Howard Andrews Art

In contrast to the large-scale exhibition spaces of places such as the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall or the ‘gallery of galleries’ type exhibition as exemplified by the Frieze Fair I would say that most artists display their works either in small high-street galleries, or through their own spaces, or these days through their websites and social media. Between these two extremes there are the short-term temporary events involving many artists and usually organised on a regional basis, an artist’s group basis or on a subject theme.

Examples of these types of exhibitions include local Open Studio events where artists or small groups of artists open their studios or create spaces for people to visit, with the publicity and organisation being handled by a local committee. The annual Open Studio event in Cambridge runs for four weekends in July and showcases over 300 artists including painters, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers, woodworkers and jewellers in Cambridge and the surrounding villages. Publicity takes the form of guide books, website and downloadable app with descriptions and examples of the artists’ works.

https://camopenstudios.org/july-open-studios-2023/

Other local events include exhibitions put on by groups such as the Cambridge Drawing Society. 

https://www.cambridgedrawingsociety.org/exhibitions/

A theme-based event is organised by Pint of Science, an organisation that runs annual events in many cities across the UK including Cambridge. This seeks to link together scientists with artists and present a series of lectures at which the scientist can explain their work to the public and an artist can present an interpretation of the work using an artistic medium. 

https://pintofscience.co.uk/events/cambridge

An example of this collaboration this year was the linking of the artist Mark Cheverton with a scientist studying the Hawking radiation around black holes. His interpretation used the ‘Beyond Black’ paint and growing a crystal structure over several weeks to represent the radiation:

The interaction of the scientists and the artists can open up new ways of thinking for both and the combined presentations reach wider audiences than might be the case for each on their own – a symbiotic relationship possibly.

During my own career within science and engineering I was involved in organising and curating an annual art and craft exhibition of works by the staff of the laboratory in which I worked. This was held in the atrium of the lab which was not open to the general public but could be viewed by the staff and visitors.

Other non-gallery exhibitions:

Jenny Holzer’s 2018 exhibition was set in Blenheim Palace with the works creating interventions in the stately home, once home to Winston Churchill and his ancestors. Holzer’s works were very critical of the way the wars in the middle east were being conducted by the western military and their setting within the stately home that contains so many artworks depicting the glory of past battles created a real sense of tension. Many of her works showed the redacted pages of reports and instructions regarding techniques for the torturing of captives:

Other works involved the placing of bones within the display cabinets or on the dining tables within the house:

And another intervention involved creating a bedspread to be displayed on Churchill’s bed:

This exhibition demonstrated how the combination of site-specific works and the careful juxtaposition of works within the surroundings can create a much more powerful reading of those artworks.

The Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

The Turbine Hall in Tate Modern is part of what was once the Bankside power station and the enormous space has been used as a site for a series of commissioned site-specific installations since the opening of the gallery. The sheer volume of the space allows for monumental works to be created such as The Weather Project(2003) by Olafur Eliasson which created the impression of a huge sun and clouds within the hall. In fact part of the illusion was created by installing a mirrored ceiling, giving the impression that the hall was twice as high as it actually was. This gave rise to a visitor-led phenomenon of people lying on the floor of the chamber in such a way as to create patterns of bodies that were reflected in the mirrors, an example of the viewers interacting with the installation in a way that may not have been expected.

More recently the space allowed Kara Walker to create Fons Americanus (2019) a monumental sculptural fountain based on the Victoria Memorial that references the links between Africa, Europe and America and their respective involvement in the slave trade. Again the volume of the Turbine Hall allowed for a monumentalism that few places could provide in an indoor space, allowing (or obliging) the artist to react to the scale of the site.

Frieze Art Fair, London

In contrast to the Tate Turbine Hall which presents the work of single artists with commissioned artworks specific to the site, the annual Frieze fair in London creates a space for galleries around the world to curate and present the artists that they represent. In this way the fair becomes a ‘gallery of galleries’. The works presented are all by contemporary artists and creates a space for collectors, critics and (some of) the public to view art trends on an international scale. 

The Frieze fair London was started in 2003 and in the early days was more accessible to the general public, in fact my first OCA study visit was to the Frieze Fair led by Michele Whiting, but with entry prices now ranging from £32 (for children) up to £245 those days are gone. It seems fairly clear that they are targeting a specific audience rather than those with a general interest in the arts.

It seems also that with the individual galleries presenting works within the overall framework of the art fair that the artists themselves will have little or no input into how their work will be viewed. The transactional nature of an art fair is by definition a space within which art is bought and sold and this means that site specific works will not be on display, the works will be presented in a ‘white cube’ environment. 

Paul O’Neill The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures (2012)

O’Neill traces the development of the curatorial process and ideas through the 20^th century detailing how the artistic curator developed from a person attached to an institution, responsible for the care and display of the artworks within its collection, through a period in the 1960s when the artist became more involved with the process of how their works should be viewed, and then later in the century the role of the curator becoming less attached to specific institutions and becoming more of an artistic creator of exhibitions. 

Of course, it could be argued that from the beginning of the arts academies of France and later Great Britain the display of works very much influenced what value was placed on the individual works. The hierarchy of genres, with historical and religious subjects being at the top and still life paintings at the bottom, determined where on the walls the paintings would be hung, the history paintings got pride of place at eye level while the lesser genres of landscape, still life etc. would be placed higher up the walls towards the ceiling.

In the mid 20^th century modernist ideas of media specificity espoused by Greenberg and others gave way to post-modernist ideas, blurring boundaries between painting, sculpture and performance creating a new approach to artistic events and exhibitions. This led to much greater interaction between curators and artists and led to the disassociation of the curatorial process from institutions and a greater role for individual curators.

This is exemplified by the exhibition in 1969 titled “557,087” curated by Lucy Lippard. As O’Neill writes:

By 1969, the convergence of artistic and curatorial praxis was causing confusion as to what actually constituted the authorial medium of the respective producers. A landmark exhibition in this regard was Lucy Lippard’s “557,087” for which, in many cases, Lippard herself installed or made work based on the instructions of absent artists. (O’Neill, 2012)

This led one critic to suggest that ‘Lucy Lippard is in fact the artist and her medium is other artists’ (ibid). This process later went a stage further and the Lyon Biennial in 2007 saw the curators Obist and Moison invite about 50 other curators to each present an artist which O’Neill describes as ‘curated curators curating artists’ (ibid). 

The process of curation involves many different aspects of how artistic works may be presented to the public. As can be seen by the examples above, exhibitions may be for single or multiple artists, they may contain art from a single period or be a juxtaposition of works from different eras. They may also have a specific relationship to the site or be a ‘white cube’ type of display showcasing individual pre-existing works. 

The siting of an exhibition can raise many issues. At one level the internal structure and surroundings will affect how the works are seen by the viewer, and importantly how individual pieces relate to each other. It may also be the case that an artist’s work relates to the surroundings both inside and outside the venue. In my own case for example much of my work is based upon the colours, shapes and textures that can be found in a close examination of the landscape of the Suffolk coast. For this reason, my choice of works that I would exhibit in a gallery in that coastal region has much more relevance to visitors to the exhibition. 

O’Neill writes that ‘Whichever form exhibitions take, they are also the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, the point at which “signification is constructed, maintained, and occasionally, deconstructed”, where one can establish and administer meanings of art.’(O’Neill, 2012) I would also argue that they also form a critical part of the monetary economy as far as artists are concerned.

O’Neill, P., 2012. The culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts London.