Case Study - The Art of Conversation (Gallery)
This case study examines how an exhibition project's collaborative and joint authorship dynamics support young artists in building artistic agency and status. It specifically references the 2017 exhibition of The Art of Conversation (Gallery).
The Art of Conversation (Gallery) is a collaboratively made and jointly authored exhibition project. Works take the form of 2D prints that contain fine, mesh-like layers of text (and sometimes accompanying imagery). The works present colloquial and visual dialogues about what it’s like to be a young artist and how tbC’s collaborative arts action around artistic agency and status supports their development. This case study begins by historically contextualising gallery display. This contextualisation is followed by a brief account of The Art of Conversation (Gallery)’s foundation story, which includes a discussion around the complex relationship young artists have with the gallery space, and their desire to engage with and critique it. An authorship tension similar to the one expressed in The Art of Conversation (Digital) case study is also examined. Many of the dialogical concepts discussed during The Art of Conversation (Digital) examination apply to this case study. The reader is encouraged to consider both studies as intimately connected. Also, keep in mind that when exhibited, The Art of Conversation (Gallery) includes The Art of Conversation (Digital). A discussion around the collaborative and joint authorship dynamics that are mainly responsible for the building of artistic agency and status, in this case, completes the study.
This study views the concept of the gallery through the lens of contemporary exhibition practices. While there is a long and engaging history surrounding the rise of the gallery space, which is often historically conflated with the museum,[1] chronicling this historical journey is not the focus of this study. However, a brief contextualisation is important to establish the cultural context in which this exhibition project is positioned.
For centuries civilisations all over the world have collected and made objects and designed sites for their display. Historians locate the modern concept of the museum/gallery within seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe describing these spaces as repositories for “an assembly of items, man-made or of natural origin, as well as curios.”[2] These collections were mainly housed and displayed in religious and private spaces, and the general public had limited opportunities to view them.[3] These spaces became more public around the mid to late eighteenth century, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[4] One of the most influential trends to emerge within the world of museums and galleries is the white cube approach to exhibiting. Even though examples existed in Europe, “the concept of the white cube was most fully exploited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the 1930s under the direction of Alfred H. Barr.”[5] For Barr, the use of bare spaces, white walls, and minimalist frames reduced visual distractions and directed the viewer toward a pure experience of the artwork itself.[6] Artist and critic Brian O’Doherty describes the white cube gallery space as one that is:
…constructed along laws as rigorous as those for the building of a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall... Here, at last, the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there.[7]
While the white cube-style gallery still exists today, it sits within a broader ecology of display spaces and presentation approaches.
Young members of tbC are interested in the artistic agency and status exhibiting art delivers. They want the opportunity to engage audiences in the reception of their work and to receive critical feedback, something they view as fundamental to artistic development. Hoodie Mag and The Blacksmiths Way Graffiti and Street Art Project are examples of the less formal presentation spaces tbC artists have successfully explored. The sub-cultural spaces of radical publishing and graffiti and street art are accessible and attract receptive niche audiences and recognition from supportive counter-publics.[8] Episodic and Vertical Platform are further examples of the less formal and public presentation tbC artists engage in. Studio presentation is also a critical part of tbC’s exhibition practice. Exhibiting in these less formal presentation spaces encourages and prepares the young artist for presentation in more formal gallery settings.
tbC artists have a strong desire to exhibit in the more formal gallery space. They understand what O’Doherty means when he says, “things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them.”[9] This desire partly stems from the exclusion young tbC artists routinely experience when trying to access the gallery as a presentation space. The main impediment to gallery access is the young artists’ limited record of practice and production. Access is also often hampered by the young artists’ financial limitations. tbC’s studio discussions often focus on the frustration these barriers to gallery exhibition cause young artists. Even though some galleries specialise in exhibiting the work of emerging artists, many of tbC’s young members are yet to qualify as emerging. The way to establish emerging status is through dedicated and sustained arts practice. Yet, such opportunities are scarcely available to young artists, which is precisely why tbC’s youth arts practice was formed. tbC’s dedicated and sustained arts practice supports artists in building collaborative bodies of work that demonstrate bold creative intentions and sophisticated production. This concerted effort has resulted in tbC being granted several opportunities to exhibit within more formal gallery spaces. For example, Burrinja Gallery in Upwey, Footscray Community Art Centre’s Roslyn Smorgon Gallery, Noosa Regional Art Gallery, Muswellbrook Regional Art Centre, Stirrup Gallery in Sydney, fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne, the (e)merge Art Fair in Washington D.C. (curated by Connersmith Gallery). The works presented in these more formal exhibition settings have been well received by audiences and gallery managers and resulted in many sales.
Despite this success, artists are wary of the constraining customs often associated with the gallery. Studio discussions often focus on the clinical, remote, even pretentious experiences many young artists have with the formal gallery. In response to this combined interest and scepticism, tbC artists experiment with art-making and presentation techniques that simultaneously engage with and disrupt gallery conventions. For example, even though The Art of Conversation (Gallery) artworks are flawlessly printed, elegantly framed and conceptually configured, the social and emotional qualities found within the dialogical aesthetic of the work attenuates the formal experience of the gallery. This engaging aesthetic resides in the combined character of The Art of Conversation (Gallery)’s dialogical[10] content, visual effects and overarching narrative. Each work contains repeated lines of horizontal text that create subtle but intriguing patterns. (Some works have sketch-like images overlayed, making them more visually accessible). From a distance, the textual patterns are almost invisible. This visual experience disarms the gallery visitor as some of the works initially look empty. However, as the gallery visitor draws closer, the subtle patterns advance, appearing as readable text. As the dialogue is so fine in scale, the viewer has to move even closer to decipher it. This physical movement towards the work mimics the intimacy often found in deep conversations between people. It also invites the viewer to cross an invisible but hallowed threshold that usually restrains the gallery visitor from getting too close to a work of art. This threshold is the viewing distance enforced by gallery conventions aimed at distancing the spectator from the artwork. Although this enforced distance is primarily aimed at protecting artworks, it is a constraining experience.[11] The Art of Conversation (Gallery) entices the gallery visitor to cross this threshold as they are required to move closer to the works to decipher them. On closer inspection, the spectator is drawn into a rich social and emotional world of conversation. Watching the gallery visitor’s face morph from expressionless to puzzled, then surprised look – upon discovering the obscured dialogue within the works – is an amusing experience.
Despite the fact The Art of Conversation (Gallery) is not interactive like The Art of Conversation (Digital), the experience of the work is intimate and engaging. The dialogue found within The Art of Conversation (Gallery) comes from everyday life, including studio discussions about what it’s like to be a young artist and how tbC’s collaborative arts and joint authorship practice supports them in building artistic agency and status. Multiple works are hung, also horizontally, around the gallery’s walls, manifesting as a rhizomatic assemblage of thoughts and discursive moments that multiply and connect as the gallery visitor moves through the space.[12] These individual dialogues morph into an overarching narrative from which a bigger story is jointly told. The metaphysical experience of these multiple voices is echoed in the short sound work at the beginning of The Art of Conversation (Digital) app.[13]
As with The Art of Conversation (Digital), the rich dialogical content and collaborative experience of making The Art of Conversation (Gallery) contributes valuable experiential knowledge about tbC's collaborative arts and joint authorship practice and its success in supporting young artists in building artistic agency and status. The conversations embedded within the artworks have come directly from studio discussions around this subject. Like, The Art of Conversation (Digital), The Art of Conversation (Gallery) operates as an artwork, a social action and mode of experiential and observational data collection. Philosopher Donald Schon refers to this kind of knowledge creation as an in-action[14] method of data collection, reflection and analysis. Artist-researchers Stephanie Springgay and Zofia Zaliwska connect this kind of knowledge creation to the in-practice culture of artistic inquiry that sees data emerging through the making of artworks, something they refer to as data-in-the-making.[15] The dialogue emerging from The Art of Conversation (Gallery) also reveals valuable in-practice knowledge about the informal learning that goes on at tbC. This informal learning manifests in the group’s mutually beneficial mentoring. Peer mentoring also sees young artists supporting and teaching each other. This egalitarian and empowering learning environment, along with tbC’s united front approach to making and presenting art, gives young tbC artists added confidence and training, further supporting their development of artistic agency and status.
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. is an excellent example of a group of young artists challenging marginal status and artworld boundaries via the gallery space. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. have exhibited in gallery spaces for decades, contributing significantly to the discourse around who qualifies as an artist, the intersection between community art and fine art, and what it means to collaborate. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. have artwork in over 90 art collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London. As gallery director Ian Berry notes, they have “not only penetrated the art market, they [have] developed a high level of sophistication… engaging in dominant art culture by engaging ‘with’ it.”[16] Berry’s writing about how Tim Rollins and K.O.S. have achieved agency and status by active engagement with the establishment directly resonates with tbC’s artistic agency and status goals. Rollins once famously declared while reminiscing about the beginnings of his collaboration with K.O.S. that “to dare to make history when you are young when you are a minority when you are working, or nonworking class, when you are voiceless in society, takes courage.”[17] Like the young K.O.S. artists, members of tbC have a similar desire to work beyond their community and engage with dominant art culture to pursue respect and power not traditionally afforded them. Despite the tensions associated with navigating the gallery system, tbC believes its engagement with the space and its collaborative arts action around artistic agency and status is equally brave.
Again, as with The Art of Conversation (Digital), a creative tension around authorship initially made qualifying The Art of Conversation (Gallery) as jointly authored complex. While ongoing studio conversations inspired the Art of Conversation (Gallery), the idea to make a material body of work with these conversations initially came from Tiffaney. However, as usual, this work’s development and final incarnation were transformed by extensive studio engagement, personalised content, and group presentation techniques. The Art of Conversation (Gallery) was also inspired by Kate’s earlier text-based work titled Because, which is featured in the first edition of Hoodie Mag. Kate and Jacqui were also principally involved in devising the Episodic project, another of the group’s dialogical artworks and a precursor work to The Art of Conversation (Gallery). Even the earlier Chalk Talk and T-Shirt Projects played a role in the evolution of The Art of Conversation (Gallery). Different artists seed and lead creative practices all the time at tbC. While individual artists often initiate collaborative artworks, outcomes are transformed by a collection of artistic skills and energies and a dynamic process of entanglement, convergence and assemblage. tbC’s collaborative artworks emerge from the intersection of multiple curiosities, skills and desires. Joint authorship is vested in the relationships that tie these various curiosities, skills and desires together.[18]
Read the Hoodie Mag case study
Read the Blacksmiths Way Graffiti and Street Art case study
Read the Art of Conversation (Digital) case study
[1] Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (New York: The MacMillan Press Ltd., 1975), 1. It’s important to note that while museums exhibit artefacts, they are more known for their collection, conservation, archiving and study of objects. In contrast, galleries are more available for the exhibition of such.
[2] Hans Huth, The Art Bulletin 50, no. 3 (1968): 294, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i354251.
[3] Ibid. Often referred to as studiolo or museo.
[4] Hudson, A Social History of Museums, 4.
[5] Elizabeth Rodini, “A Brief History of the Art Museum,” Khan Academy, accessed 10th September, 2019. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/approaches-to-art-history/tools-for-understanding-museums/museums-in-history/a/a-brief-history-of-the-art-museum-edit.
[6] Hudson, A Social History of Museums, 4.
[7] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (California: The Lapis Press, 1986), 15. A comment inspired by this source.
[8] Gwen Allen, ed. The Magazine: Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), 14; Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 4 (2002): 345-367, doi:10.1353/par.2003.0006. A comment inspired by this source.
[9] O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 14.
[10] Grant Kester describes dialogical art as a discursive aesthetic based on conversation, dialogical exchange and the social and relational experiences such exchange creates. Grant H Kester, “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art,” Variant 9 (1999/2000): 3, http://www.variant.org.uk/9texts/KesterSupplement.html; Also see, Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 10; Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Kester, “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 153-165.
[11] Claus-Christian Carbon, “Art Perception in the Museum: How We Spend Time and Space in Art Exhibitions,” I-Perception, January 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669517694184; Paul Hagon, “What Museums Must do to Ensure Art is Protected,” The Conversation, September 1, 2015, 3.38pm AEST, https://theconversation.com/what-museums-must-do-to-ensure-art-is-protected-46646.
[12] Gilles Deleuze, Negotations:1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 14. A comment inspired by this source.
[13] Designed by Simon Braunstein at Catlard Studios in response to The Art of Conversation (Digital) app design brief.
[14] Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books 2008).
[15] Stephanie Springgay and Zofia Zaliwska, "Diagrams and Cuts: A Materialist Approach to Research-Creation," Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 15 (2015): 137, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708614562881.
[16] Ian Berry, ed. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. A History (New York: MIT Press, 2009), 106.
[17] Ibid. Personal comment at a survey show at the Frye Museum, 2010, noted within.
[18] Chloé Nicolet-dit-Félix and Gulru Vardar, “Interview with Raqs Media Collective on the Exhibition, Sarai Reader 09,” In On Curating 19, (2013): 39-42, http://www.on-curating.org/issue-19-reader/interview-with-raqs-media-collective-on-the-exhibition-sarai-reader-09.html#.W7sWIVJxU4o. A comment inspired by the working dynamics of the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective.