I think that my difficulty with the white-cube gallery as a context lies in its finality. Try as it might to be otherwise, the gallery is a place of resolution, the exhibition the ultimate event, the displayed object a full-stop. I have a problem with finality, and the problem is that, wherever I look, everything is shifting and fluid and ever in motion, and nothing at all is fixed. How at all, if at all, can the static art-object reflect this dynamism? This is something that has troubled artists for decades; Julio le Parc, for instance, began to work with light, mirrors and mobiles to create chance-based, open-ended works that shifted and altered continuously. Video projections, immersive installations and interactive sculpture are some of the other ways in which artists have grappled with this issue: the creation of works that transcend, transform or open up the space. But, for me personally, the difficulty of the gallery remains: it seems to me to be an authoritative space, waiting to be filled with commodities; and very separate; not a place where art can live. I have always been fascinated by the interfacing of the inner and outer worlds; in a space that announces itself as a Place For Art, how much of the subtlety of this intersection of the private and the public can remain? In other words, a gallery seems weighted towards the outer, the public. In opposition to this, I’m thinking about art in the domestic space. I’m thinking about art as an intervention into the outside world. Not self-announcing in the way that public sculpture or a painting on the wall of a coffee-shop can be; but a quietly active Thing that breathes and lives and immerses…
These thoughts are feeding into a proposal I’m working on today; though so much of my working seems to consist of looking at the beech-tree outside the window. Yesterday, the leaves on one side of the tree began to turn yellow.
