Breaking through walls

By Mark Amery

The expression to “kick against the pricks”, originates in the bible and can be defined to mean to fight against authority. That’s quite a natural activity of artists, looking to engender debate and breath new air into things. Yet there’s also every sign at present that art institutions - often those kicked against - also want in on exploring what that kicking right now might mean.

With The Future is Unwritten at Adam Art Gallery curator Laura Preston asked artists to “embrace this time of uncertainty, where structures and systems that we have come to know are being brought into focus and re-defined”; to explore how they can engage with “the political realities of this moment.”

It leads not so much to kicking against the gallery’s walls, as gaining permission to break through them. But also to some fruitful exploration of how a public gallery might be employed meaningfully by artists interested in testing out new spaces, rather than showing off pictures. If artists used to be more focused on restacking the past, this exhibition suggests artists are now getting comfortable with rearranging the furniture of the present.

Those hoping the exhibition might see politically engaged artists providing visions for the future might be disappointed. In a time of flux these artists take an earlier, initial step of opening doors to let some air in. While on visiting you might at first be unsettled by the Adam’s relative emptiness, these artists provide space for visitors to feel more not less in control; to suggest that anything might be possible.

Martin Reynolds’ most visible work is simply to open a usually closed door. A small thing, but for a regular visitor like myself suddenly the space is full of the chatter of students outside talking philosophy and other course work – a future of possibilities. It provides a new passage through the gallery, across an enormous patch of red carpet installed by Kate Newby that suggests you as visitor are being treated royally. It’s a slight gesture more likely to bemuse than encourage a change in behaviour.

Martin Reynolds’ other projects meanwhile are so light as to be too invisible to have real effect. Actors were asked to do some postures in their home suburb, before visiting the gallery and doing them again, recorded as living sculptures relating to the space. It’s a project that surely would have had far more effect directly involving visitors to the gallery. Another of Reynolds’ projects avoids the public altogether – works are hidden behind the walls of the gallery, beyond anyone but the staff’s sight.

For all its architectural brilliance the Adam Art Gallery’s deep vertical space can sometimes make you feel like you’ve being deposited in the bottom of a letterbox; an enclosed dark repository away from the city. Kate Newby’s other more effective way of opening up the space is to create a new tiny gallery space, up some scaffolding stairs that provides a view out over the city, a deck out on a roof (with some of her ceramics providing an unsuccessfully obscure personal touch) and a piece of fabric with a clouds and blue sky pattern for dreaming.

Most useful of all are Fiona Connor’s projects. After reasserting Reynold’s action with the open door to the university by stencil burning the exhibition title through copies of the university’s fat student prospectus, she has got the entire gallery staff to move their offices into the gallery for the duration of the show. Rather than becoming living exhibits, this sees staff engaging with visitors more, and visitors with them. Both parties are changed and charged by the experience, re-evaluating how they inhabit their shared resource space. For the visitor the mechanics of the gallery machine are uncovered and revealed to actually be quite familiar.

Office clutter below in the gallery contrasts with the visceral minimalist power of William Hsu’s installation above. Through a combination of a few beautifully placed visual aids, including a muscular video topographical simulation, Hsu makes you acutely physically aware of your precarious position on a steep site close to fault lines, and the university environment itself as a place always on the edge of things. 

Other works don’t gel for me as strongly within the exhibition concept. Yes I love Peter Trevelyan’s sculptural work with pencil leads - in particular its use of the resonances of the building and its air ducts, making a 3D geometric drawing breathe and unfold with possibilities - yet it activates the building rather than the viewer. Daniel Malone’s throwing of a brick through the gallery’s front windows and accompanying material feels like interesting work that happened elsewhere and at another time (arguably a few years ago when his request to throw the brick was refused).

Meanwhile I found the exhibition’s online projects dull, undeveloped and too disconnected from the exhibition in situ. They inadvertedly emphasise the strength of the art gallery as a physical space for interaction and exploration.

With this show curator Laura Preston bravely stakes out the present as a place of openness for discussion, but still one full of indecision and introversion. She proposes this as a starting point. An emptying out and reshuffling that needs to happen before political proposals for the future can start to be written. 

The Future is Unwritten, Adam Art Gallery, until 30 August