The first group show at
Dollspace is starting to come together now; we’ve picked out a number of works
which we feel have some similar under currents which is interesting when
thinking about the role of the curator and how actually being a good one is
serious work! Especially when you’re doing open calls as opposed to hand picking
artists because you have to work with what you’ve got.
Jack Fisher’s final work is
now up on The SketchUp Residency website along with the press release, so check
it out if you’re in that part of the internet. It’s a pretty phenomenal piece; a
21 minute play in four acts where each layer of the trolley is a new act. It spans
various seasons and times and from start to finish is truly bizarre and
wonderful.
Got a new work we’ve been
working on for an upcoming show called Word
in Transit. It was started by Campbell McConnell (check out his own work >>here<<)
and it’s a spoken word event that’s going
to be held on the last carriage of a tube train on the Piccadilly line. For our
piece we’re employing someone to read out a text which is about verbal
description. Now we all know what verbal description means but within the world
of Art Beyond Sight, an organisation dedicated to making the visual arts play a
vital role in the lives of people who are blind and visually impaired, ‘verbal
description’ is a term to describe the use nonvisual language to convey
the visual world. It can navigate a visitor through a museum, orient a listener
to a work of art, or provide access to the visual aspects of a performance.
Our
work is about this idea of artworks which are heard but not seen. Usually verbal
descriptions might start with the standard information found on a museum's
object label: artist, nationality, title, date, mediums, dimensions, and the
custodian or location of the work. These are bits of information available to
one set of people (the visually able) but not to another (the visually
impaired). Ideas on the other hand are not something rooted in physicality,
they are neither hard or soft, long or short, here or there. It is these ideas
that take president within this work, taking the audience through the cognitive
process around the conceptual production of it. So what we’re getting down to
is that verbal descriptions are a tool to assist with building a visual world
in the mind of someone who cannot access the same one the rest of us can. Now,
this draws a parallel with story telling; creating a fictional world in an
attempt to entertain, educate, preserve culture and instil moral values. It can
also be seen as individuals refusing to accept the tyranny of reality and
instead generating alternative narratives and disseminating them. The primary
goal of this isn’t to mislead but to implant ideas and instil wonder. However,
here, the tools which are usually employed to assist when viewing artworks are
developed to create a mystery around the work on show, potentially leaving the
audience unaware of what they are experiencing. The piece of writing which is
being spoken is a description of the ideas within the work itself; it’s as if
there was a museum label or plaque and on it is information about the label. We’re
employing someone rather than doing it ourselves because the whole idea is
about interpretation, there is no right and wrong in art, and it’s difficult to
know what an artist was thinking about whilst producing a work. So our actor
will be interpreting our words, just like a curator in a museum might interpret
works of art.
