Welcome to the Show

I've had a paper accepted for a conference hosted by the University of Sussex; the conference title is 'Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy' and takes place over two days, 8th and 9th December. Details at the University website. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sccs/activities/stagingillusion

I will be giving a talk, 'Enchanted Objects', about my practice-led PhD research, at Coventry University in October 2012; details to follow.

Brian Eno and Florian Hecker.
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/620351

Atomino Festival, Germany.
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/684561

Nicholas Sinclair, Five Cities.
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/683959

Ergin Cavusoglu, Crystal & Flame
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/794772

'Affronting Images', UK Uncut Topshop protest
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/919683

Details of completed PhD research at the UCA website here:
http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/index.cfm?articleid=12356

I'm performing in 'Magic Cabaret' on Saturday 31 July:

Magic Cabaret
Saturday 31 July, 7pm, Chapter Theatre, Market Road, Cardiff (£3.50)

To accompany the exhibition 'Magic Show' at Chapter Gallery, Magic Cabaret features contributions from Sarah Rose Allen, Brian Catling, Jonathan Gilhooly, Aura Satz, Ian Saville, Clare Strand, Bedwyr Williams and William Wegman.

Tickets are available from Box Office or online at www.chapter.org

Magic Show is a Hayward Touring Exhibition from Southbank Centre, curated by artist Jonathan Allen and writer Sally O' Reilly.


http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=141789865831120&index=1

www.chapter.org/index.html

Contribution to the 3rd issue of Tik-Toc, published by the Doomsbury Set. This latest issue is devoted to Brighton Festival's Artists Open Houses event.





ART, GARDENING, AND THE OPEN HOUSE EXPERIENCE
JONATHAN GILHOOLY


Every year in the Andalusian city of Cordoba, ordinary householders open up their courtyards for visitors to stroll into, inspect, and enjoy. Held during the 2nd week of May, the Festival de los Patios is a citywide search for the best and most beautifully designed patio. The event is therefore competitive in spirit, and at the end of the festival a ‘winner’ is duly declared. In fact these ‘inner courtyards’ are a distinctive feature of the Spanish vernacular. Usually situated near the front of the house they can often be glimpsed, tantalizingly, through doors left slightly ajar: neatly swept marble floors are edged around with polished wooden furniture and copper pots that gleam in the half light; beyond, dazzlingly sunlit gardens entice and ensnare the onlooker.

Alfred Gell, in his anthropological theory of art, identifies art works as particular kinds of cognitively ‘sticky’, and (in the other sense of the word) problematic objects that entrap or enchant the viewer; at one point the author specifically compares art exhibitions to garden shows. Of course it is rather counter-intuitive to consider plants or gardens as artworks, chiefly because they grow ‘by themselves’. Considered differently however it is clear that gardens are highly technical phenomena, and the response that they elicit is comparable to that of the art exhibition. As Gell remarks: “Highly nuanced aesthetic judgements are freely voiced on the subject of roses and cauliflowers by no-nonsense matrons who would hardly care to utter any opinions at all on ‘works of art’ explicitly identified as such.”1 Art, for Gell, is a particular kind of technology, a technology of enchantment; gardening too, which may or may not be a collective enterprise, can be organized in such a way that it transcends the technical and converges towards the magical. He goes on to describe, pace Malinowski, the extraordinary attention to detail of Trobriand gardens, which are symmetrically arranged with ‘magical prisms’ at each corner. The garden will subsequently be productive only if it ‘looks right’ as well as through the incantatory effusions of the garden magician:

Just as when, confronted with some masterpiece, we are fascinated because we are essentially at a loss to explain how such an object comes to exist in the world, the litanies of the garden magician express the fascination of the Trobrianders with the efficacy of their actual technology which, converging towards the magical ideal, adumbrates this ideal in the real world. 2


Throughout the month of May the Artists Open Houses are a traditional feature of the annual Brighton Festival. The Open House is a curious hybrid entity: a generally collective enterprise, it constitutes the transformation of a domestic dwelling into a temporary exhibition space or arena for display. Ostensibly a display of artworks, it is also, for the majority of visitors, a delicious opportunity to inhabit, if only briefly, the living space of a complete stranger. That these exhibitions are tacitly competitive in nature is beyond doubt, for they vie with each other for space, both in the Festival’s publicity material and on the streets themselves, sign-posted by specially designed banners; prizes are usually awarded to the best artists or artworks.

Citywide in scope, precincts or zones emerge, often provisionally and arbitrarily designated according to pre-existing wards or ‘villages’; each year there are newcomers, interlopers and dissidents, the whole event teetering between unruly growth and clipped regulation; tribal coalitions swell and subside. For the Artists Open House pilgrim - and there are many - the negotiation of the Open House as a social space is a complex and fascinating one. First of all s/he is confronted with a domestic space (masquerading) as an art gallery, and although for the most part the domestic ambience remains highly visible there are cases where attempts have clearly been made to strip away or suppress this aspect in favour of a putative gallery ‘look’. (Ironically, this year’s event features House, a partner festival that inverts the concept by “bringing the ‘domestic’ into local small galleries and art spaces.”) In any case, in the Artists Open Houses, domestic and artistic technologies are fused productively, if awkwardly, in order to create an enchanted and enchanting social environment.

In orthodox, commercial galleries the weighting within the triangular relationship between aesthetic, commercial, and social components is tipped heavily towards the first two, with the majority of viewers endeavouring to disregard the second (if for no other reason than that it is beyond their means). The commercial element is, here, a highly specialized and almost recondite affair, a secreted and coded layer of the gallery’s personhood. By contrast, in the Open House, this commercial layer is more often of equal prestige with the aesthetic—upfront and unconcealed; the cash register, in previous years at least, has been a much commented upon visible, and audible, presence. Unlike the ‘white cube’ gallery, there is the opportunity to buy; but conversely, there may also be the need to divine the measure of expectation for trade, thus trading off against the degree of social exchange deemed proper. This social layer, a much more subdued and sublated entity in the ‘white cube’ paradigm, is the lifeblood of the Open House experience, and is evidence of Brighton’s residual and persistent townishness.

Tea is sometimes on offer and, if the sun is shining, this can occasionally be taken outside, whilst simultaneously admiring and remarking upon the flower garden.




1 GELL, A (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford
2 GELL, A (1992) The Technology of Enchantment and The Enchantment of Technology in GELL, A (ed. Hirsch) (2006) The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. Berg


http://doomsburyset.blogspot.com/

Read a review by Micheal O'Connell of this event which took place in Brighton yesterday, 2nd May: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/526741

Read a review of my exhibition "Now You Don't' at Grey Area, in Artists' Newsletter online:
http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/369895