o p e n e n d ed exhibition II
Stuart Edmundson, Mike Ferguson, Gary Fisher, Sarah Hardacre, Magnus Quaife, Maeve Rendle.

Collaboration is a strategy often born out of necessity. Communitarian imperatives aside, such as those that inspired art activists The Artist Placement Group, it has long since become evident that individual artists can manoeuvre their way through the ever-expanding and inherently competitive field of contemporary visual art by pooling resources. A dynamic collective of emerging practitioners is, for example, more likely to access funding and receive some form of critical attention than a solitary unknown artist. o p e n e n d e d exhibition II is one such collaborative venture, a group exhibition that is part of the wider o p e n e n d e d project; an inter-regional series of artist-led exchanges initiated by Manchester based artist Maeve Rendle. o p e n e n d e d started with Rendle inviting artist-led space Rhys & Hannah Present to select a show of their Bristol based peers for a group show at Rogue Studios, Manchester. This invitation has since been reciprocated with the Bristol artists having researched and invited six Manchester based artists to exhibit back at Rhys & Hannah Present. The project is discursive in its intentions and sets out to stimulate dialogue between “each artist and each viewer’’, resisting foreclosure through an ongoing set of collaborations or ‘open endings’ with Rendle approaching new spaces in London and Berlin to start the process afresh after the Bristol incarnation.

The venue for o p e n e n d e d exhibition II, Rhys & Hannah Present, has much in common with many other artist-run spaces, in so far as the two artists in question have taken over a previously empty city centre retail space through soliciting the support of a private developer. In a familiar economic and cultural transaction that has played a key role in contemporary urban regeneration, the artists occupy the space rent free in return for reanimating the property. This particular unit is situated in a once grand nineteenth century shopping arcade. In the place of flâneurs, the arcade is now home to herbalists, mobile phone stores and empty units; the most frequented establishment is the pawnbrokers. What was a thriving part of the city centre is now in economic flux, as those stores with the necessary resources leave to take up residence in the soon to be opened Cabot Circus. This new development, the planners inform us, will “achieve a renaissance” in the city centre and promise to be a giant, continuous retail experience comprised of “one million sq ft of high quality retail and leisure uses, as well as apartments, offices and public spaces”. Cabot Circus will “feature a glass roof equal to the size of one and a half football pitches (5,500m2)” and even more wondrously “it will be held together by 203 tonnes of bolts equivalent to the weight of 40 African elephants.” A spectacle more bombastic than any artwork, Cabot Circus appears to be initiating a commercial renaissance whilst simultaneously emptying out the other half of the city centre left behind in its wake.

Due to its location, o p e n e n d e d exhibition II therefore provides an opportunity not just to see new work, but to explore the previously private upper levels of the arcade. A winding spiral staircase leads to two upper floors and the visitor is soon disorientated, climbing higher than the frontage would suggest that it is possible to go. Altogether o p e n e n d e d exhibition II is an engaging exhibition which makes good use of a potentially difficult space. It is “self-curated” by the artists involved, a phrase which hints perhaps at a suspicion towards curatorial meta-narratives that force thematic readings on unrelated objects; decisions appear instead to have been made purely on a formal basis with sensitive positioning of works, so that the show feels like a coherent whole rather than a series of individual exhibitions, one on top of the other. Of the six artists involved, the two who top and tail the show (Quaife and Edmundson) are explicitly making reference to art world concerns and the others (Rendle, Ferguson, Hardacre and Fisher) are working through more speculative propositions. That is not to say that either of these approaches is better or worse, only that it is an exhibition that contains contrasting sensibilities which can be read as the result of the different tastes and alliances of its multiple selectors.

In terms of the former tendency, art that is confidently artful and explicitly referential to historical legacies, Edmundson’s I will never follow you…I will never bother you! dominates the show and is positioned in the front window. His assemblage is part sculpture, part supporting structure for smaller paintings and objects that resemble Constructivist sketches and maquettes. There is a playful tension between the expressively rendered geometric watercolours and everyday items such as packing crates incorporated as plinths. His work brings to mind the work of other contemporary artists who carefully corrupt the tropes of Modernist art, such as Michael Stumpf and Thomas Scheibitz, and the work also creates a dialogue between Quaife’s similarly referential watercolours on the top floor, which take seminal theorists as their starting point. By way of contrast, the practices of the other artists are more informal, tentative and strangely suited to the ramshackle environment that they occupy: traces of the building’s former life as a shop still linger.
It would be easy, therefore, to miss Mike Ferguson’s interventions with the lighting system, a series of strings and pulleys that run between the rooms and up the spiral staircase. They resemble the kind of system that a trainee inventor might concoct and have a real purpose; when tugged the chain of connections is meant to illuminate the top level of the show where Quaife’s work is located - on the day of viewing, Ferguson’s work is temporarily out of order but still suggestive of a contingent functionality. There is a wilful amateurism operating here in the use of familiar materials and unpolished presentation, a ‘just enough’ sensibility also found in the work of the other artists, in Hardacre’s use of taxidermy that presents pet shop rejects to uncanny effect; in Fisher’s interactive sound-based drawing project which comes complete with feedback generating amp and schoolboy’s pencil case and in Rendle’s Prontaprint style photographs of kinetic sculptures, produced through systematic use of a faulty 35mm camera that leads to deliberate double exposures.

Thus far, the project achieves its aims in generating dynamic interactions between artists. It is here, however, that I wish to raise two provocations for the artists to consider, or ignore as they will, before o p e n e n d e d moves on to its next incarnation; namely that the project has yet to visibly foster wider dialogues beyond those artists immediately involved, nor does it reveal any of the motivations behind decision making processes. There are currently no on-line traces of the public discussions that took place in Manchester and the Bristol show has been animated only by the conventional private view: there have been no subsequent talks or seminars. The average viewer instead encounters an end result (art work exhibited in a space or art work documented on a web page), rather than a sense of open-endedness. That intense discussions have taken place between select groups is evident from the fact that these exhibitions and exchanges exist, however, the viewer who encounters either group show is left only to speculate on what they were. Did, for instance, the remits of the funders and partner organizations (Arts Council England: North West and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation via Castlefield Gallery) have any influence over the format of the project? Who choose whom and why? What links already existed between these artists? (For example, two of the artists collaborate together as the itinerant Blackpool Museum of Contemporary Art). Were the more dominant parties those with access to spaces or influential networks (or both)? Were there any passionately fought differences over which works were chosen? What new cultural alliances have been formed after exhibiting and for which individuals? Will the current formula of artists inviting other artists to take part in reciprocal exhibitions ever end up as something other than a group show?

That o p e n e n d e d is therefore only partially open and far from transparent does not of course detract from the quality of the work on show. As a process it is more akin to the private literary salon, with the artists directly involved being the primary audience. Whilst there is a real integrity in keeping discussion between like minds behind closed doors, rather than setting up discursive situations in the wider public realm which can after all, amount to no more than staged rhetoric, this opaqueness around decision making is, at times, frustrating. There is real potential for an already ambitious project to raise questions around the agency of contemporary collaborative practices and unpick the power relations that lie behind them. Artists’ social networks are traded off for economic capital (funds, spaces, access to the market) in order to gain access to cultural capital, in the form of validation by the legitimising institutions of critics, writers, curators and the art market. These interlocking forms of capital run through the heart of the project, taking in the space itself - for Rhys & Hannah Present could disappear at any moment should their private or public sponsors withdraw: the space currently relies both on a developer and the regional arts council, as well as a network of artists, in order to survive. Whilst my questions to the artists will have to remain open until the next instalment, I hope to see an exhibition that is more explicit about the exchanges of capital that are going on between artists, cultural institutions and economic forces. In the meantime, the transaction between artists and developers continues; perhaps an exhibition by artists in the empty units or luxury apartments of Cabot Circus is but a recession or two away.


© Marie-Anne McQuay, 14 September 2008