Only Connect

My work Only Connect (2013), created for Artereal Gallery, comprised a series of sculptures based on the tenets of early childhood learning. The small gallery space became an installation of three interrelated objects.

The first, Thread, was a large 2.5 metre freestanding board of architectural plywood, its smooth surface peppered with holes of varying sizes. Lying on the floor and attached to the board were two thick ropes coloured red and yellow.

Beside this sat Slide, a concrete base with ten twisted aluminum poles protruding from it. Wooden beads were threaded along the poles, and parts of the metal were bound in red twine, allowing only partial movement of the beads.

Finally, Stack consisted of five copper cuboids, in varying sizes, resting on the gallery reception counter, a nod to Robert Morris’s minimalist cubes but also another easily-manipulated child’s toy.

The proposition set up within the gallery space created the possibility for activity on the part of the audience: how should they regard this artwork? How should they deal with these objects that almost call ‘play with me’. This conundrum raised an issue noted by Matt Glenn from Serpentine Gallery, London, consultant curator at Artereal, in his essay on the work:

The illusion to functional capacity propels the questions involved in encountering a sculpture that has been grafted with a certain welcoming to engage physically. This brings into consideration the formal decisions made by the artist, decisions not only of aesthetics, but also of practicalities—solutions and sequences, both investigated and manipulated. ^[1]

Only Connect required the audience to query their own assumptions, acknowledge their own role and overcome the hurdle of how to interact with the pieces. The path forward was not a predetermined one; the choice to physically manipulate the objects, to change their form and shape, to explore, to play like a child or indeed to just mentally manipulate the objects or watch others do so, was left open. Although the frame of the space, gallery and context all assert their bias, the in-between zone in which the audience finds itself becomes freeing. During the opening night of the exhibition all options played out. As Glenn notes,

The grey areas surrounding Williams’ sculptures challenge a position of absolutes. It dismantles the scaffolding of classical approaches, allowing for the function of the artwork to shift. ^[2]

The model of collaborative practice implicit in this work is explored by Kester when he describes the two divergent paths relational practice has taken. The first, as championed by critics such a Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop, requires that the artist retain complete control over the form and structure of the work. In the second, a collaborative model more in keeping with Milliss’s and my own, the audience is a trusted partner and becomes an equal party in the creation and construction of meaning in the work. It is because this latter model requires the artist to surrender control and autonomy that both Bourriaud and Bishop find it problematic. For Bishop, the artist’s quasi- detached perspective is essential.

Without the detachment and autonomy of conventional art to insulate them, they are doomed to “represent”, in the most naïve and facile manner possible, a given political issue or constituency.^[3]

The position of Bourriaud and Bishop can be traced to the Greenburgian modernist philosophy that sees the specificity and autonomy of art as vital to its success. Art must retain a distance from life and remain true to its particular form; thus painting must remain true to its two-dimensionality and not drift into representations of other forms such as sculpture (perspective) or theatre (narrative). In a similar fashion, Bishop and Bourriaud assert that when art moves directly into the political or social sphere the artist loses their autonomy and thus the artwork is contaminated. Bishop and Bourriaud’s approach sets the artist up as detached, privileged and uniquely capable of explaining the contingency of meaning to an audience that would otherwise be swept up in its experience of a work.

This belief betrays a mistrust of the audience and also seems to confuse the notion of autonomy with objectivity. The first position in no way guarantees the second. And when it comes to socially-engaged practice, objectivity is a matter of responsibility, not distancing.