In conversation: Megan O’Shea and Louise Ashcroft
Departure Gallery during set-up.
Megan O’Shea: As this is a retrospective catalogue one thing that I am interested in exploring through this conversation is the gap between your intentions for the exhibition and the manifestation of those intentions Rhizomatic. So a starting point might be for you to tell me a little bit about your curatorial concept for the exhibition.
Louise Ashcroft: The concept started from a number of quite different motivations. Firstly, I was motivated by the challenge of using two such enormous spaces and my feeling that we’d need to fill them with a lot of strong works if we were to take on their scale and come out with something interesting as a whole. It’s so easy for work to get lost in these spaces and I decided that the show should be treated as a conceptual piece in its own right; an extension of the encounter between the artists and the building which captures the energetic process of the artists occupying the space.
I have always felt that these warehouse projects work best when artists spend time on site making work that addresses the context, thereby incorporating the space itself into the work. You simply can’t make work on the scale of these spaces, so you have to ‘become’ an extension of them in some way.
It is this idea of ‘becoming’ that led me back to my interest in A Thousand Plateaus, in which Deleuze and Guatarri describe ‘becoming’ as a mode of spatial practice involved in the creation and occupation of rhizomatic space. The concept of rhizomatic space is something I have explored in the past in my research on alternative modes of spatiality in art. I am interested in art that incorporates different spatial dimensions, some of which remain inaccessible to the viewer and thereby create an open-ended space similar to that of a question or rumour.
MOS: The spatiality of Rhizomatic was also interesting to us as the PO Box Gallery. I suppose that we see our tiny ‘gallery’ space as a nodal point in the extensive network of the postal system. Occasionally we want to open out and make more visible our practice and these vast warehouses gave us the opportunity to do that. It was a way of really ‘exhibiting’ the tangible communications that we have been exploring.
LA: Yes, there are definitely some interesting similarities and differences between the way PO Box Gallery and Rhizomatic explore space. Network space seems to be important subject-matter for a lot of artists in London at the moment. People are interested in this kind of theme. In fact, when I came up with the concept for Rhizomatic I realised that Deleuzian concepts always go down well with artists, to the point of being a bit of an art school cliché. I wondered why there was such an appeal and wanted to use this appeal as a way of getting a lot of people interested and capturing the zeitgeist of artists’ interest in these concepts.
I came up with the idea that everyone in the show would be both an artist and a curator, and invited them to ask six more artists to join the exhibition. I am interested in curating as a mode of art practice in its own right and wanted to bring out the hidden collaborative and curatorial aspects in art making, such as the peer groups and networks we all work alongside and who inform our practice. There was also something really curious about seeing how far the concept would go and something anarchistic about questioning the power I had enjoyed as a curator and offering it up to the many. I hoped that by making the process clear in the labelling system (showing who had invited who) I could make artists accountable for the quality of the work they selected, so that they would be sure to invite good artists rather than just doing favours for friends. Indeed, there were some amazing works and I met artists I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. The whole process was designed as a diagram of the many wider art worlds and networks that Departure Gallery artists were part of.
MOS: When I first emailed you to ask if you would be interested in constructing a conversation about the exhibition I received a rather bleak out-of-office reply. It occurred to me that I might have to play both parts in an invented dialogue and led me to think about the concept of the ‘death’ of the curator. Thankfully you returned from holiday before I had time to write an abstract interview with an absent curator but I suppose that my thinking then shaped the initial question I actually asked about your inspirations.
LA: The death of the curator is an interesting idea (it did nearly kill me!). I have always found it strange the amount of power and hype around curating, which is really quite a new phenomenon in contemporary art. Rhizomatic was a chance, paradoxically, to both overthrow and fetishise the role of the curator by offering it up to the crowd. Crowd forms were a definite inspiration (especially the ideas in the book Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti). There is something joyous and excessive about saying ‘invite whoever you want’ the more the merrier! It’s a nice counterbalance to dense philosophical theory! This energy and openness was also a good contrast to the usual feeling that the art world is like a secret society, where networking and favours sometimes come before quality, and which is inaccessible to outsiders. Like the concept of ‘six degrees of separation’, Rhizomatic has the potential to take on every artist in the world. It will always be an unfinished snapshot of a process, which I hope to extend in the near future. It’s important for me that Rhizomatic is not understood as a tree-like web, but as an unfixed, mobile, hyperspatial system, which will never be complete and which will never be located.
Reflecting on the show, the sense of energy, excess and difference came across well and I think that the building where PO Box was, was definitely retained the essence of open possibility that is characteristic of rhizomatic form. It always intrigues me that artists who make durational, process-based or contextual work much prefer damp, dirty spaces. For me this was the most interesting building and it represented the point at which the very finished objects of the other, cleaner space were involved in a process which was already becoming something else; dematerialising into other forms such as actions, sounds and dialogues.
In an extraordinary instance of pathetic fallacy the building itself seemed to be almost dematerialising due to flooding and indoor waterfalls the week before the show and it is exactly this feeling of fluidity and dematerialisation that will be important to the continuation of the Rhizomatic project after the Southall show is deinstalled. By writing about the project collaboratively as we are doing now (for the PO Box Gallery catalogue), we extend Rhizomatic momentarily into a conversational space which represents the new stage of a project which I hope will continue to pop up and transform in the next few years and beyond.
MOS: If I can wrangle a bit more conversational space in the catalogue then I would like to ask you to expand a bit on the idea of the ‘crowd’. I am interested in whether this crowd includes the viewer or whether the viewer remains separate from the rhizomatic of the exhibition. Perhaps you could let me know whether the artists/curators also occupied the role of viewer or whether you hoped for (and indeed received) a larger audience for the exhibition. Do you know how many people who were not included in the exhibition viewed the show?
LA: Over 600 people came to see the show on the private view night and some afterwards by appointment, so there were over 400 viewers who were not exhibiting. I hadn’t considered it before, but I think it’s really interesting that you ask about whether the artists are the viewers, or perhaps the viewers are all part of the work sculpturally. I think the massive crowd on the private view night was what set off all the works and kept it from being a documentation of a rhizomatic process frozen in time (which would have been the antithesis of a rhizome). What was interesting about the show was the energy of the crowd and it’s feeling of impending exponential growth. I think that this feeling of a creative uprising is the essence of the project; the unpredictable energy of rioting masses who have disbanded after the crowd spectacle, but go home and multiply ready for the next group action, which threatens to reemerge spontaneously at any point in rhizomatic time-space.
Megan O’Shea is a member of PO Box Gallery.
Louise Ashcroft curated Rhizomatic at Departure Gallery.