THE VANISHED REALITY— WHAT'S IMPORTANT?
7th of December 2016. Oxford, England.
Marking a perhaps welcome departure from my last two marathon entries, I’m going to spend today discussing just one exhibition— ‘The Vanished Reality’ at Modern Art Oxford, part of their Kaleidoscope series which celebrates the gallery’s 50 year anniversary.
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| Maria Loboda, to separate the sacred from the profane (2016) |
While living in London obviously had more than its fair share of perks and living in a contemporary art paradise was an absolute dream, one of the things I’ve really been enjoying about Oxford has been the chance to really engage with the programme of a specific arts organisation. Situated right in the centre of the city, I find myself wandering into Modern Art Oxford whenever I have spare time, revisiting their exhibitions in different moods, seeing the art in different light each time. Of course, you can spend time revisiting exhibitions in London…. it’s just that I very rarely did. While I can think of so many exhibitions I would’ve loved to return to and spend more time with, it was just too hard to resist the pull of the new, constant and unrelenting. In Oxford, it feels easier, natural.
My latest visit to ‘The Vanished Reality’ was actually occasioned by an event evening at MAO. This has been another one of the special things about getting to deeply engage with a specific institution. Without as much arty competition, it’s been easy for me to prioritise their events and, as such, I’ve attended more than a few since I moved here. From the exhibition openings with live music and tours with curators to film screenings and talks, I really feel like I’ve developed a deep understanding of their interests, aims, and practices.
The headline event that evening was a talk by the director of the Chisenhale Gallery, Polly Staple, but it was preceded by a quick tour of the galleries with MOA curator Stephanie Straine. The exhibition itself probably deserves a post of its own, but I’ll attempt to be brief. Like the rest of the exhibitions in the Kaleidoscope series, ‘The Vanished Reality’ represents work from the gallery’s history in new combinations and configurations, shuffling the old with the new. Creating contrasts and questioning art practices, the series reflects changing contexts. In this last iteration, MAO brings together the work of ten artists who explore conditions of display, revealing hidden structures and systems both within art institutions and throughout wider society.
Naturally, this includes some of the old standbys of institutional critique type work— Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Kerry James Marshall. It casts the net a bit wider, though. One of the more compelling pieces in the exhibition for me a series of videos produced in the late 1970s by the Australian artist Darcy Lange. Lange, invited by MOA, filmed art, history, and science lessons in four local Oxfordshire schools. The students were then invited to participate in a discussion at MOA, reflecting on teaching practices and on the structures of the institution. The films dedicated to arts lessons and well as the final discussion are shown in the gallery.
(Iman Issa, Heritage Studies #10, #13, #14 (2015))
Over my many visits to the exhibition now, I have also been consistently impressed with the three pieces from Iman Issa’s 2015 Heritage Studies: #10, #13, #14. Sitting in the middle of the upper gallery space, they at first seem to be types of minimalist sculpture. Upon closer investigation, however, your eye finds the vinyl wall texts that accompany them, and the work is complicated. These wall texts proclaim a history and a provenance that is out of sync with the work itself— we’re told that these modern forms made out of copper, brass, and wood are ancient artefacts, carved from marble and sandstone. One piece, for example, is said to be a ‘grand staircase’ dating from ‘1439 B.C.’ There is, then, a plain mismatch between what we’re told and what we see. As Straine pointed out in her tour, the work represents a mutation of knowledge, the gaps that form as time passes. Issa explores themes that carry on throughout the exhibition: how reality, meaning, and our modes of communication are interlinked.
In addition to recent work by Louise Lawler, in which she revisits her past photography and examines issues of distortion and image circulation, I’ve also been absolutely taken by a piece commissioned for the exhibition, Maria Loboda’s To Separate the Sacred from the Profane. It opens the exhibition and stands as an invitation into the gallery space. It somehow both transforms the gallery space and compromises its power. A magical gateway, it promises to transport us to a sacred, hollowed space. It sets the gallery space as a place apart, somewhere that’s both reverent and full of possibility. But at the same time, there’s a limited quality. The circular gate way is always just a frame. Reality is always outside of it.
The new commissions in the exhibition represent a key component of Modern Art Oxford’s history. From the Hans Haacke piece, A Breed Apart—commissioned for his solo exhibition in1978 and now redisplayed—to Lobada, the gallery is committed to being at the forefront of contemporary art, and Straine’s discussion to these projects was a perfect introduction to the evening’s main speaker, Polly Staple.
As the director of Chisenhale Gallery, which is known for commissioning new works and providing artists with their first major solo exhibitions in the UK (Rachel Whiteread, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Cornelia Parker for example), Staple is dedicated to the process of art production. While I was aware of her work at the gallery from my master’s degree, I hadn’t realised how extensive her career has been. Previous to working at Chisenhale, she also served as the editor-at-large of frieze and Director of Frieze Projects.
Her talk, part of MAO’s “What’s Important” Series, focused specifically on production and on the process of working with artists, discussing how to serve as both producer and as a critical friend and how to establish trust and encourage communication. While I’ve been puzzling over various moments of her talk in the time since the event and she shared some fascinating case studies, I thought I’d share just a few things I took away from the evening.
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| Louise Lawler, Pollock and Tureen (traced) (2006/2013) |
Staple returned to one point, one question she continues to ask herself throughout the commissioning process, from inception to realisation— what is needed? It’s a question that applies throughout the process, from the origin to the exhibition. What is needed for the artist? The various audiences? The staff of the gallery? The curator? It’s a question that leads you down so many alleys. For example, from this question, she remarked on how she has begun to reframe fu
ndraising as a type of advocacy. Staple also remarked how this question is actually key to the gallery’s programme and how she chooses the artists that Chisenhale works with. For her, as curator, she needs to learn, to develop her understanding the world and her place within it. This is exactly what I need as an audience member as well, and one hopes that if the curator has that experience, it would transfer on.
Staple also sought to reframe the boundaries of ‘production.’ Production, she claimed, can be friendship, collaboration, and even a refusal. The means can be an end in and of themselves.
It was a generous and lively conversation, and I’m sure her stories will stay with me as I make steps towards beginning my career in the art world. With Staine’s tour before it, it was an evening of productive questions without easy answers.
How do we communicate? What are the structures of our world? What does it mean to produce? What do we need?
If you’d like to know more about Polly Staple, I’d recommended two interviews: one where she discusses her working practices with Andrea Phillips and the other where she, along with other members of the art world, the discusses how to best judge a work of art.
Exhibitions Visited:
Modern Art Oxford. ‘The Vanished Reality.’ 11 November - 31 December 2016
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