INTERFACE

REVIEW

Laboratory

Laboratory
Jerwood Space, London 29 July – 30 August

Reviewed by: Charles Danby »

In advance of my visit to the Jerwood Space, part way through our conversation, 'Laboratory's curator Sarah Williams revealed that she was speaking from inside a sculpture. She expressed excitement that the artist, following provocation, had produced a work different to his regular output.

Standing in the gallery I could clearly grasp the sense that I was looking at the sculpture that I had been remotely linked to earlier that day, further confirmed by the fact that inside it was plausibly accommodating for human habitation. Had I not had that conversation my thoughts about what I was looking at may have been different. Peaking like an island, the tarpaulin's edges were drawn upwards from the floor creating a loosely pyramidal form. I could not determine its exact internal structure but I enjoyed its flirtation as something built and something wrapped.

Under the direction of curator Sarah Williams 'Laboratory' is an exhibition of the production and process of an exhibition, through to the final show itself. Melding artistic practice with curatorial thinking, press relations, events organisation, marketing, exhibition documentation, catalogue production and critical review 'Laboratory' was set loose through the contributions of artists Steve Eastwood, Mia Taylor, Jock Mooney, photographer Paul Winch-Furness, writer Pryle Behrman and design team The Partners. Working on site throughout the four-week period the contributors to 'Laboratory' used the gallery rooms as office, café, studio and exhibition space, working under the constant gaze of modern panoptic observation. This placed them in full view of, and in direct contact with the visiting public, both present and remote.

It is through this particular and peculiar structure I had been left to unpick ideas and processes of 'Laboratory' rather than works that neither necessarily existed nor ever needed to promise to exist, nestled amongst books, music, materials and daily ephemera. Aside from the actual content each space had become an accumulative installation, a reflective portrait of each of the three participating artists, each a character within this art reality. The truth of anything was questionable. Post-it notes, train tracks, highlighted lines of printed computer text, peeled back masking tape from barely marked linen canvases, books, chalk boards, hand written lyrics, tables, shelves, badges, shoes and microphones.

In its mainstay 'Laboratory' orchestrated a position of process above outcome. The necessity to produce final works was one that was not imposed, although a formal exhibition opening was programmed towards the close of the exhibition. While the working rhetoric of 'Laboratory' was directed towards the artists through an idea of studio practice, it was as implicit to the full contingent of collaborators. Design agency The Partners created a blog as a flexible and responsive mechanism for 'Laboratory', documenting the activity of the artists, the contextual framework of interviews and talks set by Williams, the photographs of Winch-Furness and the written texts produced by Behrman. Added to throughout the period of 'Laboratory', this collective compendium also became the exhibition catalogue. Configured to sequentially unfold as a concertina, each entry from the blog was printed individually and bound to its own format and scaling.

On a structural level, 'Laboratory' revealed and concealed in equal measure. In revealing process, by inviting artists to use the gallery as their studio, it pre-empted an assumption of what that process was rather than what it may have been. This exposed a recurrent tension, the tension between works in production and completed works, as Behrman pointed out in one blog entry: "The artists are still focused on creating completed artworks to some degree I think." This hesitation created an almost impossible dichotomy, which is understandable, but does not appear to have been addressed with any certitude.

Perhaps more interestingly was what was concealed; when the artists chose not to play into such a situation of disclosure. The space that the artists occupied became its own complex signifier in the absence of work. As a studio filled with materials, music, food and books it constructed a picture, hinted at direction, revealed aspects of personality and communicated desire. The success of 'Laboratory' hinged on the willingness of its collaborators to participate, to enter into in one sense a big brother house of art. Performance was central to 'Laboratory' and each artist became subject, a character of themselves in relation to framework of the project through the scrutiny of observation and real-time contact.

This is how the new media connections came to succeed, the blog and Twitter accounts that serviced the exhibition's audience with additional and alternative aspects of information. Encountered in separation or in combination with any direct experience of the exhibition, these online facilities offered personality to the figures behind 'Laboratory'. Though it was perhaps ill-placed and exposed a lack of thought and maturity, the terse and aggravated response to a piece of critical review that Mooney posted through the exhibition's blog drew on the speed, attitude, field of language and behaviour that is in itself the regular fare of that technology.

Such observation and scrutiny implicates a theatricality of stage and set, a two-way mirror through which the artists' arrangement of works, materials and other ephemera is a mechanism of communication, both responsive to and affected by an awareness of the viewer. On the reverse side of this for the viewer – without a fixed entity or artwork – is left with a collective piecing together of material presented, with each space becoming its own locality and conversely its own installation. While in one sense this enriched, contextualised or expanded the experience of encountering works – reading notes stuck on walls marked with pen or finding boxes filled with toy railway track, both neat and cluttered, and the material present and presented revealed identities, sensibilities, and process – it also limited, reduced and obscured intention and direction, protecting the artwork and artist from any critical eye through the rhetoric of 'unfinished', 'work in progress', 'experiment' or (film) 'rush'.

One surprising aspect of 'Laboratory' was the orthodoxy with which the artists chose to organise themselves. The Jerwood offered three gallery rooms and each artist opted to occupy a single space. Postings on the blog point towards dialogue between collaborating parties with Behrman explaining that the tags attached to each artist, of painter, sculptor and filmmaker, had quickly become redundant. He wrote that, "things have changed during the show" and that they "wish(ed) to continue blurring boundaries of categorisation: are there any discrete works on show or only room-sized installations?; are the artists creating objects or staging a performance? 'Laboratory' demonstrates, I think, that an artwork can be a sculpture, part of a performance and in an installation, all at the same time."

In describing the temporal folding of artwork with practice and medium, Behrman points towards a collapse of the reference points that ordinarily hold works within a set of parameters. The rigid occupation of territory appeared to be a limiting factor within the framework of this collapsing experiment of individual action. Taylor attempted to address the issue of the workspace, constructing a series of moveable screens that allowed her to alter her working space, however the emphatic homesteads of Mooney and Eastwood limited Taylor's movements to a single room making this proposition in part redundant.

This returned 'Laboratory' to a central problematic of what it was and how it functioned. Its demand was one of spectacle rather than show, but within this there was little to determine how or why these three artists had been brought together. In many senses it appeared that they had been wrongly selected for the exhibition, but perhaps this didn't matter. The assured focus of Eastwood's practice did not necessarily need 'Laboratory' and in this sense it felt that he would perhaps have been better off working in the privacy of his own studio away from public view. Conversely, Taylor and Mooney's pursuit of and constant flirtation with ideas of experimentation may have offered a more engaging spectacle, but not necessarily to the benefit of their work.

In a posting responding to a question set by Taylor, asking how experimental Behrman thought he had been in his writing, he wrote "I think I have the same internal dialogue as the artists: to what extent should I treat 'Laboratory' as a time to try something totally different and to what degree should I treat it as a time to develop and gradually extend the work I already do?" Behrman's answer highlights the uncertain tension that sat at the core of 'Laboratory', of reconciling its strongly experimental curatorial remit – one that attempts simultaneously to isolate and assimilate a studio practice and to do so through the construct of an exhibition – against the differing working principles of its contributors.

While the interest of 'Laboratory' for its participants was apparent, the success of its on-site captivation was perhaps less certain. The exhibition's focus on running online technologies in parallel to its occupation of the Jerwood Space was its greatest strength and offered much needed resource to its layered proposition.

Structuring online content in this manner and using it in real-time to format, template and produce an exhibition catalogue was a great achievement and should be commended. In raising questions, 'Laboratory' draws on issues of process, contribution, editing and audience that all require further examination, and while as an exhibition it remained uncertain and hesitant it could perhaps be that the only thing lacking in 'Laboratory' was its full embrace and complete immersion into a reality format.

Writer detail:
Charles Danby lives and works in London. He contributes to Untitled and Wonderland and is assistant editor of Miser & Now. Curated exhibitions include Pranvere, Albania (2007) and Air Guitar & Two Teaspoons, London (2007). He is project curator of The Fifth Column, a platform for contemporary art in external spaces.

charles.danby@gmail.com| www.charliedanby.co.uk

Venue detail:
Jerwood Space (The) »
171 Union Street, LONDON SE1 0LN

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