- Venue
- Bargate Monument Gallery
- Location
Art Vaults Season Three
by Jenny Gilpaki MA Art History
For those unaccustomed with the preceding two Artvaults Seasons, the whole idea revolves around the utilisation of some of Southampton’s medieval vaults, including the city’s Bargate Monument Gallery, as exhibition spaces for contemporary visual arts. Season One in 2005 involved the opening of just five vaults, while the following year three more were added. This year the project has expanded with five more sites and the inclusion of work by fifteen emerging contemporary artists. Given the site-specific character of the entire project (the former being a legacy of radical practices that grew sometime in the late 1960s and 1970s), the call for artists was to produce works that saw the physical locations, in this case the underground cavernous vaults and their material or conceptual properties, as integral to the artworks themselves. One assumes, with the intention of forging a dialectical relationship between art and site.
Simple but effective, may be one way to summarise the work to be found at the vaults in Season Three. There are no high-tech showings here and even when modern devices are implicated (videos, projections, kinetic sculptures), there is nothing too lavish and complicated. Further, in some cases, the vaults themselves seem more enthralling than the work they host. In part, due to the innovative idea of using them as exhibition spaces for contemporary art and partly due to the vaults’ medieval architecture, it is not too exaggerated to argue that they may indeed be the show’s protagonists.
But there is another element that may distract someone from getting singularly anchored in any individual work and this is none other than the very way one experiences it – very act of physically going about from one vault to another (the sites are all dispersed but within walking distance with one another), especially when choosing not to follow the map provided. For it is then that the viewer becomes elevated from a mere spectator to a real explorer and the act of exhibition-going becomes converted from an ordinary, planned and contemplative act into an activity of wondrous encounters and hence into an experience of true discovery, be it artistic, curatorial, archaeological or otherwise.
