Producing and curating visual art in non-traditional gallery spaces presents a number of particular challenges and rewards. Claire Doherty looks at how work outside the gallery can offer a new perspective on its environment.
In curating work outside the gallery, the curator may often start with a number of questions. What is the curator?s role in supporting an artist?s encounter with place? How might visitors experience contemporary art outside the gallery environment? And what does it mean to produce an artwork in response to the landscape and history of a city for temporary exhibition?
The commissioning and exhibition of artworks in unexpected places is by no means new. There is a long line of scattered-site exhibitions going back over the past two decades that have placed artwork in unconventional settings. Many have been inspired by the nature of place such as ?Tyne International? and ?Arttranspennine? and by the recent swell of biennales across the world, which have come to dominate visual arts culture. These projects recognise the potential of active encounters between artists and cities, between the local and the international, and, consequently, commissioning in context has become central to the curatorial rationale.
Artists first
The curator?s role within this biennale culture has shifted from custodian to producer, but the duty of care remains just as important. The curator is charged with the responsibility of supporting an artist to produce the best possible work, and in turn, the responsibility to mediate that work to a wider audience. To do so, the curator needs to combine scholarship (particularly an in-depth knowledge of the artist?s practice and working process) with exceptional project management and communication skills.
?Thinking of the Outside?, a recently launched series of six new temporary art commissions for Bristol?s historic city centre, began with just this process of research. Situations, a research and commissioning programme led by the University of the West of England, was initiated in 2003 to investigate precisely these processes of research and mediation. ?Thinking of the Outside? was developed as the first commissioning project, following an international lecture series, publication and conference. In 2004, Situations entered into a commissioning partnership with Bristol Legible City (the city?s public art and information programme devised to improve people?s understanding, experience and access to all parts of Bristol) and also with Picture This, the Bristol-based moving-image projects agency. A group exhibition of new commissions was to be curated as part of the Bristol Legible City programme, and whilst supplementary funding was raised by UWE and Picture This, the City Council?s programme contributed the largest proportion of funds.
Team effort
This pooling of resources, skills and knowledge, along with the expertise of Arnolfini who managed the education programme, created the necessary infrastructure to deliver the project and a temporary staff and technical crew were recruited to deliver the installation and invigilation of the project, audience-development programmes and marketing. One of the key curatorial challenges for the project was the relationship between the artists and the commissioning brief.
Conventional public art commissioning diverges from gallery or project agency commissioning in that greater prominence is given to the particulars of the brief and role of the client in public art. Here the original brief to the artists ?to respond to the city?s medieval walls? was broadened to ?examine present-day boundaries, architecture and attitudes that deal with the relationship between outsider and insider?. Rather than operating as a restrictive framework, this brief gave the artists a starting point from which to begin their research, but also allowed them the flexibility to create works that developed their own practices.
Having selected the six artists through invitation and an open submission process, my role as curator was to maintain a sense of physical and conceptual cohesion for the project, whilst matching the different paces of the artists? research processes. Though none of the works were site-specific, the location, refurbishment and presentation of the scattered sites became an integral part of the project: Nathan Coley created his dominant sculpture ?Iceman? for a disused churchyard, João Penalva transformed an 18th century market hall into a cinema and Susan Hiller created a spell-binding video installation for the vaulted chambers of Bristol Castle. The resulting exhibition took the visitor on an intriguing route through the Old City, encountering moving image installations, paintings and sculptures in unexpected places. One project, an open call for unsigned music acts by artist Phil Collins, will result in three music videos to be shown throughout the UK in 2005/06.
Ongoing
The legacy of such an exhibition relies not on details of the research and production processes, however, but on its capacity to captivate visitors during its six-week run. To this end, the enduring and surprising nature of the works, the ?front-of-house? team located at every site, and programme of talks and workshops, and associated marketing campaign became vital to supporting the visitor?s experience of the exhibition. A publication including newly commissioned responses to the works, drawings from the group visits and documentation of all the projects in progress will be published in November 2005 ? not the final word, but a contribution to the ongoing programme of artistic responses to Bristol and a possible reflection on the nature of art outside.
Claire Doherty is Director of Situations and Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of the West of England, Bristol. ?Thinking of the Outside: New art and the City of Bristol? was presented from 21 May to 3 July 2005. w: http://www.thinkingoftheoutside.com