Abstract:
This exhibition consisted of a series of lithographs and selected objects by Nuala Gregory mixed with works by other invited artists. This unusual combination is presented in the form of an installation containing references to the history of art and to art’s place in society. Installation, perhaps pre-eminently among the art forms, captures the idea of things thrown together in the chaos and happenstance of modern life. In this case, an assembly of prints and paintings is structured around a neon sign and a chair, two tokens of the difference or the gap between art and the social. The neon sign (Bar Zacatecas) invokes the space of a public bar in Mexico in which art and leisure are strategically mixed together. People are surrounded by banks of small paintings covering the walls and suspended (most impressively) from the series of wooden rafters on the ceiling. The paintings form part of the décor of the bar, in which they are mixed with various functional but clearly aestheticised objects – mirrors, lamps, stained glass windows, bottles, wrought iron chairs – supplemented by paper decorations, skulls, puppets and dolls … As the bar fills with people, this creates a kind of living installation in which art is de-sanctified and serves as a point of spontaneous, unpredictable conversation (or discursive participation) rather than formal contemplation. The chair refers back to an event in the early history of modernist art: 0,10 (Zero-Ten). The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting held in Petrograd, 1915. A famous photograph of Malevich’s work for the exhibition [figure 2] focuses on his Black Square, mounted high up in the ‘red corner’ so that it faces down into and across the entire space of the gallery. The red corner was the space reserved by Russian peasants for the placement of sacred icons. By his repudiation of imagery and strategic act of positioning, Malevich aimed not just at ‘the degree zero of form’ in painting but its replacement by an art of spiritual depth and genuine social utility. Almost directly below the Black Square, unremarked by art historians, was a type of ‘accidental artwork’ – a chair, probably placed there for the benefit of the person whose job it was to protect the exhibited works from damage or theft. Oddly, the chair looks as if it forms part of the installation, in which its purpose is to confront the audience with a silent challenge (who are you; and what do you make of all of this stuff on the walls?) or to invite them to ‘sit in on’ whatever the art is doing. These two references, social and historical, were brought together in the current exhibition. Each, in its way, recalls us to the social dimension of art (so often suppressed by the white cube of the gallery space) and the possible construction of communal or collective meaning. The title When Will the Present Begin? raises a simple, perhaps provocative, question about the possibility of a new time and a new role for art. For those in the former Eastern bloc, the present might be said to have begun in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall – and in Belfast a few years later, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Or perhaps it has still yet to begin? Can art invoke a genuinely new artistic-social space, or a new present in which art and the social are no longer set apart but merge again with ‘transformative’ effect? The exhibition aimed to resituate art somewhere between the discrete space of the gallery and the lived space of the community and the city. It mixed professional and non-professional art, and invited each of us to metaphorically take a chair and stake a place in the discussion.