Exhibition - 'What can be seen' - Vlatka Horvat and Tim Etchells

'What can be seen' was an exhibition at the Millennium Gallery curated (and contributed to in part) by Vlatka horvat and Tim Etchells, as an exploration of the process of curating an art show. It's contents consists of collections of various interesting items from the 'Museums Sheffield's archives, arranged together and with items from the storage facilities, such as product packaging, archival notes or sketchbook guides, as a play on how a person's perspective changes upon entering an art gallery, the context they're viewing these items in changing their perception of them. 

I enjoyed this exhibition quite a lot actually, and it is actually very relevant to the concepts I've noticed have been slipping into my practice so frequently, namely my tendency to present everyday situations/ objects/ scenarios as abstract or surreal through my methods of translation. In the same way I am trying to view my environment from unusual perspectives to inspire compositional ideas or find artistic merit in places it wouldn't typically be, Horvat and Etchells are exhibiting, in the same fashion as artworks in an exhibition, objects which are not in themselves art (or are they?) and challenging the viewer to see them in new ways.

For example, these 'Ariel Surveys of the M1 Motorway (March 1962) - Huntings Surveys ltd'
which are images which were just supposed to serve a practical use, taken by slow flying aircraft with low stalling speed which were able to take photographs of the ground without ostensible movement. The overlap method of aerial photography allowed a three dimensional image of the ground to be constructed from multiple images of the same location (Taken from the label in the gallery). Once these are framed and arranged together in a grid in a gallery, one can begin to see an aesthetic merit to the photographs, the distance the photographs are taken from separates the land up into distinct forms which would work as purely abstract compositions, very close to the process I go through in isolating obscure views of everyday things in drawings without context.     

   
























There was also a big focus on incongruity throughout this exhibition, another notion which I am attracted to, (as discussed in my post about David Lynch) for the genuinely strange results it can yield. There was a massive container in the gallery space, entitled 'Objects, artefacts and specimens drawn from all Museums Sheffield departments', exhibiting different unusual, seemingly unrelated objects, grouped together via an atypical logic, e.g. shape rather than use. An example being a taxidermy platypus, rolling pin and various knives associated by length. This exercise opens up new, unexpected dialogues between the objects, encouraging and demonstrating the importance of inquisitiveness in the understanding and appreciation of art. I also just found it quite funny.

There were elements in the exhibition which I just liked on a purely aesthetic level, such as the photographs of 'Watercolour Sketches of Excavated Burials' (1845 - 54) by Thomas bateman, a pioneering Derbyshire antiquarian, from his book 'Illustrations of Antiquity'.  

There were moments in the exhibition which I thought were in danger of becoming pretentious, for example 'Diana Robing' (1881) - Blanchards, Blackfriars, London, which is a glazed terracotta statue of the Greek goddess Diana, but displayed in this exhibition in the wooden framing which was protecting it during travel.

    










            












The descriptive plaque stated that "supported and framed in this way, the statue becomes a hybrid sculptural object, combining ornate and everyday materials and creating a dialogue between the curved lines of the sculpture and the rectilinear structure of it's wooden container." It isn't this particular example which I actually found irritating, I do think it's quite interesting to see how the statue fits into the frame in a way that almost looks as if it was built in order to fit into it. It was the fact that there were a couple of other examples of this, also labelled as 'hybrid sculptural objects' which didn't , in my opinion, actually work as effectively and it began to feel a little contrived. There were also things like a bunch of frames without the paintings in, wrapped up as they were in storage which, whilst in keeping with the thematic interrogation of what can be considered art, were just not that interesting and paled in comparison to some of the, much more playful, approaches.

Still, there was enough humour present in this exhibition to stop it feeling pretentious and elitist as a whole, and this also kept it feeling lighthearted and spirited enough to encourage people (well me at least) to think about it and consider and appreciate what was being said.
The best example of this, probably, were the photographs of the cards in the storerooms labeling things in the museum's archives, and little notes to self and for others left by the curators. Without the context these become funny and surreal, some examples being "card missing" and "nothing on top". 

Displaying these photographs also gives an insight behind the scenes of art galleries and museums and alleviates somewhat the elusive nature of what often seems another, somewhat exclusive world. It's an entertaining show of honesty which helps to pull back the pretentious sheen of superiority so often found in the high art world, and galleries in particular, where the visitors move slowly, standing a safe distance from the art and speaking in hushed tones.