Artangel present Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario

Artangel present Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario

24 August, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is disappointed by Artangel's latest commission: Ryan Gander's non-exhibition exhibition.

This month sees the opening of Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario – the latest and much anticipated project from celebrated arts commissioning organisation, Artangel. Artangel are probably best known  for commissioning 'Seizure', Roger Hiorns' copper-sulphate-filled flat in Elephant and Castle, and 'Surround Me' – Susan Philipsz' sound installation across the City of London, and in some ways there's something similar about Gander's new work – which opens to the public on 30th August.

All three projects seek to drag art off its pedestal, out of the white cube gallery space, and, kicking  and screaming, into the outside world. In doing so there's a concerted attempt to rupture our traditional modes of differentiation between fact and fiction, art and non-art. As Gander himself told the Evening Standard last week: “There is no difference between the fictions I am creating in here and outside and what is happening in everyday life."

So what is Locked Room Scenario all about? Well, the concept is that you've booked an appointment to look round an art exhibition, entitled 'Field of Meaning', but the exhibition is closed, so instead you have to wonder round the building, peering through doors and windows in order to get a glimpse of the work on show. The doors you would normally enter are locked, and so it's the back-doors, service staircases and unlit corridors that one must explore instead.

Gander has imagined whole back-stories for the fictional artists involved in the show, and one of them – Spencer Anthony – even texts me to suggest meeting in the Wenlock Arms. Unfortunately it's shut and the (real) landlady seems a little irritated at turning away yet another baffled art critic.

Inside the building there's a host of details that catch the eye: including a pile of post addressed to this Spencer Anthony character, a timeline of conceptual art featuring the fictional artists, an office containing, amongst other things, a visitor's book you can't reach, various empty cups of coffee and the Collected Writings of Irwin Green. Elsewhere I spy briefly on a man rolling cigarettes in a side room, and have my path blocked on the stairs by, from one direction, a chap carrying a chair, and the other, by a pair of canoodling hipsters. Upon leaving, I'm followed down the street and given a page torn from a novel, with the words 'blue monster' circled in biro.

There's something interesting going on here in terms of a comment on how one is shepherded round galleries, and particularly public museums, and there's also an interesting exploration of the actual act of viewing art, and its relationship to the outside 'real' world. It's fun to have to guess where you're meant to go next, and strange to have to peer through little gaps in order to see anything (although it must be said that this aspect isn't entirely new – I've seen similar things done at Schwartz Gallery for their Unobtrusive Measures show back in February, and way back in 2008, Paul Eachus' contributions to Working Space at the Arts Gallery.)  

There's several problems though with Locked Room Scenario: the first is that these kinds of fully immersive pieces, which seem all the rage in contemporary art right now, generally leave me cold. Yes, it's fun to go round, and there's a certain little frisson of adventure, but rather like Mike Nelson's over-hyped work for the British Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, it doesn't do much. Locked Room Scenario is more complex and involving than Nelson's facile work, but still it doesn't really provoke or challenge or linger. It's fun, but that's really as far as it goes.

The other problem is that, to some extent at least, the dramatic tension lies in the tantalising inability to see the exhibition within. The trouble is that, from what I can see, all the works look terrible, and I'm frankly not that fussed about seeing them in their entirety.

With one notable exception. Through a pain of reinforced glass I catch a glimpse of movement –  a graceful blur of dance. She's only a foot from me, but the glass creates distance and anonymity. Sometimes I can barely see her at all, then her hazy form sinuously returns. It's a beautiful moment, lastingly memorable. It's just a shame it's the only such experience I'll be taking from Locked Room Scenario.

Ryan Gander - Locked Room Scenario is at Londonnewcastle Depot from 30th August to 22nd October 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys