I think Davids texts need to go on the blog. Yes it was a good night and I think the conversation went really well. I have decided that to fully see the work people probably need to go to Parsons Cross in their own time and just see it in the Cafes and have a chat with people like Tim did. I don't think that you have to do this just this is probably the best way to see the whole thing. I don't think this could be a bus trip or a guided tour - perhaps just a personal decision - about 6 people said they would do this so that is probably a result. I didn't have any pictures from the show but here is a picture of a rose I took while walking on the estate the other day when Tessa Bunny was out taking photoes. I also found a dead baby Dodo or at least it looks like a dead baby Dodo.
Brian O’Doherty MADE a critical analysis of the idealogy of the white cube gallery space in his seminal essay Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, published in Artforum in 1976. He gives us a history.
In the 19th Century the frame is essential FOR the work of art; it must have the ability to separate the content of the picture from everything outside of the picture, (including the wall). YOU are made acutely aware of THE edge of the painting. Then during the 19th Century paintings start to ‘put pressure on the frame’; rather than the picture being a window onto a world there is a new emphasis on flatness rather than depth, and some of these PIECES, says O’Doherty, read as pattern rather than view. Composition becomes more ambiguous, what is SHOWN or not shown seeming to be arbitrarily decided rather than consciously composed according to historic pictorial conventions.
The flattening of the image redirects the eye to the surface, to be looked at rather than looked into, ‘HERE’ rather than ‘there’. We ARE moving towards Modernism - the painting as autonomous object - where there is length and breadth but no thickness, where THE primary law was that the picture plane could not be violated.
With the dissolving of the edge, pictures needed to be separated in order to avoid them blending together, but the SECOND this was done it exposed the wall, creating the danger that the wall and painting become a single entity – a mural – but the stretcher, however shallow, was enough prevent this, allowing the late-modernist painting to assert its autonomy.
Hanging became vital; ‘How much space should a work of art have to "breathe?", and the wall became not just a support but a context for art. With this came an ideology that would brook no sEDITION, the flawless white walls conferring the status OF ‘artness’ onto the WORKS within it – so that anything INSTALLED in the gallery must, by (social/institutional) definition, be art. But what of artworks outside the gallery?
In the 1970s the Artists Placement Group took their work out of the gallery, re-engaging with the world, with the slogan ‘Context is half the work’, and IN making two of each work, and placing them in SHOPS ON BUCHANAN ROAD AND MARGETSON CRESCENT, Steve and Kate confirm that context does indeed construct meaning; PARSON CROSS is self-evidently not a gallery, but a different order of place. Each place is BOTH a context and a ‘situation’ (defined by Claire Doherty as ‘sets of conditions in time and place - a convergence of site, non-site, place, non-place, locality, public space, context and time’), but the pieces WORK in entirely different ways, in spite of there being apparently nO Fundamental difference between them. ThE QUALities of each situation define them and force us to consider whether they have intrinsic VALUE or whether their value is extrinsic. THE Yardstick by which we measure is different in each situation.
O’Doherty is best known for his essay of 1976, and few people are awARE that as an Irish born emigrant to New York his artistic practice has focussed on the multiplicity (rather than singularity) of the personality. For 36 years he had an alter-ego, an INDIVIDUAL named Patrick Ireland – a persona he created in 1972 after the Bloody Sunday shootings to OBJECT Strongly to the British military presence IN Northern Ireland, and for him this duality of persona mirrored THE Irreconcilable differences between Nationalist and Unionist communities. The suspension by the crOWN of the civil RIGHTs of the citizens of Northern Ireland was opposed by the adoption of a quintessentially Irish name, and all artworks he MADE for more than three decades were signed by Patrick Ireland, making them SPECIFICALLY political acts rather than solely artistic ones. In 2008 O’Doherty FORmally laid Patrick Ireland to rest in a funeral ceremony in the grounds of the National Gallery of Ireland in recognition that the North is now at peace. Dressed in a WHITE stocking mask he led a funeral procession carrying a pine coffin containing a death mask of his own face, which was ritually interred.
So O’Doherty’s creation of a second persona allowed him to construct the meaning of his work as a political action rather than an autonomous act of artistic creation – essentially changing the context of its production, in the same way as the SPACEs in which Steve and Kate locate THEIR two editions alter the MEANING of the apparently identical works, but just as twins are both individuals, easily mistaken for each other, these works are discrete, they are not simultaneously in two places, not both in and out of the gallery; in each case their meaning is SITUATED where the work is located.
We may question how each situation and each object jointly construct these distinct meanings, and ASK ourselves how they ought to be understood in relation to each other, and certainly Steve and Kate want you to make you THINK ABOUT the apparent process of ‘decontextualising’, or perhaps ‘recontextualising’ –WHATever we want to call it – that is occurring, and wheTHEr you are complicit with the GALLERY in constructing and imposing specific meaning on the work.
DO ESoteric critical theories deployed in the gallery context still apply to the objects in Parson Cross, or is the OBJECT Simply itself in that situation, removed from the possibly futile machinations of deCONSTRUCTion and other fashionable intellectual postures? Are the people in Parson Cross inDIFFERENT to theory, might they reject theory as the deMEANING Sophistry of the bourgeois dilettante? Is the ‘informed’ gallery-goer better able to divine the meaning of the work than the resident of Parson Cross? Are the works here in the gallery the same as the works in Parson Cross, or do they DIFFER ENTirely depending on their respective SITUATIONS?
In a gallery context it is hard withhold an aesthetic judgement on a work – to ask yourself ‘do I LIKE it?’ – whereas in Parson Cross this might seem an irrelevance. The works there have an apparently unequivocal USe value, whether functional or social, an alternate and more immediate measure of worth. IS functional or social use any more or less valid than aesthetic judgement in determining the value of an object (which becomes extremely problematic when the objects look identical), we may ask, or is the functional and social equally at WORK here in the gallery (Nicolas Bourriaud suggested in Relational Aesthetics that art was a game, and that, far from being autonomous, an artwork EXISTS in a social context) albeit IN a DIFFERENT guise, as a means of contructing meaning? Bourriaud suggests that in fact the two systems of valuing are coincident and mutually co-dependent. The balance between the two may vary, depending on the COMMUNITIES with which we identify ourselves at any given time, but it is a case of both/and rather than either/or.
