For a work of conceptual art, Roelof Louw’s
Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) (1967) is unusually generous. Some 5,800 oranges are stacked neatly in a wooden frame on the floor of a gallery. Then visitors are allowed to help themselves to the fruit. By the time I saw it in the big conceptual art show at Tate Britain in 2016, the pyramid had dwindled: it looked more like a ball pit for toddlers, as improvised by a greengrocer.
Louw’s oranges, in their abundance and with their more or less uniform shapes, are everyday things; you might see them piled like this, if not in such quantities, on any high street in Britain. But perhaps, in carrying them into the unfamiliar setting of a gallery and then constructing a cairn out of them,
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There’s an episode of
Yes Minister called ‘Equal Opportunities’. Minister Jim Hacker is under pressure to recruit more women to the civil service. The hunt is on for female mandarins. ‘Ah,’ says principal private secretary Bernard. ‘Sort of… satsumas?’ At this time of year, I can’t help thinking of Bernard as I hover in the Co-op over nets of tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas and ‘easy peelers’, whatever they are. ’Tis the season for citrus. For oranges at the bottom of stockings, for Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning, for smoked salmon blinis with slices of lemon, for Milanese panettone with candied parings of peel, and for J.C. Volkamer’s