Goett & Hoad: 300 Spectators

2010/11

Fabric & wallpaper

 

200cm x 230cm x 8cm

 

“Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial – the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics,” Brian O’Doherty wrote in his famous 1976 essay on the modern white cube gallery; among “ungrubby surfaces […] untouched by time and its vicissitudes,” the visitor is expected to be no more than a spectator: “while eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not.”

 

Unlike the old Towner Gallery with its creaking floorboards, lived-in past and crumbling surfaces so visibly touched by the vicissitudes of time, the new Towner has been built in the tradition of the modernist temples of art, dedicated to safeguarding the artwork and keeping visitors in awe and at bay.

 

300 Spectators pays homage to the gallery visitors’ undesired and absent bodies, creating a small space for their comfort. Making visual reference to the rows of seats found in the Congress Theatre next door with whom the gallery shares a wall and a cultural space, the piece plays with affinities of audiences on both sides of the wall.

 

The 300 miniature, minimalist armchairs, measuring 8cm x 8cm x 8cm each, arranged in neat rows, from a distance look like a colourful patchwork. Made from fabrics and wallpaper, they bring a touch of private home comforts into the public gallery space. Some seem similarly ‘dressed’ at first glance, yet at closer inspection each of the seats, like the visitors they are dedicated to, is different.

 

Who is looking at what? Is 300 Spectators to be interpreted as a critique of the gallery, a comment on visuality, or a cultural ‘borrowers’ auditorium? Whatever else it might be, first and foremost it was made for the delight and enjoyment of the visitors, to entice their own imaginations irrespective of the makers’ intentions and thoughts.

 

East Sussex Open

Towner Gallery Eastbourne April/May 2011