< Back to Events and Reports N.B. A separate site tells you about the artists' work shown in the exhibition Current Research: Charts, Evidence and Other Documentation. This gallery tour and seminar featured: Exhibition curators Helen Sacoor (freelance curator) and Oliver Sumner (John Hansard Gallery, Southampton), plus Beryl Graham (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Sunderland. Around 25 people attended, including students, gallery curators, journalists and academics. During the tour the artists' work concentrated on were: Roman Signer. His videod 'experiments' (showing for example, what happens when several helium balloons are attached to a table) communicate completely non-verbally a thesis and experimental exploration of that thesis. They are also funny - is the humour coming from the use of 'serious scientific structures' to explore the artistic or the 'pointless'? I compared his visual communication with the also non-verbal information that Hamad Butt received from a scientist whom he asked about vapourising iodine. The columns of figures in tables are information that Butt described as being 'hermetically sealed' - to a non-scientist they are just patterns and graphs. Butt's work had an 'end product' of hermetically sealed glass containers of gases as sculptural forms. Part of Peter Lloyd's work is simply copies of letters written to the Disney Corporation, with replies. At this point the question was asked - does it matter what form the artists' products take as a means of presenting 'research' - visual, text, 'document of artwork' or artwork itself? Tony Kemplen and Claude Closky both do text/print-based work, both using absurdly detailed systems of collection and classification. I suggested that this obsessive approach was rather like the 'boy thing' of wanting their record collections in alphabetical order. A gallery curator from Edinburgh disagreed, pointing out that women can also be into the ordering, analysing and controlling of things. Are traditional 'scientific' methods of taxonomy etc. a 'Boy Thang'? What might a 'Girl Thang' method be? Further discussion of the show centred on concepts of 'collaboration', e.g. artists like Andrea Nagy could be said to be 'experimenting on' the staff of organisations who she rang up to challenge about her 'most valued customer' status. Can the artist be said to be 'collaborating' with the public in this way, or exploiting them? Scientific and social researchers are bound by strict experimental ethics, but what about artists? If the artist is a 'detective' as part of their investigative work, are they engaging in deception? In addition to the Current Research publicity site, Oliver Sumner recommends the following web sites:
Beryl Graham, March 1999. |
