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Art Spaces

In White Boxes

What's art, what's boxes? You'll find out!

As the year closes, we're given the new Saatchi as a platform to showcase exciting talents readying us for the 2010's. The safe white spaces leave some feeling a bit empty and rather short-changed. Is the minimalistic approach the answer to what's leading us into the future? SUPERSWEET's Daniel Rourke discovers.

The New Saatchi

For every single artwork there are a million kinds of exhibition space. Public and private spaces, open and hidden spaces. Spaces that speak of character and spaces that speak of form. It appears that ‘space’, as Captain Kirk was fond of exclaiming, is still the final frontier for some art galleries.

But what if the spaces art is entered into becomes more important than the art itself?

The new Saatchi gallery, located just off the sparkling streets of Chelsea, is a perfect example of how presentation can overwhelm content. The exhibition currently on show - an expression of ‘Revolution’ compiled from the work of over twenty Chinese artists - plays host to a gallery space that has yet to establish itself. Although it successfully fills Saatchi’s thirteen identical exhibition halls, the work ultimately fails to prevent the all-prevailing sense of repetition.

Whilst contemplating a sculpted turd the size of a motorbike or a mechanical donkey astride a lurching skyscraper, one is left feeling empty. Saatchi’s choice of opening exhibition material is interesting and unique enough to offer the public a sense of ‘the new’, but at no point does the identity of the art surpass that of its exclusive surroundings; the gallery as a brand has become more important than the artwork that maket it.

Wandering further into the depths of London’s art-scene, it doesn’t take long to find galleries where art and space live in more balanced harmony. Since its inception in May 2000, the Tate Modern has become an icon of British expression. Taking the crumbling carcass of Bankside Power Station and turning it into one of the world’s most unique art spaces was visionary in allowing the hall’s internal structure to speak for itself.

Doris Salcedo's 'Shibboleth', 2008

Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's work Shibboleth, a giant crack which crept along the floor of the Turbine Hall during the first half of 2008, was not so much an addition to as a subtraction from the hall’s space. It asked us to contemplate the limits of the traditional art-space, a subtle notion that appears to have been lost on the hall’s newest artist…

TH.2058 is a series of tessellating bunk-beds littered with dystopian fiction. The beds long to be touched, sat upon giving the space a quality of home far removed from the bleak vision the artwork appears to convey. But being overshadowed by a giant plastic replica of Louise Bourgeois’ motherly spider, Maman, denies the bunk-beds a meaningful conversation with their environment. 

The grand mistake of TH.2058 is an exact opposite of that made by Saatchi, but no less disheartening. The Saatchi gallery cancels out the value of its art by branding itself as a spatial commodity. In TH.2058 the power of space is underestimated by a desire to squeeze out every drop of value it contains.

Throughout 2009, another London art experiment is set to remodel the relationship between art, space and public – this time from outside the gallery.

Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth has become one of London’s most talked about art locales, spreading the domain of the gallery out into the public arena. Anything that sits on The Fourth Plinth must, by definition, take account of the history it echoes over (like 2005’s infamous sculptural inhabitant, the pregnant and disabled Alison Lapper).

2009 will play host to Anthony Gormley’s One and Other and Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. Both works play with the very notion of Trafalgar Square, Shonibare’s recapturing the spirit of Nelson in a modern, self-contained space, squeezing an icon into a giant bottle and sealing it up tight. Gormley’s interactive work blurs the boundaries between viewer and participant, asking members of the public to display themselves atop of the famous platform. Both works shatter ‘the white cube’ ideal of the gallery, reminding us that ‘space’ and ‘modern art’ are one and the same.

Words: Daniel Rourke
Illustration: Steven Schweickart
Photography: Courtesy of Tate and Saatchi Gallery