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Automated Response In the beginning there was art, and then there were galleries. And the people came to the galleries to see the art, and they saw that it was good. And they grew fond of the galleries that held the art, and enjoyed spending time there, and the galleries welcomed them by providing refreshment rooms and toilets. Then the gallery directors, having eaten from the Tree of Art History, began to think that they were as Gods, knowing good and evil. And in the mind of the people the art was no longer good, and but for their fondness for the galleries, they would have stopped going. And the gallery directors, sensing the people’s disaffection, improved and enlarged the refreshment and toilet facilities, and added attractions such as play apparatus on which enervated visitors could amuse themselves. And so it came to pass that the gallery became the subject of the art. It began with a shift in the meaning of ‘installation’. Originally referring simply to the display of a work of art or exhibition in a gallery, the term was eventually appropriated by the avant-garde to identify exhibits in non-gallery settings that might not otherwise be recognised as art. When the ‘site-specific installation’ entered the gallery, the gallery, qua site, became the focus of attention. The gigantism of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installations, for example, is designed to show the space to advantage rather than the work. Phidias’s giant statue of Athena in the Parthenon was an object of worship; Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas, on the other hand, blew Tate Modern’s trumpet. In the past year or two, the vocabulary of ‘architectural intervention’ has expanded to include all manner of ‘responding to’, ‘conversing with’, ‘imposing on’, ‘energising’ ‘agitating’ and ‘reclaiming’ the space – even ‘architecturally adjusting the volume’. Staring into space used to be the prerogative of an artist, but that, unfortunately, is no longer sufficiently specific. Inviting artistic responses to specific spaces has the advantage of allowing galleries to project the illusion that exhibitions of no intrinsic interest to the local populace are somehow local. Coincidentally, it’s an ingenious way of foisting D-list foreign artists no one has ever heard of, even in the capital, on regional galleries whose visitors would far prefer to see local talent. Tate Liverpool pulls this trick every two years at the Liverpool Biennial, and Tate St Ives is now giving it a try. Last winter it invited one Heimo Zobernig from Austria - ìone of the most respected artists working in Europe todayî, in case you didn’t know - to ìrespond both to the building and the context of St Ivesî. Tate Britain, meanwhile, has commissioned Eva Rothschild to ‘agitate the architecture’ of the Duveen Galleries and nominated Richard Wright, who makes wall paintings ìthat respond directly to the architectureî, for this year’s Turner Prize. Wright ìis interested in formal beauty;î enthuses Turner Prize juror Jonathan Jones, ìand he collides the architecture in his head with the messy, arbitrary architecture of real places.î Ouch. Even the pocket-sized Kettle’s Yard has turned itself Upside Down/Inside Out, moving the collection from the house to the gallery while the house plays host to a responsabulous retrospective of 14 years of artists’ interventions. The idea, says Michael Harrison, is ìto create more conversations. Not least, we want to explore the house itselfî. This, by the way, is the director speaking. And so to the South London Gallery, which is announcing its forthcoming expansion with the exhibition Beyond These Walls featuring six more foreign artists you’ve never heard of ìfor whom architectural or spatial interventions are an important part of their practiceî. Ayse Erkmen (Turkey), Esther Stocker (Italy/Austria), Pieter Vermeersch (Belgium), Leon Vranken (Belgium), Knut Henrik Henriksen (Norway) and Tue Greenfort (Denmark) ìhave had little prior exposure in Londonî, but conversing with space is, I guess, an international language. I went along two days after the opening; it wasn’t easy at first to identify the art. The walls had been given a gradated paint job by Vermeersch, geometric holes had been opened in the wooden floor by Vranken, the corridor track lighting had been lowered by Erkmen and Stocker had transformed the education room into a 3-D op art painting. Greenfort, meanwhile, in a symbolic act of ‘spacial social intervention’, had reopened the back entrance onto the Seaux Gardens Estate, scene of the tragic Lakanal House fire. On a Sunday afternoon the place was deserted, apart from two young couples and a man with a baby in a buggy, all obviously artists, and three kids manning the Seaux Gardens entrance. The open gate was like an accusation; no one came through it. Here is a public gallery opened by the Victorian philanthropist John Passmore Edwards for the local community, which is now effectively closed to them by its choice of art. Would it have been so empty if the exhibition had featured ‘accessible’ figurative paintings? Odd how ‘accessible’ is a dirty word, while ‘access’ isn’t. Seaux Gardens, anyway, has delivered its verdict on SLG’s open door policy. You can take a horse to water – you can even hire outreach officers to take water to the horse – but you can’t make him drink. Why does rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic seem more worthwhile than this? Because the Titanic’s stewards didn’t know it was heading for collision with a messy, arbitrary iceberg, whereas we are fully aware of a £100m black hole in our arts budget. Meanwhile our contemporary art galleries are emptier even than our churches – which we don’t have to pay for – and the only reason there isn’t a public outcry is that the public never activates the space by entering it and discovering how echoingly empty it is. A gallery full of art no one believes in is like a deconsecrated church; all that’s left is the architecture. And who’s to say the architecture wouldn’t be equally – or better, given its general unsuitability to art – used for some other, more deserving purpose? The gap between the public’s expectations of art and its ‘delivery’ is now so yawning that the contemporary art gallery has become a No Man’s Land. How long our semi-bankrupt economy will subsidise this standoff is anyone’s guess. Even the Arnolfini seems pessimistic. To launch its current crystal ball-gazing Futurology season Belgian duo Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans, whose work ìexamines architectureÖ as an ideological gestureî, teamed up with 51N4E (a Brussels architect’s office, not a strain of swine flu) on The Good Life, a proposal to convert the dockside gallery into luxury flats and sell them off. Could they be serious? Regrettably, no. As tends to happen with building projects these days, the vision was taken ìalmost all the wayî. Still, it offered the gallery ìthe opportunity to think about its cultural value at largeî. That is certainly something worth thinking about. Fifty years ago no one would have dreamed that permission would be granted for empty churches to be turned into luxury apartments. I give it less than fifty before our new and expanded contemporary galleries go the same way. Who but a gallery director or architect could possibly care about artists’ responses to gallery spaces? The public will eventually reclaim these spaces, unless they are filled with art we can all respond to. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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