Panhandling in the Office

Exhibitions can be assertive, provocative, they can create ways of seeing, of contrasting and collecting. Some of the most relevant exhibitions did not come out of certainty, but were borne out of curiosity about something that became concrete long after the event: a hunch, an attitude, a picture that takes shape; something in the mind’s eye, dimly perceived that cannot be explored prior to the exhibition. Indeed, the exhibition is the legitimate locus of uncertainty and proposes to formulate the what, where and how.

Harald Szeemann’s ‘When Attitudes become Form’ (1969) or Kynaston Mc Shine’s Information Show (1970) and Les Immateriaux (1985), perhaps the first exhibition curated by a philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, all dealt with new ideas about cultural production, presented in an open-ended format: works were temporarily propped or lay on the floor, they appeared as textual statements via photocopies or writing fixed directly on walls, or they operated via the now defunct minitel system, a precursor of the internet. Objects, once dematerialised progressively melted into the realm of information, disembodied until called upon. These works were innovative in this period, they exhibited a fluidity, a dematerialization, and a slippage between forms; their display, critical of the institutional setting and politically engaged, in time became part of another tradition of showing, a way of underdetermining an exhibition’s destination and casting doubt on its propositional or authoritative status.

We tend to associate text with authority, yet arguably to write is not to know, since texts begin as ways of examining things we are unsure about, adventures that begin on the first page, and that linger long after the last. To write is also an invitation to dwell in the gap between language, object and place, a liminal state that invites us to fall over the edge, to tumble from one space into the other, to stumble and crash through a makeshift partition, and into a room in the way of a Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin, dramatically, pathetically, fortuitously.

Such a fall is thus associated with boundaries and socio-cultural conventions; the transformation in format that occurs when a text slips over into an object, or an object into a space, requires rapid shapeshifting, morphosis. Another way of putting it might be to effect a translation. This faithful attempt, from one language to another results in instability because it suggests that each thing is fluid enough that it might be transformed into another version of itself. The act of presenting an idea as an instruction as written or spoken text represents a translation, which precedes the potential enactment of this instruction as, say, a performance or drawing. The shifting between modes of operation, address and media has been a constant of Modern and Contemporary art, further confirmed by the rise of exhibition-making as a locus of investigation.

Here, the display strategies appear as if borrowed from a putative head office of a production company: faint shadows of pinboards, boardroom tables, bookshelves, vitrines, video address systems; in short, places of latent instruction, both pragmatic and codified, inherently empty and already overloaded with significance. The imprecise aesthetic of the office has been adopted, perhaps because it suggests production and productivity, but also, a kind of banality, a labour coupled with a reluctance to work.

Or perhaps the artists and curators are labouring in a cultural panhandle, prospecting, sifting and sorting sand and sediment, hoping for a nugget at the bottom of their pan.

In the course of nine weeks the exhibition curated by Jonathan Houlding, Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley and invited guest curators will add artworks, actions and accumulate documents, objects and ephemera, to be displayed, sifted and repositioned bringing into focus what was once an unstable picture.

Nicolas de Oliveira

Installation View SE8