Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Site Gallery, Sheffield
15 November – 14 December
Reviewed by: Emma Cocker
In the realm of scientific enquiry the experiment is the cornerstone of empirical knowledge; it epitomises the methodical pursuit of ‘truth’ and certainty in a slippery, unstable world. Less a site of resolution and rationality, the experimental test-bed or studio laboratory of artistic practice operates in a more contingent, disruptive manner: it is a zone of indecision and irresolution where nothing is fixed but instead remains in flux or interminable disarray. Rather than attempting to quell the tide of contradiction or confusion; remove the risk of contamination and discrepancy; or control and eradicate the possibility of human error or subjectivity, artists might wilfully increase such variables through repeated acts of personal investment in order to create unexpected gaps and glitches in the way that things are perceived. Working against the teleological grain of Western knowledge, the use of the experiment or test-site seems intent on undoing and unravelling, rather than underpinning accepted or familiar constructs, canons or existing concepts about the world. The notion of an artistic ‘practice’ thus becomes a temporal site of rehearsal or potentiality where infinite solutions might yet be within the grasp of possibility.
‘Site Platform’ presented experimental, cumulative or durational work by Yorkshire-based artists in a series of short exhibitions, events and performances. Rather than as a location for the display and presentation of a resolved form of artistic practice, the gallery was transformed into a threshold space that hovered at the interstice between public and private worlds, where the audience was witness to work which lingered at the nascent point between improvisation and intentionality, between actions that were familiar and those which were still unknown. The gallery became a site of experimentation and inhabitation, a place for dwelling or spending time (for both artist and audience) as well as a platform for more determined action. Though highly diverse, each project in ‘Site Platform’ presented the evidence or trace of some absurdly episodic, repetitious activity or private ritual in which a perpetual tension remained between the conditions of declaration and doubt; pointlessness and necessity; boredom and immersion; precision and spontaneity. In The Applause Hester Reeve improvised the undoing or reversal of a philosophical treatise by Plato through highly evocative bodily translations and performed tableaux. Michael Graham’s Ambivalent Processes charted the relentless mapping of dust and the plotting of architectural discrepancies in the gallery through Weak Lines and Blemishes. Evangelia Basdekis silently embroidered the sole of her foot in I Trust You where her insistently relentless, reiterated stitch gradually assumed the form of an image of Mickey Mouse. Whilst in Unloud Duncan Higgins’ production of innumerable video works and paintings appeared to propose the (im)possibility of a personal archival system or visual language in which fact and fiction; past and present; the romantic and the catastrophic cannot be categorically fixed or determined, but instead bleed across one another and become indistinguishable.
‘Site Platform’ proposed the possibility of a public space for experimentation, transformation and wilful irresolution. Whilst on the one hand it could be seen to support the kind of alchemical process whereby an artist’s tentative and improvisational activities and rehearsals might emerge as an actualised artwork; on the other it appears to demystify the nature of artistic practice by revealing or disclosing the mess and uncertainty which precedes and is a part of the work itself. The notion of experimentation and irresolution is articulated then in both the content of and context for the series: it operates on an individual level as an incentive for creative practice but also performs as a wider critical catalyst that involves an audience in questioning how certain habitual or latent conditions of existence might be collectively scrutinised or taken to trial.
Writer detail:
Emma Cocker is a writer and lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University
Venue detail:
Site Gallery
1 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS
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