Curated by Gavin Wade, with Céline Condorelli and James Langdon, ‘Display Show’ is the first iteration of an exhibition project which seeks to examine the politics of exhibition and display. Taking Temple Bar Gallery & Studios as its first site of installation, the curators intend to realise and adapt the exhibition over two subsequent iterations at Eastside Projects, Birmingham and Stroom Den Haag, Netherlands later in 2015 and in 2016. Featuring work from Condorelli, Andrew Lacon, Eilis McDonald, Flore Nové-Josserand, Yelena Popova, Wade, and Christopher Williams, this superb show draws influence from the radical display methodologies of twentieth century architects and artists such as Frederick Kiesler and Adolf Krischanitz. In dissecting methods and strategies of display, ‘Display Show’ interrogates the overlaps between art-making, saleability, and preservation.
As both curator and contributing artist, Wade has a strong presence in the show. His towering sculptural piece ‘Z-Type Display Unit (After Kiesler & Krischantiz)’ encompasses the centre of the room. Adapted from Kiesler’s ‘L-Type’ and ‘T-Type’ Display Units of 1924, and Krischanitz’s ‘Secession Mobile Wall System’ of 1986, Wade’s work balances form and function, acting as both a standalone structurally and aesthetically impressive sculpture, as well as a ‘support’ on which other works are hung, and visitors are welcome to sit upon. The coated aluminium pillars of glossy pink, yellow, blue, and black accompanied by the hardwood and ply panelling recall the Judd school of formalist sculpture and garden-centre shedding simultaneously, as complimented by the television’s yellow hose-like power cable that winds tangling into the display unit along the gallery floor.
Painted on the floor, with grossly slick beige floor-paint, is a pattern connecting the gallery’s furthest corners. This piece, ‘Organised Direction (After Herbert Bayer)’, is based on a detail of Bayer’s exhibition floor plan design for MoMA’s “Bauhaus 1919-1928” exhibition from 1938. While the source of that piece’s inspiration is tucked away in the exhibition’s accompanying literature, more direct references to source materials appear in the work of Flore Nové-Josserand. Utilising Wade’s Display Unit panelling, Nové-Josserand presents a series of inkjet and laserjet printed images entitled ‘Thoughts on the conceptualisation of space and mechanisms of display, relative to subjectivity and emotion, in schematic form (…)’.
Interspersed with photographic source material of the work of artists – such as Eileen Gray, Lina Bo Bardi, and El Lissitzky among others – are a number of printed fliers advertising either Eastside Projects (a gallery) or CYC Logistics & Distribution (a UK courier service). A variety of slightly differing images, all containing bold shapes rendered in a dated graphical style, are printed on the fliers. This imagery is primarily used on the fliers advertising Eastside Projects, though on some pages, these oval-enclosed drawings are adorned with the CYC corporate logo instead. The addition of a corporate logo to these images draws attention to the history of corporations adopting formalist imagery, while highlighting the concurrent existence of the gallery as a site of exhibition and the gallery as a site of business.
Eilis McDonald’s ‘Numinous Objects’ hangs on the opposite side of Wade’s Display Unit. This short looping video consists of a series of objects and 3D-rendered shapes placed against a long rectangular white background; like an online store’s webpage, the tidy arrangements are perused and scrolled through, until the bottom of the page is reached triggering a swift upward scrolling accentuated by the scroll-bar at the side of the video. The objects displayed – the majority of which are domestic – vary from commercially friendly stock-photo products like a rubber glove, a pile of sponges, and a Macbook, to items which become more sinister in this context: A hooded torso faces away from the camera, looking not quite like a product image of a hoodie, nor like a photo of a person wearing a hoodie.
McDonald’s selection of abstracted images is imbued with an undercurrent of criminality. A sleeping bag, a pile of rope-bound curtains, and a full black bin-bag placed next to cleaning products hint at something ominously morbid. McDonald alludes to the domesticated and normalised crimes of financial capitalism, arguably the reason for which stock photography of these objects/products exists. In showcasing these stock photos out of the context of advertisement, McDonald is playfully transforming them back into grim props to place next to the GIF-ified oddities of the computer-rendered lines and shapes strewn throughout the video.
McDonald’s pristine three dimensional forms are mirrored by Andrew Lacon’s ‘Marble(d)’ in the nearest corner. Based on the plinths used at the Vatican and British Museums, this grey marble plinth is complete with bevelled edges. The absence of an object or artefact is highlighted in the negative space of the Lacon’s bright yellow wall installation ‘A Display for Sculpture 06’; this corner installation is a reference to the classic method of photographing sculptures against reflective coloured corners.
On the far side of the gallery, Yelena Popova’s ‘The Collector’s Case’ similarly references the somewhat hidden methods which go into the presentation and preservation of art objects. ‘The Collector’s Case’ consists of a flight case propped up in a concertina fashion, allowing the audience to view Popova’s paintings as attached safely to the aluminium panels of the case.
The paintings themselves transform into something purely functional in this context. Almost as display models, they are like impressions of what one might imagine modernist painting is when stripped to its most primitive signifiers: curvilinear shapes painted in primary colours with loose precision.
Once an artwork leaves the safe surroundings of the artist’s studio, it is surrendered to extraneous circumstances; the act of thoughtfully exhibiting an artwork often relies on a curator’s ability to contextualise and translate something intrinsically private (studio production) into something public (gallery display). ‘Display Show’ looks with careful consideration at some of the less public aspects of art and exhibition making: conservation, marketability, and commodification. It seems fitting that the hum of commodified and privatised Temple Bar, just outside the gallery’s windows, blends so seamlessly with Condorelli’s sound piece, ‘Sound of the Swindelier’, which documents twenty minutes of studio work.
Display Show curated by Gavin Wade, with Céline Condorelli and James Langdon is exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios until August 29th
Words: Aidan Wall
