Situations of Display – Online Debate, Axis Web

Welcome to this, our first live debate in the Dialogue Journal debating chambers. Taking the format of the collegiate debating competition, the discussion will unfold from a set house motion, with arguments 'for' and 'against'.

Our guest in-house debating team for 'The Curating Issue' are The Dirty Collective. Having written the house motion, they've now had to split themselves into opposing teams to make their supporting and opposing arguments. Along with guest contributor Peter Lewis they will initiate and maintain the discussion.

We invite you to join us in the debate; whether you are 'for' or 'against', we want to hear what you have to say - but keep it clean!

The debate is open from 23rd June to 7th July.
45 posts by 10 people

'Exhibitions in Alternative-Non-White-Non-Gallery spaces negatively affect interpretations a spectator is encouraged to think about, since they often speak for and over individual works'

FOR

In distinction to non-white spaces, the White Cube is not a literal translation for a white-painted space, but that associated with the institution, the prestigious contemporary art venue, or the National Gallery, which, though the walls are in fact crimson red, is of the same character.

Abbreviating the term to 'WC', White-Cube then designates the 'water-closet', or toilet, a place to dump waste, but the things which occupy them are anything but below the waist/waste. The clean, pure lines and aerial lighting of the gallery place great emphasis on each individual works' aesthetic values and draw comparative analysis within a language which is not necessarily elitist, but prioritises formalist interpretations without consideration of its social, historical and cultural context. As works of incredible bourgeois and economic value are displayed, beyond the average salary of the general population, any possible interpretation might similarly be felt to be inadequate, thereby jeopardising the viewer's confidence in engaging the work.

People do not conceive of 'spaces'. Spaces are characterised by a specific sociality; you arrive at 'home', 'work', or 'the park'. When exhibiting in an alternative space, such as a radical social centre, a different set of interpretations can be arrived at. This also brings to light particular elements of the work that might be obscured by traditional notions of aesthetic value, neutrality and purity and further articulate a rich, white-male, Western history of art. Curators are responsible for making history as much as an artist, and in using a lived territory puts to work the idea that we are all equally capable of inventing our own translations. These new forms might serve to transform the people using them, in turn placing value on process and symbolic analysis in art production, and bring to attention the extent to which curatorial practice is a methodology of control and propaganda.

AGAINST

Exhibitions outside of the White Cube preserve traditional ideological tendencies and rarely truly liberate the spectator, in the end, coercively manipulating him/her with a façade of being for 'real' people.

A judgement on aesthetic value can not occur in alternative venues. In a messy, dirty or perhaps any alternative venue, the division between the artist's work and the socio-political context effectively becomes muddled and obscured; this affects perception of its formal characteristics, but also can be an excuse for bad art. Since the artist's work is subservient to the demands of this mediator figure, a nice market niche has been carved out for the superstar curator. This could herald a time when the artist is employed as a service provider, for educational institution, gallery, local council, or corporation to serve their political needs and motivations. Certainly in Britain, public art, like the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, are, perhaps unknowingly, used as a quick and easy remedy to cancerous and malignant social problems.

The institution as a White Cube serves as a centralised location, an institution forming local identity in which one can celebrate many different types of community. It is exactly this space because it is a holy ground; it serves a ritualistic function, as a safe haven and communal gathering space. Such spaces may host inspirational works of the highest international quality; there is a market demand for art of this kind. Naturally tourism increases and serves to line the pockets of local people too. This is a global market, and unless it is played in this way the city falls off the map, so does civic pride and self-esteem. Finally, White Cubes naturally change as culture is willing to accept it, often in open debate and discussion amongst experts and pillars of local community, rather than through coercive force.

Have your say below...
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Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #1
Posted on 23 June 2008
The White Cube carries the same depressingly familiar aura, of an unassailable or transcendental authority, and derives from earlier aristocratic regimes of taste and aesthetics, or we might say, that presents itself as ‘democratic’, as postmodern fragment, or as a-historical model forcing through an ‘absolute value’. This reduces art’s necessary plurality guaranteed by the gallery system’s claim of neutrality, isolating any ‘infection’ of the real. This is a disaster by any definition, since it mediates the production of artistic gestures into a single ingenious system of ‘ethical’ values, fragmented onto egoistic or ethnic particularities, as a vague infinite of personal freedoms, whilst quietly endorsing the aestheticisation of the political. We are therefore obliged to seek a space of suspension from these motives, in the artistic gestures of refusal.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #2
Posted on 23 June 2008
(continued) Yet alternative attempts as gestures are not able to act as witness, nor can be accessible within a system that seeks to restore security by vetting works. The other, unredeemed, unknown, unacceptable, resides beyond the destructive logic of ‘ressentiment’. Does the White Cube not in fact make attempts to reassert its autonomy with allegiance to the practice of ‘ the specific and contingent’ (Gillick) as the facilitation of art’s true activity carried beyond its traditional autonomy? For example by promoting individuals who might be seen to challenge, yet in fact perpetuate obsolete forms (retrospective progressivism) branded historically, as 'conceptual art', (Ryan Gander, Frieze, cover) or 'institutional critique', (Simon Martin, Tate Britain, Lightbox) or 'identity politics', (Steve McQueen, Queen and Country, Barbican) or 'social practice' (Liam Gillick, Venice Biennale).

Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Post #3
Posted on 24 June 2008
The 'retrospective progressivism' Peter speaks of is particularly insightful, reframing a historical context for Liam Gillick's work, for example, that perhaps younger artists are ignorant of. Work such as Liam Gillick's Utopia Station, and what is characterised as a positive move to generating models of sociality rather than a banal critique of capitalism, receives the sanction of the White Cube, which believes it to be a reassertion of its autonomy and neutrality in being 'contingent and specific'. Perhaps someone could suggest artists or curators that buck this trend?

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #4
Posted on 24 June 2008 as a reply to #3
In fact I was criticising Liam Gillick and the others - well indirectly - as 'rhetorical' artists, who cleverly manipulate other's production into their own social positioning - something Michel Serres notes in 'Parasite' that the producer always loses, and the parasite always wins - since the postmodern surfing of signs of meaning reduces all to a playable relativism. I think that I agree with Alain Badiou when he writes of the witness to a 'second restoration' a period that has lost the passion for the real, and that covers politics with 'ethics' or post-politics, allowing a host of crimes the 'whitewash'...I am trying to say that the white cube has incorporated its antagonisms within a seamless movement so that all criticism is hollow, as if obsolete. This may be the situation but it leaves a bitter taste. If artists must now work within the market so completely, there is cause to find a way of refusing or subverting, disordering these internal mechanisms.

Posted by
Cliff Hanley

Post #5
Posted on 24 June 2008

Since the mid-20th Century, artists have considerably outnumbered exhibition spaces available, even in London where the tourist industry and tradition of art-buying together have supported legions of commercial galleries. Begging for room in the relatively few white cubes available is dominated by Catch-22: if you want a show, you won't get it. If you have money to burn you can hire; you can stick your art in cafes, on street railings or set up an art trail and throw your studio/front room open to the public. For most working artists, there is simply no question of considering the white cube. Life is too short.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #6
Posted on 24 June 2008 as a reply to #5
There is no lack of galleries, ironically, in fact it seems a problem really is of excess. [ e.g. Berlin is over-saturated with both 'artists' and 'galleries'. Too many egoistic dealers, managers, curators and too few artists who are producing anything other than recycled 'aesthetic' obsolescence. I think that it's again a question of 'ressentiment' if one is blaming the 'white cube' as if one can't run a gallery or curate shows oneself - as so many independent artists' groups have throughout history, [ e.g. Dan Graham, Don Judd] or found ways of presenting work with or without funds. Scratch video, transgressive cinema and interventions in the street and internet swarming add to the availability of resources of ideas and platforms that adjust the 'unfairness'. Risk needed, or changing an attitude to singularity.

Posted by
ael
Post #7
Posted on 25 June 2008

For a while, with regards to my own work, I considered the white cube as a standard arrangement for the means to display and finalise a body of work. The classic gallery space almost acts as a signifier of established art, although certainly within the institution, it is not a difficult format to achieve. I now see that choosing a white cube environment for the display of my work would be a distinguishing element in any aesthetic and conceptual interpretation, with the exception of perhaps the degree show format. Specifically chosen areas for exhibition (not strictly site specific) seem more appropriate for my practice, although I am wary of the idea that these can infringe upon the work or equally the art may rely too heavily upon the space to gain strength in form and content. Perhaps then, leaving its commercial and social status aside momentarily, the white cube offers a neutral space within which an accurate and uninfluenced interpretation of the artwork can be deduced.

Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Post #8
Posted on 25 June 2008
Exhibit Exhibit Exhibit! As a student of Fine Art, there is continuous pressure to be exhibiting, to the point where it becomes intrinsic to the course, and often devoid of critical application. Anybody can put a show on; its not difficult to negotiate the use of a bedroom, abandoned church, or the local dilapidated museum, and effective networking can secure white gallery space. Critical application to how these places are used is an imperative, as it can be boring to see one after the other. And yes, is it easier to measure production, aesthetic, values of one art work against another in a white cube space? Or a failure of the institution to encourage real debate, to question the ethical grounds on which it stands....

Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Post #9
Posted on 25 June 2008
...[continued] But where does risk begin? We are reminded this is the age of 'post-production'; cultural forms are regurgitated, reproduced, reframed, and rehacked. There is no such thing as originality, or, as recent exhibitions and writings indicate, and having abandoned any hope of change, are we seeing the author return? So how can you create a space in which to react against something that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent? Or maybe that's not the question to be asking.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #10
Posted on 25 June 2008 as a reply to #9
The artwork is a question for sure of its status as an object and of the subject, a 'commodity' of a special kind, the Self. To quote Isabelle Graw in Artforum, April issue on markets. It is considered unique, and is 'split between its assumed symbolic value and its market value'. This is here a kind of a self-evident observation, not entirely transparent, as Graw herself is a mover in-between, academia and market-place. What has a price is paradoxically priceless [ this is the role of the gallery and museum/critical journal like Afterall] - art is Art with a capital A- philosophy sutures onto sociality to produce desire from ideals fabricated in centuries past, as pre-destinations or retrospective progressivism, whose logic is undeniable, hard to disentangle from fact. Is there more meaning, precisely, than a handbag by Louis Vuitton? Not everybody is an artist, the 'multitude' thinking of Negri and Virno is the mask of the idealism of a 'general intelligence' that doen't really exist- that the claim that 'everybody is an artist' belongs to the era of idealisms, the 60s, but never the less, the logic is of denunciation of any real world so as to abstract value.

Posted by
andy nizinskyj
Post #11
Posted on 25 June 2008
Whilst the forum appears to be focused upon the debate regarding preferences towards or against a whitecube setting, at this present moment it is not something that concerns me (I will be discussing this Saturday-Monday during my moderation of the forum), but I would like to introduce an alternative view of the space. Duncan and Wallach’s whitecube critique of the MOMA NY as a ritualistic labyrinth, sporting the architectural embodiments of corporate capitalism creating blank and impersonal experiences, and acting as a tool to implement the ideologies of the middle class white male. In regards to this why not consider the whitecube as a signifying mirror of post modernity?

Posted by
andy nizinskyj
Post #12
Posted on 25 June 2008
(Continued) If art production is becoming dependent on the market the whitecube appears to be an ideal arena to depict this business based demand for art, after all we live in a Capitalist world based upon economy and gross profits. In this case does to whitecube not act as a social commentary on how mankind is currently running the planet?

Posted by
andy nizinskyj
Post #13
Posted on 25 June 2008 as a reply to #7
I liked your analysis that "The classic gallery space almost acts as a signifier of established art, although certainly within the institution", this is great because as I said in my last post it reflects on one hand ONLY the art appreciated by a small minority, but on the other hand the social commentary on the infrastructures within our world which allow this. I also enjoy your concern that a site specific or specifically chosen area may cause the work to rely to heavily upon it; in my opinion an art work should be strong enough to "hold its own" so to speak, to be able to function within such a mundane space and outgrow the commercial and social status' you talked about whilst at the same time allowing investors and businessmen to turn a good profit.

Posted by
andy nizinskyj
Post #14
Posted on 25 June 2008 as a reply to #7
(Continued) But again that leads to the idea of art being created specifically to be compatible with the white space, to be overt and patron orientated as we saw in the days of the YBAs. I could relate this to Mark's analysis of the white space reflecting the institutions failure to encourage real debate and question its ethical grounds, but ideally it may not have to; the whitecube (like the majority of paradigmatic written art history) glorifies the individual and thus the space's representation of individuals and their opinions within a neutral space, opposed to the encouragement of separate debate, and inadvertently creates discussion by offering an analysis of itself and the practices of art history to fuel debates such as this very forum.

Posted by
Mette Woller
Post #15
Posted on 25 June 2008
To discuss something as established as the art institution without alternative models, is seemingly creating an endless game of tail chasing. However, there is no need to emphasise the importance of the interesting debate. When the street artist, Zevs, in February 2008, exhibited a Louis Vuitton bag behind glass at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Denmark, did he not only stress the inescapable “social” inheritance from art's capitalistic father, but created simultaneously a boomerang effect, pointing directly back at himself: how and why have street artists become part of the institution? Is the whole foundation of street art not found in a critical position concerning public and “democratic” spaces and especially the institution of art? (a debate in itself) However, what I am trying to stress, is how it made me consider the importance of being heard, of getting “the message” out, which in some cases have created an almost paradoxical practise.

Posted by
Mette Woller
Post #16
Posted on 25 June 2008
(Continued) Since art (artists) has no interest in a neutral position, it will always seek the best speaking tube. In its complexity this can be generated as a seemingly neutral position, but there is no doubt that art always has something to say. Then, if the best speaking tube seems to be the institution, whether or not it is done as a criticism from within, or being part of, I found it hard to be critical about it. However, since the speaking tube is never clean but filled with fictive neutrality, the message will always be blurred, in other words, the art will always be affected by its frame in many ways.

Posted by
Mette Woller
Post #17
Posted on 25 June 2008
When Zevs exhibit in an art institution, he ends in the same crisis at the former appropriation art did: is he actually capable of criticising, or does he only replicate the same features, he is trying to criticise? Projects made by the Danish group Superflex are interesting critical approaches to the art institution, however, if one's practise is founded in painting and sculpture, what opportunities are then left? Exhibiting outside The White Cube? If the debate concerns neutrality, are alternative non-white spaces then more neutral? www.superflex.dk

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #18
Posted on 27 June 2008
I think the debates on neutrality are now fully absorbed. Critique is accommodated. The white cube is always accommodating its opposite. [ Aquirre] Zevs, with whom I have worked on a number of occasions, is closer to the novelty of fashion and quasi-realism of 'the street' as style [life style] than art. The argument that is proposed in the new Artforum editorial is that novelty is at an impasse, at least in the platonic sense of a thorough programming. A parallel argument is proposed according to Paul O'Neill, curatorial discourse has acted 'as an engine of emergence for a set of contemporary practices, ones that do not simply rehearse the marketing of inconsequential novelty.' [ Nought to Sixty, ICA publication] - both write [ Tim Griffin in 'A New Novel' and Paul O'Neill in 'Emergence' ] of overriding the 'flawed creator-genius' heroism of the obsolete avant garde and isms at a level of agency in works that constitute both a plurality and an embodiment...

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #19
Posted on 29 June 2008
in the lull of any commentary [ is the server down, is there a technical fault?]- some more mystery - its always the mystique of the dealer's knowledge that allures and creates the economic value yet where does is knowledge / etiquette acquired? How does knowledge circulate and get filtered, so that the 'quality' is recognised, maintains its relation to the discourse of the market, is legitimated and yet others 'fall by the wayside' of the vanity publishing – everyone is looked at – has a website? The real hooror is to be invisible. , not surveilled in the sense of self-policing, which art has kind of become, as a communitarianism. And what of product? The economic model in place for a hundred years in Europe and America was 'product', ' filtered through galleries, offered to collectors and public institutions, written about in magazines, partially supported by galleries and drifting towards the academic apparatus that stabilses its 'history' - certifying, much as banks do, the holding of its major repository, the museum.' [Afterword, Inside the White Cube, The ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O'Doherty]. What of Richter’s website – is that a parallel world of finance that he interpolates?

Posted by
ael
Post #20
Posted on 29 June 2008 as a reply to #13
I aimed to make a neutral comment. However, I do not believe a pro of the white cube gallery is that it offers commercial gain. This does not seem to be implied in my original post.

Posted by
Townley and Bradby

Post #21
Posted on 30 June 2008
I would agree with Peter Lewis that the White Cube is always accommodating its opposite. This can be seen in the way that many galleries have off-site projects, or include site-specific work within their programming. The motion and opening presentations of this debate set up a dichotomy: 'alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ vs ‘the White Cube.’ I think that 'alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ are very rare. Alternative exhibition spaces frequently a connection with a gallery of some sort. If artists want to create opportunities for showing work in an interesting way they will often set up a gallery to support that. What I mean is: how alternative is alternative? Is a white cube that is programmed and maintained on a voluntary basis different from a White Cube? Part of my interest is that I am on the committee of OUTPOST, an artist-run voluntary-run gallery in Norwich.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #22
Posted on 30 June 2008
I might draw your attention to some projects that conceive of practice and discourse as integrated and operate without the obligatory and futile 'chasing the hare' art's commodification, as Mark Harris had written about - the outmoded, ineffectual situationist, anarchist tactics naively opposing the big other – the fantasy against the state, [ that he criticised me for in fact ] or those more stylish ventures that embrace the system's 'system' like China Art Objects, in Los Angeles, eg. as ironic strategy, simulated capitalists, going on to win 'best booth' at Basel Art Fair. Is Anton Vidolke’s ‘e-flux’ project precisely the death of any radical gesture, cleverly and neatly filling the void of radicality, by assuming it already dead? Then killing it with a kind of new economy. There is still a world ‘out there’. Mark did choose to work on a number of projects with me where collaboration was a key factor, with an indifference to 'success or failure' [ at Host, Glasgow, a kind of phenomenal 'peer to peer' group work continually being added and subtracted to/from. Projects like Bert Thies' Isola Art Center in Milan, or Platoniq, in Barcelona [web-based] RT Mark, e:vent network in London with Colm Lally,

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #23
Posted on 30 June 2008
[continued] [...] or the veteran, internet artist Wolfgang Staehle, [who caught 9/11 on a webcam], or the Multitude projects set up in Mexico City [ see issue 6 /seconds on Multitude], there are many of course that present a difficulty for orthodoxy and legibility. I think the right wing Rand research group worried about some of these hyper-anarchic network operations but concluded that they were at least matched by traditional subversive network methods [including social /public space interventions]. Then is the internet now a dead zone? Is this platform for debate merely a panacea? Outpost echoes some of the ideas we were playing with at Redux in London, working without state funding, using the domestic space as also social/showing space, and not differentiating between certain acceptable and unacceptable ethical positions.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #24
Posted on 30 June 2008
continued [...]this is also not to 'push the envelope' or salute western liberal democracy's injunctions to the rights of artistic expression against any kind of censorship. Working internationally [ the Middle East for example] one comes up against a wall, if carrying that western, 'freedom' delusion, which is merely a superiority complex or something about 'other' cultures' need for western democracy, and a new form of missionary zeal in disguise.

Posted by
Leah Mai
Post #25
Posted on 01 July 2008
Townley and Bradby, you point out 'how alternative is alternative?', and I'd like to pick up on that. I find the issue of 'alternative', especially in art, a tricky business. Surely the aim in art is always the alternative, the challenging, the subversive. If white cube galleries are accommodating the opposite- for example site specific spaces, then what is the alternative? Where do things move on from here? Another issue that must be brought to the surface is funding. Its increasingly difficult to gain arts council funding. From experience, it seems its a constant battle to tick boxes and make sacrifices in order to gain funding or support, especially if your not an established organization. Going back to what Andy Nizinskyi points out, the business based demand for art, i have found in several of the white cubes i have visited recently, for example the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, seem to definitely blur the boundaries between business and art.

Posted by
ael
Post #26
Posted on 02 July 2008
I wanted an opportunity to write about an exhibition I saw in that very gallery. What a link. Earlier this year the Deutsche Guggenheim hosted an exhibition titled ‘True North’. The works were selected due to the attention paid in each to the romanticism of Northern Landscape painting. However, the medium of the projects were either video or photography, which contributed to the underlying theme of human and modern taint on a magnitude that is constituted due to it barrenness, un-touched and unyielding character. All the pieces indicate a human presence and a subsequent ‘loss of purity’ (True North press release), that unite in a melancholic tone. In the first room, I was under the impression that it was a solo show, however the small info panels next to the five photographs indicated otherwise- these were not as apparent in the gallery as I find them to be in Tate museums, for example, and as such I found the curatorial strategy to be more visible...

Posted by
ael
Post #27
Posted on 02 July 2008
This is not to say that this was a curators show, the work was very much at the forefront of ‘True North’s program. I must say that it was here that something clicked for me with regards to visual display. The work was placed in a way that the images (still or moving) were in conversation with one another- each piece introduced and complimented their acquaintance. However, I understand Leah Mai’s concern of the corporate presence in the gallery. Their commercial sponsor is very noticeable in every way the exhibition greets the visitor- in the catalogue, on the title wall and so on. Furthermore, in a side room where Orit Raff’s video piece, ‘Palindrome’ (2001) was considerably overshadowed by the gift shop, which seemingly guided your path through, and past the artwork- I’m certain Raff saw nothing in common with postcards and Guggenheim pencils...

Posted by
ael
Post #28
Posted on 02 July 2008
I’ve also learned that much of the works shown were collated from New York’s permanent collection, which makes me wonder if the Berlin museum was created more as a showroom for their bigger brother. However, I did consider the glacial theme of the show might have had something to do with the seeming harsh, clinical and arguably impenetrable sphere of the white cube, a comment on its faceless and powerful, business-related alter ego.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #29
Posted on 03 July 2008
I would also like to experiment here with an example of younger curatorial tactics vis a vis older conventional forms and their displays. My colleagues Brody and Paetau run the operation 'e art-now' which mimics its commercial operation / mailing list 'e-flux', with an emphasis on eastern european initiatives..and its not a parody, it performs as an advertising device. Here is one I received tonight on my email. "The idea of 're-present' the famous Swiss art fair, Art Basel, emerged in 2005 with the happening Art Basel Geneva. The international art scene motivated the artists to create the happening as a reaction towards the commercialisation of art fairs and their continuous worldwide expansion. The actual context of economical expansion of emerging countries makes the question even more immediate. The subversive position of Art Basel Geneva about the art business is a 'product' of its own milieu. The happening tries to question the limit of the system as well as its purpose

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #30
Posted on 03 July 2008
[...] Art Basel Geneva converts a business event into a 'pop' spectacle, where the glamorous atmosphere, dilemmas and paradoxes of a cloudy art world are faced by a single message on the wall, a comment and modest inversion of meaning. Using the official Art Basel corporate identity, the artists will produce a wall painting of the Art Basel Geneva São Paulo logotype and turn the exhibition hall into a foggy environment full of artificial smoke. Hostess will inform the intentions of Art Basel Geneva São Paulo and an invitation will be submitted to all the Art Basel gallery members, invited to attend the opening. Art Basel Geneva São Paulo is an event hold by the artists Lukas Mettler & Cris Faria.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #31
Posted on 03 July 2008
Despite the bad english here and there I think the sentiment is right, that adjusts perception to the seriousness of these satellite white cube events. There are many projects advertised on e art-now that are micro-political instances of this kind of attitude that though adding unnecessarily to the market, subtract something necessarily from it. Failure itself is productive as it accumulates more like-minded acts, indifferent to exclusion.

Posted by
ael
Post #32
Posted on 03 July 2008
‘If you’re not making ten mistakes a day you’re not trying hard enough.’ (Joel Fisher The Success of Failure). I like the idea of embracing failure- incorporating a form of playfulness in the ethos of an exhibition/collective/artwork is a quality that deserves to be privileged from time to time. This is not to the extent of flippancy or mocking, which could be perceived if such an attitude were to be placed in the white cube.

Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Post #33
Posted on 04 July 2008
(Wunderkammer, Uni of Leeds Degree Show 08) On entering this basement, curiosities arranged in a white space but what is this here: a screen, an amplification of a voice, a young artist - Taneesha - so she calls herself, and she's talking to me, and the group of people once there, and to the display, talking art, speaking art for them and me, caught amongst people bustling, sipping, standing in herds around hanging objets d'art, which are are there and they [italics] are not. That's in the past now. Its empty now, but full, I walk around, and climb stairs, jump on a couch, read a book, chat, talk to people, I'm bored, I'm comfortably immersed. I still hear the babble of the opening night crowd. And serious. There's some here. I wonder, in a tone frighteningly close to Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, if the seriousness with which Art is treated is toxic to its causes.

Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Post #34
Posted on 04 July 2008
I was wondering what people thought of younger curators such as Curatorial Industries' and their project Self Storage, www.curatorialindustries.org/ ?

Posted by
ael
Post #35
Posted on 04 July 2008
Interesting website, I enjoy how annoying it is. It seems that this forum is making it more and more clear that the white cube is neither right or wrong but what is important, highlighted by and with thanks to all the generous offerings of new and exciting projects, is to be consciouses of where and why one chosen to create an exhibition. However, this may mean that the white cube, for all its intents and purposes is ultimately a site specific format.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #36
Posted on 04 July 2008
yes, checked it out - very impressive as ever from west coast post conceptual art taught from the horses mouth. The archive has indeed come into its own, as it were, not just as an integer of curating. [see /seconds 8, on open archives]. Its practice since has struggled to resist the obligatory compromises, to attain an indifference to data, to the tasks insinuated in those nebulous territories and exchanges that devolve from the mixing of the terms, curating / archiving / collecting / data, which most often casts the curator either as an anonymous go-between or colonizer of artists true intentions.

Posted by
Peter Lewis

Post #37
Posted on 04 July 2008
We are presented with a taxonomy of artworks that comprise their series without making any such claims, by the affirmation of hermetic. These accumulations of works are situated in a paradoxical relation and extends new meaning to the threatened closure of roles, both artist and curator, in the death-throes of the author, now safely archived. The show is an archive, the archive, a show. This is a delicate balance indeed, precarious since it is at once art, and at once, curating. “What is it? In fact it is ‘objects’”. [Marcel Broodthears 1963 statement from his first one person, 'commercial' show] We hear so often and laboriously of the institution of the museum, and of the worker, yet not of the poetry of work, as a craft that turns obstacle into momentum, a movement to and from- from the work to museum, and reverse, from the museum to work.

Posted by
Emily Phelps
Post #38
Posted on 05 July 2008
I'm particularly interested in this notion of the curator-artist. I wonder where or how one might distinguish between artist and curator? It would seem it is not only the alternative gallery space that might speak over and above the individual artwork, but the message of the curator themselves... in this, does the curator not become an artist, a kind of master puppeteer laying out a very particular scene in mind? If the connotations of the white cube are inescapable then surely it is impossible to forget the socio-political context of an artwork... I would be intrigued to hear anyone's thoughts on the distinguishing features that might separate an artist and curator.

Posted by
andy nizinskyj
Post #39
Posted on 05 July 2008 as a reply to #32
i like this idea too alice, i long for art that suggests the maker does not take themselves seriously, yet places utmost importance in their work. the shoddy, home-made and typically 90's work made by the mtv generation during the yba years was certainly refreshing and one could certainly plant the notion of embracing the 'failure' of creating the works of the high brow onto artists such as emin, lucas or hume; but this was the revelation of the period, a group of working class and lower middle class twenty-something's making millions on being slobbish, hedonistic yet ultimately determined. I do not think that the white cube would mock playful failure after displays such as these and i believe it is an institution that praises it indefinitely, ideally the whitecube exists to praise the final stages of perfection and with it the disappointments that preceded, a marker to improvement and success - afterall is success not born in the fires of many more failures?

Posted by
Townley and Bradby

Post #40
Posted on 06 July 2008 as a reply to #25
I agree with Leah that in contemporary art we set great store on originality; we see art as exciting when it provides alternatives to the preceding tradition. However, I think that this forum is using ‘alternative’ in two different ways. The motion and the opening arguments were using ‘alternative’ to mean ‘non-gallery space.’ The ‘For’ argument suggested that when we see artwork in a ‘lived territory’ it allows us greater freedom to interpret the work and make it meaningful. The ‘Against’ argument suggested that the conflicting uses and symbolic languages of a non-gallery space can create a sort of noise which ‘muddles or obscures’ the artwork. (At least, that’s how I understood the arguments). I was using ‘alternative’ in the sense used by the motion, to mean a non-gallery space. (continued in next post).

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Townley and Bradby

Post #41
Posted on 06 July 2008
On second thoughts, please disregard the last sentence of my last post. When I wrote, in post # 21, ‘how alternative is alternative?’ I was mixing up two meanings of the word. I was wondering whether an alternative way of running a white cube space equated in some way to an alternative (i.e. non-gallery) location for showing art. I was also wondering to what extent the organisational structure of a white cube space affects the experience of viewing art there. I mentioned OUTPOST gallery (www.norwichoutpost.org) because the exhibition space is a single room, painted white, with almost featureless walls; a classic white cube in fact. (continued in next post).

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Townley and Bradby

Post #42
Posted on 06 July 2008
OUTPOST gallery is artist-run, using a model partly derived from Transmission gallery in Glasgow. The usual gallery tasks – programming, installing, writing press releases – are carried out, but without anyone receiving a wage for it. Since the work must fit around people’s day jobs, families and art practices, there is a fluidity to the way that tasks are initiated, discussed, passed on. Does any of this make the white cube space less ‘elitist’ or more of a ‘safe haven’ (to refer back to the opening arguments)? Does the collaborative commitment of the steering committee, and the inevitable importance of social networks to a low-budget organisation (loans of equipment for shows, programming discussions that take place outside of the formal meetings, etc) invisibly alter the ambience of our white cube?

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veeseegee
Post #43
Posted on 07 July 2008
Sometimes I still return to the place where some part of this dialogue started, which is to say Block (a journal in visual culture). There was a particular article that Lucy Lippard mentioned, in which art is referred to as a form of social energy. In that sense, I think that where art exists (or what form of organisation thread in and out of it) might, at this stage, be less important than asking what it accomplishes and for whom. To the extent that the process of coming into being, such as nonhierarchical forms of decision making, enter into the equation, fine. Yes. But then what? And then we get into the question, not of the White Cube as such, but of the support structure for legitimating meaning. Here the market seems to trump, does it not (witness the influence of collectors on the curatorial staff of major museums)? But I don't wish to sound so pessimistic. I'm not: You know, "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

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Townley and Bradby

Post #44
Posted on 07 July 2008 as a reply to #23
Peter Lewis says that OUTPOST, like Redux, is ‘working without state funding, using the domestic space as also social/showing space’. This is incorrect. In fact, OUTPOST is heavily reliant on an Arts Council grant. Although no one at the gallery receives a wage, the grant is essential for the other running costs of the gallery. Neither does OUTPOST make use of ‘domestic space as … showing space.’ As I wrote in my reply to Leah Mai’s post, the exhibition space is a conventional white cube. In post 31, Peter Lewis writes about micro-political acts that are ‘indifferent to exclusion.’ I’m interested in the way that exhibitions in ‘alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ are usually indifferent to to some aspects of exclusion, but working hard to be included in the art world in other ways. (continued in next post).

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Townley and Bradby

Post #45
Posted on 07 July 2008 as a reply to #23
(continued from post 44) The necessities of local cultural politics mean that most non-gallery exhibitions have to make use of some existing network (be it a gallery off-site programme, an artists’ studio complex, a city arts festival) to support the work or to access an audience. The interesting part is where the exhibition organisers choose to resist the conventions, the ground on which they choose to fight. The group of artists who set up OUTPOST in 2003 were resisting the pull to London, and creating a way for themselves to stay in Norwich, whilst still being able to engage with exciting contemporary art. This probably explains some of the mixture of radical and conventional approaches adopted by the gallery.

POSTED BY PETER LEWIS AT 08:59