An interesting weekend in terms of art work to see. PSL offered an opportunity to assess how that gallery’s open tall white wall and breezeblock feel supported/effected the artwork and the audience’s experience of it and to compare this with the OLSEN experience.
My read on this could be linked to earlier comments on the frame. The informal nature of the work within PSL I feel reflects a need to integrate the work into the ‘real’ world. Rory’s radios leak the sound from radio stations normally heard in domestic and work settings into the gallery, a fax machine links us to another place, could this be an office somewhere? A smoke machine creates a fog within which we have to look at everything else, are we supposed to be reminded of a club scene? Most of the work played with the everyday world, how are we meant to read a horse when its in an art gallery. Are we supposed to switch our reading between ‘real’ and ‘constructed’ worlds? As an audience are we then to take this experience and load it onto what is happening as we walk out of the gallery into the world. The edges of one thing fraying and being rewoven into the other, collaboration perhaps being opened out to us as observers now participants in the process. However there were still several signifiers operating in the PSL space that guaranteed that it would be ‘read’ as a professional art gallery space. The fact the walls were raised to 12 feet and painted white, the convention of the ‘opening’ or in this case the ‘closing’, how the work was presented as a discrete series of pieces etc. In fact I think this space is closest to the warehouse spaces you often find art shown in when visiting larger cities. It feels ‘international’ and doesn’t have that parochial problem of having to overcome the municipality feel of locally designated ‘official’ spaces for art.

OLSEN was the opposite. Framed worlds seen in the mythologised dark of a cinema space. This reminded me far more of the way pre-historic art in caves is described in The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
by David Lewis-Williams. Lewis-Williams describes the membrane between the real world and the world of the ‘other’ as being essential for shamanistic practices. A spirit world, a place where only the mind can go, linked to the unconscious but needing a place to become, was seen as vital to early human’s wellbeing. He refers to the cave wall as the membrane which allows passage between these two worlds. For me the projection on the cinema wall and my immersion in the dark operated the same way. Some of the work seemed designed to work with that trance like state you can find yourself in when gazing at flickering lights in the dark. Perhaps as an audience I need that framework in order to suspend my disbelief. Artists I was particularly taken with were: James Holcombe, Victor Alimpiev, Emily Wardill, Makino Takashi, Pete McPartlan and Pat O’Neill. For those of you into Beuys there was a very funny film by Ken McMullen.



By the way smoke and fog machines are things to look at in themselves, there are so many varieties, do you think Dave Ronalds chose the best one? See:
http://www.kave.co.uk/Kave_New/hire/effects.htm