One of the most predominant ideas in my research has been the idea of discovery within a gallery or museum and the feeling of getting lost among the work (such as the Buren research mentioned in my last post). My favourite ideas for the design of our gallery space revolve around this idea. I love the idea of using corridors between rooms to make the visitor want to seek out the artwork. Currently I am thinking of creating rooms for each person to show their individual work in. These rooms would be painted in a light colour, though probably not white. Connecting these rooms would be corridors which would be narrow and painted dark to create a claustrophobic feeling. Entry to the lighter rooms with the art works would be like a type of relief from the corridors.
The corridors would also serve the purpose of separating the works. This would work well on a course such as mine where there many different types of practice to be displayed within the one degree show. We produce such a diverse amount of work between us that it has often been difficult in past exhibitions, and in past year’s degree shows, to display continuity between the works. The gallery layout that I am currently looking at would allow there to be an emphasis on the different nature of the work produced on Critical Fine Art Practice BA (CFAP).
Pictured are some of the layouts and colour schemes I have been exploring. I have paint samples in the post and will hopefully be building a mock up of two rooms separated by a corridor in our studios this week (Plan Pictured Below). I will make this mock up from cardboard and chipboard that we have in the studio, though the actual gallery would probably be all boards and not cardboard!
The main problem that I am trying to sort out is that of flooring. We have very scratched wooden floors in our studios; it is expensive and timely to try to change them. We will have two weeks to put up our exhibition, but I have to allow people exhibiting in my gallery space time to install their work.
I’ve been designing a few different gallery spaces based around our studios which will become our gallery in the degree show. I’ve been struggling to decide what I want to achieve from a space and so have created a few designs. Pictured here are designs that are meant to encourage the visitor in one route around the gallery, one that encourages wandering with no direction, creation of a maze like space and the use of corridors.
I have been researching the works of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher and their reactions to gallery space. One of the most appealing ideas came from reading about Buren’s exhibition The Museum That Did Not Exist. This exhibition was at the Centre Pompidou a few years ago. Buren split the space he eventually negotiated for the exhibition into a chequer board type effect (Below). The aim of the space was to allow the visitors to move as they pleased. In theaccompanying catalogue Bernard Blistène said ‘… very few exhibitions offer so much freedom to their visitors. Few, too, have so determinately refused to impose an itinerary. Few have been constructed with such a resolute idea about avoiding and scheduled, marked out route… Buren wanted people to get lost in his show. No question of a beginning or an end, of any obligatory circuit or a laid out path…’ I think that I would like to achieve something similar in my own gallery.
To prepare ourselves for our degree show our tutor has set us a small project; to put on an exhibition in a display cabinet that is outside our studios. For this exhibition each of us must provide at least one artefact to go in the space. That’s 16 artefacts in a relatively small space. The artefact must represent out practice so that the exhibition can work as a type of preview to the degree show. As my course contains a lot of critical theory and some strong opinions, we began with a debate on what an artefact was.
I began making a model to go in the cabinet as my artefact. The model is similar to the models I made of mazes, though it is of one of my gallery designs for the studio. While talking about it with people in the studio while I was making the model a question arose; is this a representation of my practice or my practice? This question has had me a bit stumped all weekend. I think it’s related to the difficulty I have describing my practice, especially as it has changed so much over the three years of my degree. I see these models that I make as a way to plan installations and constructions that I want to build. But I’m not sure if that makes them part of my practice or not. I guess it does, particularly when the installation is never realised, as with the mazes (see edit to 7th February 2012 entry).
I am now trying to consider something that symbol what I am thinking about in my practice and my research. I have been looking at direction of the spectator, through the artist controlling their actions such as in many performance, installation and participatory practices and through the gallery space itself. The provision of direction and maps for the visitor to the gallery has been the focus of my most recent research. And I have been trying to find ways to avoid such a rigid route around gallery spaces. So a symbol of direction seems to be representational of my practice. I am thinking of using either a map or a directional sign, probably an arrow that will become my artefact.
ve been told that I won’t get any funding from the university to help with my degree show project. This could mean that I can’t make what I want to for the show. I will however carry on with it for now (I’m looking at colours for the walls at the moment), but I will also keep in mind any other ideas I have that could be more affordable. One such idea I had been hoping to try out this weekend but laziness, procrastination and bad weather have prevented me.
I want to see how people outside of a controlled, safe environment, such as a gallery, react to directions. I am going to go to Queens Park in Brighton and tie arrows to the trees and see who follows them. It’s a fairly simple project, and mostly just too see what happens. I’m trying to work out how appealing and obvious to make the arrows, at the moment they are just cardboard and could be easily missed. So I think I will make them bright fluorescent colours. I also want to try this at the weekend when there will be more people around, including families with children who might be more likely to take part. I’m going to wait for better weather too, and will probably repeat the experiment a few times with different things on the arrows. I’m not expecting many people to follow them, but hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised.
