Does size matter anymore?
Copyright Mark Amery and the Domnion Post
In a panel discussion at last Saturday's Prospect 2007 contemporary art symposium, Marnie Slater of small public gallery Enjoy was asked what she would put in a gallery the size of City Gallery if she ran it. Her answer was telling: what makes you think a gallery like Enjoy wants to be bigger?
The panel discussion focused on 'new modes of presentation' and Slater is one of a current crop of artists who think big, but don't depend on large institutional spaces to express that thinking physically. Indeed the symposium was dominated by artists working in temporary and site-specific ways. Even its title, Art/World, suggested it was interested in where art ends and begins.
This was a major institution acknowledging that while a new generation of artists still rely on the exposure and curation such an institution offers, they are less dependent on their physical spaces, or are interested in employing those spaces in quite different ways. Performance and video, and the use of cheap, available materials to affect conceptual ideas are arguably quite different from what the gallery's large white spaces were designed for. This might even explain why so many works in Prospect 2007 look like round pegs jostling in big square holes.
Why in fact have an art gallery at all, asked UK curator Claire Doherty of Director of Auckland's Artspace Brian Butler during the panel discussion. Wouldn't just an office suffice?
Doherty is curatorial head of One Day Sculpture, a major national public art project recently announced by Massey University's Litmus Project. It proposes a series of site-specific temporary (24-hour) public art works be commissioned and exhibited over 2008 and 2009. Established in 2005, Litmus itself is described as "not a gallery, but a catalyst for the production of new work in new contexts". It is Wellington's first office-based contemporary art institution.
Doherty's question to Butler is more provocation than reality. The majority of contemporary artists still require the use of a space that gives notice to the public that it's a place to encounter art and is clean of other competing functions (could there be a more direct alert for this than the word 'Artspace'). Even those working outside the gallery need a space, be it physical or digital, to show documentation. Galleries as we've known them however are no longer the only model.
Which brings me back to Enjoy. Their current exhibition by Louise Menzies is entitled Shelter or Marquee, and that title expresses something of the gallery's function. It's increasingly no inconvenience that one of its four walls is windows. It allows Enjoy to look out on the world and the world in return to look in. The gallery is as much an office, a small research library and gathering place for a community: for this point in time a shelter for artists, a marquee for a party. When I turned up on Monday part of the installation had been put to one side to allow for a musical performance as part of the exhibition. A beer keg and a beer crate of records featured.
Meanwhile Menzies' exhibition had been keeping my mind piqued with the possibilities it suggested since I'd seen it the week before - a true sign of a strong show. Menzies' work suggests that the small can broadcast loud. In a central photograph a piece of carpet and some carpeted steps in a studio for a photograph's subject to pose on are empty, and the lights for the photo shoot point outwards like speakers. It's as if Menzies is expressing a wish to shed light on the real world beyond photography's stagings.
Captured off-kilter in a sea of studio white, the lights are animated (they seem off-balance, as if they've started walking), and the carpet is rippling; the whole scene seemingly engineered to knock you off your guard and make you ask questions. The steps for me resembled a makeshift vacant soap box, as if welcoming you the viewer to step up and make your own statement. To be a mechanism by which we get to, as the artist says "give air (or shelter) to individual narratives about the world". The work itself is in fact a recreation from memory of one made by art school colleague Ryan Chadfield - all this together with the musical performances raises issues of individual ownership and collective creativity.
The soap box analogy fits with the second component of the installation, a cloth banner in pink with yellow tassels with the words 'Labour & Free Will/ Love & Revolution' on it. The banner (which has a romance reminiscent of something carried by a brass band, say) is mounted on a cheap wooden billboard, like a roadside election hoarding. As a whole the work questions whether such words as spelt out here, once so politically powerful, have been emptied of their import. It questions whether the power of language has been muted, and what in their work out in the world contemporary artists now have to say politically. McCahon told us that he needed words; Menzies questions whether they've now become spent.
