- Venue
- Outpost
- Location
- East England
It’s rare to see an exhibition without knowing something about it beforehand. So the experience is mostly quite unlike that of noticing a door you’d previously overlooked, finding it’s unlocked, pushing on it, stepping through; it’s more like passing through a cloud of fragmentary material. The material consists of hints, invitations, press releases, teasers, installation shots, e-flyers, explanations, references to other works, and all slowly orbiting at some distance around the solid centre that the exhibition offers.
An exhibition is a small solid planet, a temporary fictional location brought into being by a committed group of people, variously including artists, curators, gallerists, funders. They talked it into being. Their act of speech gave things substance, made things appear in the gallery where, consequently, those things can be viewed or heard or perceived by a visitor to the exhibition. But not all ideas take shape. This doesn’t make them less real, only less tangible.
The current exhibition at OUTPOST is This isn’t Nelson’s time its 1956 and its time to get out and leave this shtick! by Mark Aerial Waller. The show consists of four works, all of them incorporating film. The only work not shown directly on the gallery walls is ‘Midwatch’. The Press Release for the exhibition describes the mini-auditorium in which this film will be presented: ‘A plywood shed-like structure … protrudes from one gallery wall; fragments of plaster on the floor suggest it has entered the gallery space forcibly. Its wooden sides have been burned to a charcoal surface, leaving on one facet the strangely characteristic silhouette of a modern battleship.’
At the opening of the exhibition, I sat in the ‘shed-like structure’ and saw ‘Midwatch’. It’s a claustrophobic piece, filmed entirely in darkness, with the eerie green light of the camera’s night-scope illuminating the faces of two men. They talk angrily and at cross-purposes. Their exchanges circle round the state of their ship, and who’s on board, although they appear to inhabit two different eras in history. One, who could be a chef, goes on rambling diversions about ‘the Persian Seas’ while the other man tries to cut through and get some straight replies.
Stepping out after the film, I noticed there wasn’t any plaster on the floor around the wooden walls; but you expect a few changes between a press release and the actual exhibition. It seemed to me that the dominant features of the ‘shed-like structure’ were its dense black colour and the way it met the gallery wall at something other than a right angle. Its colour and size gave it a presence in the gallery, but not a disruptive one. Box rooms or viewing structures are commonplace in galleries. If artist’s films are to be shown in the same space as other works, and the sound is to be contained in some way, it’s the obvious solution.
Yet the notion that the shed-like structure was a disruptive force had already become part of the exhibition, or part of the way it was received. For those closely involved in making the exhibition happen, the notion had become part of the narrative of the exhibition. I heard the words ‘disruptive’, ‘violent’, ‘forceful’ used by people at the opening as they looked at ‘Midwatch’ from outside. I read about the idea in the artist interview. OUTPOST has a tradition of interviewing the artist during the installation period. A transcript is made available as part of the exhibition. In this case, the transcript has the interviewer, Joseph Murray, saying ‘ ‘Midwatch’ bursting into the gallery space reminds me of when I was a child at Universal Studios in Florida and I was on the Jaws ride, Jaws kept smashing through different materials to try to eat me …’ In his response, Mark Aerial Waller describes the housing for ‘Midwatch’ as ‘jutting into the room, like an uninvited guest in the show.’
An exhibition is a fictional and collaborative event. The artist, or the curator, (or in OUTPOST’s case, since it’s artist-run, the committee-members) has to engage others to make the exhibition possible; they describe an as-yet-unrealised exhibition that is persuasive, that people want to repeat to each other, that people want to replicate. How could it be otherwise? Perhaps not every element of that invented exhibition finds physical form. The visitor to the exhibition can’t experience everything merely by looking at what’s on show; they must find some other way to experience these unphysicalised elements, they must gain access to those who heard the exhibition talked into being. How could it be otherwise?