- Venue
- Nettie Horn
- Location
Responsibility
About a year ago Simon Pope put on an exhibition in Cardiff in which visitors were invited to go around an empty gallery whilst remembering experiences of previous gallery visits. Pope put instructions on the wall near the entrance and employed the gallery staff to guide visitors, but otherwise abdicated from his authorial role. He gave up responsibility for what the viewer saw.
Although it doesn't look like it, similar things are happening at Nettie Horn gallery. The gallery is not itself – for this weekend it is the Guy Hilton Gallery, as the Bob and Roberta Smith sign tells you at the entrance. The works on display are, with one exception, not by Nettie Horn artists and were not chosen by Nettie Horn curators. Instead they are unfiltered contributions from the 13 neighbouring galleries in Vyner St.
The curators – J J Charlesworth, Andrew Hunt and Robin Klassnik – are not curating. The result is that Neighbourhood Watch represents a microcosmic inversion of the very hierarchical control over who gets to show in the art world. A line of subversion in this vein goes back through Simon Pope's piece to Robert Barry's closed gallery of forty years ago, and Duchamp's closed theatre before that.
One of the works at Nettie Horn is a painting in two parts, separated vertically, with an inverted and flipped c-print of it beside. It is called "Meevil" and "Evilme": an hallucinatory semi-palindrome with skulls, clowns and porn. It comes from Artists Anonymous, where the group is the artist, strangely correcting a list of works in which the gallery's name comes before the name of the person who made the work.
Complication
Nettie Horn Gallery has moved to take up a space, cuckoo-like, that was previously occupied by Vilma Gold. In the last few years, many galleries have moved into each other's spaces, as well as out of Shoreditch, as the rent goes up. This is the background to an exhibition in which a gallery pretends to be another gallery and shows work from other places, work that is there by virtue mainly of these places' geographical proximity. "Community" is undermined: as the curtain-twitching suspicion of the exhibition's title suggests, being in the same street does not mean being close. This movement of works is, for some, the nearest they have come to a conversation. Remember also the underlying ambition of the galleries to represent them selves by the work they submit.
Our sense of locale is disturbed again by the works. Brian Catling's video, part of a reel from Alma Enterprises, shows the artist looking like a Beckettian tramp, shaking with the DTs, messing about with knives and mirrors. In close up a fifty pence piece is inserted into a wound on his forehead, then off he goes again. He is accompanied, very loudly, by the dissonant sound of a recorder group. The noise invades the gallery space, bedevilling further encounters.
Other works involve the alteration of pre-existing or recognisable objects: Nayland Blake's mutated puppets, Henry Kroktatsis's aluminium antlers, Laurie Freeman's mannequin torso with piston-like protrusions, and Ross Chisholm's scratchily embellished set of found family slides. They re-iterate the trading of places and borrowing that characterises the exhibition.
Surveillance
Neighbourhood Watch works to question what we think of the curator's role and how we get to see what we see. It does not work as a reliable survey of local art, but sits at the tail end of a line of decisions and deferrals, leaving you unsure if these are artworks that everybody or nobody agreed on. It is a product of a healthily chaotic environment in which object and place, site and non-site are no longer reliable differences. One small work says it all: Satoru Aoyama's embroidery, an intricate chain that floats across a black polyester ground. It looms in the corner, quietly synecdochic of a closed and open, and looped and finite enterprise.
