Social Sculpture

Overview

This is a worrying show if art galleries and/or rule-breaking makes you nervous, and probably not a fun one if you hate reading catalogue essays. The view above is what confronts you on entering the gallery space, and sure enough a yellow line demarcates the entire exhibition space as off limits and you have to disobey it to get to see the other works. This piece is an experiment with the viewer: does he or she see a sign or an artwork? And will they go against an instruction that's so close to the gallery golden rule of "Do not touch the art"? The viewer is thus made into an element of the artwork, and is in fact part of the exhibition for the time they spend looking at it.

Involvement is key to the other works in the show, too, with the viewer needing to invest time and thought into the nature and meaning of each piece in terms of the concept and process of its making, and how it 'works' in relation to the other pieces in the show and the space itself. The show, which might look like a jumble of videos and of stuff, rather than some more coherent exhibition, comes together as something meaningful and involving with the application of a little time and, to be honest, a little theory.  Just a little, though, and the title gives you a fairly heavy hint in that 'social sculpture' is what Joseph Beuys called his work.