That people are willing to become participants to installations such as Blind Room, that are disorientating and create feelings of panic or fear, shows the power of the gallery space on the actions of the spectator. Would you, for example, go in to a pitch black room if someone asked you to anywhere other than a gallery? If someone on the street said, hey come and have a look in this room where you can’t see anything, you probably wouldn’t go in. Maybe that’s a slightly unfair way to put it, but you would perhaps be less likely to do something like that in a public space than in a gallery space. Is this because you go to a gallery expecting to be asked to do things that evoke certain emotions, and it is after all in a gallery so it must be safe.
There is a type of social-cultural contract within a gallery, within most spaces, that tells us how we must act. Martin Creed’s piece at the Tate Britain with runners sprinting up and down the main hallway, showed something of how we expect people to act within a gallery.
I am still trying to decide where to go next with my art practice. I like the idea of challenging our notions of what could go on in a gallery space but I think that this moves away from what I want to concentrate on more; the spectator as a medium for making art.
Edit- 28/2/12
After writing this I worked on some ideas for a maze installation within our studios. I never wrote an entry about it as ideas about gallery space took over and I never actually made the installation. What I did make were models of what I would’ve made. The maze would have had arrows on the walls, with the idea that those entering would follow the arrows without realising that they led them in a circle. I was also planning on using changing lighting to disorientate the visitor and make it harder to tell that they had been in the space already. Pictured is the model that I would’ve created in life-size had other things not taken over.
