Seeing such a vast quantity of high quality art in Berlin gave us plenty to think about with regards to our own work. Adrian Piper’s transparent grave in the wall of the gallery gave us the idea to perhaps install windows in the fake walls of a space in which we are exhibiting. The white walls of the gallery have serious power when it comes to the value of art objects. When something is placed within them it tells people that someone thinks that thing is important and has made a conscious decision to place it there, which most probably doesn’t have anything to do with its direct functionality. Yet the walls are usually fake ones, which is an interesting metaphor about art establishments already; something that attributes worth is false, perhaps rendering its judgments false also? This work would allow visitors to see through the fake walls to the ‘actual’ walls of the building itself, revealing the grubby, muddled and generally unkempt behind-the-scenes version of the gallery. This piece also nods to ‘The Human Condition’ and other works by the famous surrealist painter, René Magritte, that involve windows or openings that reveal something unexpected beneath. Magritte was bringing reality into questioning with these works, using the semiotics of the window’s portal-like qualities but at the same time their boundaries. Windows are not for proactive people; they are for those who would rather watch than do and depending on which side of the window one is positioned, the view can be either that of a pinhole or one which is expansive.
Something else we’re thinking about is setting up a Twitter account for Millie Place; she was the subject of ‘what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts a recent work employing the use of voicemail recordings. The focus of the account would be that’s she’s the receptionist of a fictional gallery where she is constantly bored being a bored and so continually posts on Twitter. This would eventually paint a disparaged picture of a gallery that is perhaps never seen but described, with a variety of characters and situations becoming familiar to regular subscribers.
Inside the Jewish Museum there are a number of holes in the wall utilised to exhibit different artefacts. We noticed that on at the bottom of the wall directly underneath these were loads of tiny black marks from the shoes of (we assume children) who were unable to see so going right up to the edge of the wall on their tiptoes to see what’s inside the wall. This fell slightly into the same category of works that are invisible but also something else. Making a plinth which had similar shoe marks near the ground creates a story of what has happened before and the height of it would dictate what would go onto – maybe it’s 7ft tall rendering it too high for anyone to see what’s onto. There’s still plenty of stuff to think about.
This links in slightly to another idea that was triggered by seeing Joseph Beuys’ ‘Das Kapital Raum’, a works that uses multiple chalkboards on which have a variety of scrawled notes. If we were able to exhibit in a school or a site with a lecture theatre, a whiteboard for lecture we constructed would be fun to do. Giving snap shots of information and small facts that all link together in some way, again creating a narrative using a certain visual language.
Whilst in Berlin we also saw something we had never seen before…adverts on toilet paper. This wasn’t in an art context but just in a pub that we happened to go into. We could very easily print our own toilet paper and have it installed in the toilet of the gallery (it wouldn’t even need to be a gallery we were ‘technically’ exhibiting with ;) or require difficult installation shots because there are toilets everywhere!) What to put on the toilet paper is yet to be decided.
We also have a new ‘show’ in Istanbul in conjunction with The Institute of Fictional Exhibitions Art Foundation. Check out the press release below.
