- Venue
- ICA: Institute of Contemporary Arts
- Location
- London
Performance, spectacle, the interactive event: all common features of conceptual and contemporary art, from the transient Happenings of the 1960s and 1970s, to the more recent experimental participatory ‘laboratories' such as Utopia Station. Here the art is in the situation, a relationship that forms between collaborating participants, where the roles of the artist, curator and audience are often indistinct.
Earlier this year at the ICA a variety of contemporary artists who likewise employ collaborative methods and ‘the moment' in their work, were represented in Double Agent, curated by Claire Bishop and Mark Sladen.
Christoph Schlingensief presented The African Twin Towers: Stairlift to Heaven, a large wall projection of a film with a functioning Stannah Stairlift dissecting the scene. Schlingensief employed local community and non professional performers to act in this film and the audience could mount the Stairlift, performing a spectacle as they glided through the space of the projection to privately view another film, not visible to those on the floor.
Joe Scanlan presented artist Donelle Woolford who at various weekends worked on wooden sculptures in the gallery-space-come-studio. And in Instant Narrative, Dora Garcia hired and installed a writer-observer into the space to create an instant story out of the actions of the audience, projected directly onto the wall.
Barbara Visser showed a single video projection of three simultaneous lectures, two of which were delivered by actors employed to stand in for the artist, in Last Lecture. The video represented three different points in time and was three-dimensional, the final lecture being presented by a silhouette. The division between audience and video seemed erased as viewers walked directly past the projector casting their own silhouette onto the projection and interacting with the lecture in this way.
In Double Agent the visitor's role was varied. The first 3 installations encountered in the lower galleries required the visitor's instant active collaboration; ride the stair-lift, literally be projected into the space of the lecture, have your story typed out onto the wall by an observer. The possibility of instantaneous participation challenged the conventions of the role of the viewer, but, as mentioned earlier, this isn't necessarily anything new and the presentation of artworks created by other collaborators returned one back to a state of passive viewer. I couldn't for example pick up a wood-saw and follow one of the diagrams in Woolford's studio space upstairs. This piece was about someone else's collaborative role, someone who was only there on Saturdays and Sundays. ‘A lot of people don't know I am the exhibition' Woolford told me, which left me thinking; how do we read this installation then, when she's not here? And when she is there, interacting with the room, not perceived by us as ‘the exhibition' but just as any other visitor to the gallery, does our expectation of our own role not change? Can I not now pick up a wood-saw too? Who says not? Should I have? Perhaps the recent trend of Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction art has affected my judgement; I expected this level of participation throughout the exhibition. But actually I wasn't entirely required. Others were required instead, which left me wanting more.
I wanted the boundaries to be pushed of what is seen as art and what could become performative art objects by activating the audience: Act as a double agent, shake off the normal traits of passive viewer, make the art happen. Ride the stairlift!
My frustration at a supposed freedom to collaborate and interact, but only at the right times and if certain rules are adhered to, was in fact the success of this show, bringing to the forefront current issues of gallery conventions. Although, while these artworks pose interesting dilemmas for the visitor, my worry is that soon interactivity will become so conventional that the viewer will no longer want to be predictable. Perhaps this can explain why I didn't ride the stairlift.
