chances are youre going to expand these photos to examine each crumb regardless.
He is the nephew of a former PM but Van T Rudds name may be familiar to you in its own right.
A political activist and visual artist, he has been at the centre of a number of recent political controversies: three months before Julia Gillard ousted his uncle from government in 2010, Van had announced he would be running against her in the Melbourne seat of Lalor, for the Revolutionary Socialist Party. Later that year, when the ABC program Australian Story featured him in an episode, Uncle Kevin declined an invitation to appear; and in 2011 Van was fined and removed from the Australian Open after staging an anti-racism protest dressed in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
But The Rich Forks has been Vans most longstanding project and next week a small amount of them will be exhibited at a community arts centre in Melbourne before the collection travels the world. (Van would not confirm whether this collection includes a fork from his relative.)
Van says the idea behind the project is two-pronged: on the one hand it takes back a tiny bit of the wealth of the 1% and on the other it exposes and infiltrates exclusive corporate dinners where billionaires and conservative politicians decide the future of our world while devouring premium food and wine.
Van says there are about 40 forks in the collection so far, a number arrived at with the help of five-star hotel workers dotted around the world, many of whom are paid a minimum wage while they handle the cutlery and glassware for the rich.
The activist and artist sees it not as stealing but reverse looting, or reappropriating a tiny piece of the vast amount of wealth stolen from us.
When questioned about the projects legality he replies: So what? … Capitalism has been basically built on legalised crime for the benefit of the extremely rich.
But isnt it a little creepy? Van is similarly nonchalant: Ive never considered it creepy. Perhaps displaying them in public may relieve a bit of that, he says. Personally I find the tens of billions made by Mark Zuckerberg from our private lives a little creepy.
- A small selection of The Rich Forks will be displayed at Footscray Community Arts Centre from 5-21 May, with more exhibitions to be announced
