27/10/2021 – Mid Week Reflection – Are some exhibitions just shit in a room?

*Please note that the dates and the posts may not line up as these texts were previously kept in a document before publishing*

Part of investigating how I would want to curate and exhibit my work (which is one of my MA project proposal aims/objectives) involves me visiting galleries. This is something I always do anyway, but for the next while, I want to visit them and critically reflect on them, so this feels like the right place to put those thoughts.

Something me and my partner started discussing quite some time ago when we visit galleries or exhibitions together, is if we felt that it was just ‘shit in a room’.

I have to be honest, this started when we first visited the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh’s grand re-opening exhibition: Karla Black, details for a retrospective. The new extension made for a cool open space, it still feels warehouse-y but in a contemporary art, could be filled with anything type of space. The works were described to be about materiality, and the desire to just create. From the Fruitmarket Gallery Instagram page: “We need, trust and want to take risks, to experiment, to frame questions rather than provide answers, to bring new perspectives to bear”.

So you can see how walking into this shiny new space and exhibition posed to be about the audiences encounter with the art object and materiality, we were excited to see some interaction, some dialogue between artist – art object – audience.

I wouldn’t even say we ended up disappointed, because it actually just became a bit funny in the end. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the objects; I leaned too far over to see a pile of dirt with gold leaf stuck to it and got shouted at by an invigilator.

The upstairs space just had pink powder on the floor, there was a clearly marked path to walk down the side of it, to see where reels of thread had just been sparsely launched into the powder, but that was it- don’t even think about getting close or missing a step.

I’ve tried my best to understand Karla Black’s work and enjoy it in the past. The way it is spoken about in Scottish contemporary art circles, it has all the elements that I should like, that connect to my own practice. But at the end of the day its just lumps of plastic, or dirt, or powders on the floor that seem to say nothing other than “I made this”, and like, cool, making and creating is cool. But do we need to give it that much space when the dialogue created is just ‘you have to stay away from these things because they are art ™’. If that was the intention, to consider what makes an art object, what makes it precious if its just everyday material, then that would say something, but this just didn’t seem to.

So that’s where the ‘is it just shit in a room’ thought started, and now I cant help but think about it every time I go to a gallery and look at what the space is filled with. Do I feel something, am I interested by the content and context, or is it just shit filling a room? I think asking myself this, boils the exhibition right down to a simple question, essentially asking; do I think this is worth time to see or not.

So this is how I want to review exhibitions moving forward, still considering the ins and outs, the details of the space and the work, but also the basic question of whether or not it is just shit in a room or not.

Image of the upper gallery in the Fruitmarket Gallery taken at the time of Karla Black's exhibition.