RETURN TO DOLLERSHIEM EXHIBITION
Our first professional Exhibition at Sylvestor Space, Sheffield. APRIL 2008 Read our speech for the public symposium for more information about the exhibition at the bottom of this page.to put it simply, this exhibition is a reapropriation of a deception of a deception.
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This is the speech we did to "reveal" our
exhibition at a public symposium in the End Gallery, Sheffield uk in May. ( A
collaborative exhibition + speech)
POST REVEAL:
Until now, we have deliberately remained silent about our project. In the
module seminars we avoided all questions, creating a frustrating mystique
around our group. We deflected any encouragement to share ideas by letting slip
certain ambiguous details to the rest of the class, such as, 'it's about
blimps,' 'Gene Kelly' or 'architectural deception.' These details were not
irrelevant yet they made it difficult for anyone to pin down a solid relation
or meaning to we what we were doing. Each week our group would sit and discuss
our ideas and would bring a new title which summed up our thoughts or
direction. In the final exhibition these titles, eighteen in total, were
documented as A4 posters along the right hand side wall. In the exhibition we
again had to remain quiet, politely refraining to answer any questions raised
(albeit with great difficulty!). Our campaign of wilful silence and deliberate
obfuscation has become a performance. However, this performance will now
conclude as we reveal all.
First I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time,
five fearless fine art students set out to make something miraculous, something
that would make people gaze in disbelief. On the 28th of March, 2008 these
brave young adults travelled to a remote location in the Peak District, called
Offerton Moor. As the sun set around six o' clock they toiled quickly and
stealthily to erect a solid pine structure measuring 7 ft by 14ft by 7ft. Upon
this structure they hung 14 halogen lights bearing the strength of 60-120
watts, powered by a generator. At approximately19:00hrs, as dusk descended
rapidly, they turned on the lights, generating a bright bold light that sliced
through the wild darkness.
In the valley beneath, familiar eyes were stunned to
see the lights of anew village twinkling, where before there was only the wild
rolling moor. More onlookers gathered, scratching their heads in bewilderment, all
of them too afraid to approach the spectral lights. At 23.00hrs the lights
disappeared once more into the darkness, never to be seen again.
On the 1st of April, April Fools Day, we opened an
exhibition at Sylvester Space at 6.30pm. In this space we documented our
research and the event which this led to in the space. The documentation of the
research came in various forms including sound and video work, large A0 and
smallerA4 posters, an enlarged A0 photograph of the lights on the moor, a table
covered with our working drawings and diagrams, reading material, photographs
and finally the wooden structure itself, which was situated by the door as you
first enter the space. We also printed one hundred catalogues on tracing paper
which we displayed in the space, each at the price of £1.00. The exhibition was
open from Tuesday the 1st until the 7th of April.
The content of the exhibition plays the role of the
unseen, and the informant, following this appearing on the table is an archive.
One that acts as an open vault plays upon and within the role of information. A
viable discourse, a tool for formation and formatting, a currency, the
execution of information, this is a viable, the idea of communication,
representation, divulging, involving, disordering, reordering, instruction,
meaning, knowledge. And ultimately the gift of information.
The use of information is then to divulge willingly
or unwillingly. The exhibition acts to inform but not to disclose, not to
deliver, a constraint. An enigma. This is also the role of the few involved the
few with information, with power. What is said explains nothing, a non, the
work held before within the exhibition fails to inform, the information is
sparse, the information concerns everything apart from the pinning down, an
expiation which is never finished. A deliberated efensive tactic for betrayal.
This said, the information presented is still information, information can be
little, sparse, a flash light, an observation, reading or measurement.
Information can be as little as the dust left on the mantle piece. The light on
top of the moor.
It is to the viewer to interpret the information, the
material is a play on clarity, the man from behind the curtain. Take of this
information what you will. What is not said creates suggestion, everything
suggests, a glance at the truth, a barrier to what is entangled, what is then
the other wants to discuss. The exhibition falls then to theshrouded. The
everything which is present. What is derived at, or what the viewer does not
derive at, all creates intrigue, the veil is always present to be look behind,
to look beyond.
Consider the play of information throughout and
within political concern, termed limitedhang out. By withholding the key facts
a deeper crime is then played out within the decoy object, a façade within the
information.
Just like the anglerfish toying with it's prey, just
like the wreckers and smugglers luring unwitting ships towards the impending
doom, the trap was baited with the unknown and the promise of clarity.
The clues were all there; nothing was hidden from the
viewer, only the answers they desired. We were asked for these answers but we
had none, or at best inconsistent ones. After all how does one give the desired
answers without revealing too much, without dispelling the allusion? Had we
left Brigadoon it would simply have ceased to exist. In the same way had we
been forced to remove ourselves from our own deception there was always the
chance that our work, along with us, would have disappeared back into the mist.
Though some may only have possessed a void where they
desired answers, this cannot be said for all. A deception does not work simply
through a complete lack of communication; it is densely layered with
misinformation and misdirection. While one viewer may admit to knowing entirely
nothing, another may believe that they have discovered the truth or perhaps
that they already possessed it. In reality all they have is a snippet of
misinformation, a misdirection to content their gaze.
Somewhere in this torrent of information there is of
course the element of truth, after all no deception can work without the
possibility of plausibility. Though what happens when all the required
plausible elements are laid out in front of the viewer? When everything seems
to be there, the light of salvation emanating from the shoreline, do we head
towards it? Perhaps instead we step back, examining for a moment all that we
see. We must remind ourselves that seeing should not always be the only factor
in believing, especially when deception has been paramount from the outset.
Then we see that, of course, no hills were climbed
and no lights were ever shone. The structure merely served its purpose, as it
had always been intended, solely in the gallery space and not on some peak
overlooking Offerton Moore.
We are, both as artists and audience, simultaneously
the deceived and the deceiving. You are witnessing not only just an attempt of
deception butare a part of the recreation of a re-enactment of real, truthful
events.
It seemed to us that the logical conclusion of our
original idea was that the proposed deception should be extended, thatthe
depiction of deception should be a deception itself.
Importantly, the only dishonesty that we allowed in
the exhibition was the poster of an event that stated a structure that had
lights on was put up on a Friday in March, but even then we are still reluctant
to say that it was we, as a collective group, that did this. Lights on the moor
have happened many times before. Most famously as a decoy for Sheffield inthe
war to stop the steelworks and residents from being bombed. These decoys where
called Starfish Sites that would consist of structures with lights and candles
on to look like glowing steel works.
Interested in the idea of how architecture can have
uncanny countenances and stand for symbolic gestures that dominate and help
form facades of our own reality; we played with the contexts of this ideology
starting with the fake Sheffield as our opening platform.
Exploring an area that at first seems to be familiar
we reveal lots of things. We can think of Brigadoon and can look to other
material such as smugglers and the hexagons of text which contained extracts
from Ron Rosenbaum's(Rosen Bowm)“Explaining Hitler” addressing Dollersheim
(Dollers Highm),Hitler's birthplace which was erased from maps of Austria under
Nazirule; another disappearing village, but in very different circumstances.
All the work within our exhibition continued this
notion of projection, deception and most importantly suggestion just as our
society does. Each of us individually provides the market and demand for
illusions that fool our experiences and existence. We want and believe these
experiences. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. Modern life is
that we have lost our own refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once
did. With this, there is a complexity that comes from taking on an otherwise
completely normal conventional situation and redefining it, translating it into
an experience.
We have created a cloud of information, a mist, a
blizzard that obscured the work, but is symbolic just like every piece within
the exhibition.
It comes together to create a constructed dialogue of unarticulated
perspectives and voices in order to construct a picture of architecture and
landscapes as indeterminate and contested. Proving only further that we are all
at once deceiving but also being deceived, all the more.
We didn't set up our deceiving structure. The work
necessitated this deception, an extension of the structure itself; the
deception is not only demonstrated to a viewer but enacted upon them as well.
However, the purpose of this deception is not to deceive, at least not
entirely, at least not authentically. Rather, deception, suggestion, revelation
and obfuscation are tools of a larger purpose.
The eye imposes logic, a desire to see. A town appears because the viewer wants
to see it; it becomes a question of projection rather than any innate content.
When presented with such loci, such points of information, a viewer connects
them and creates a narrative; he can institute buildings, lampposts, a
homestead, an activity behind what he sees, an active mind. The same is true of
a work of art, which is a channel for interpretation and a screen for
projection.
For our part, we are exploitative. We attempt to make use of this, to create an
a cloud of confusion, to refract the light, the beams of interrogation, to
leave it unclear. We hope to make the ground under the viewers feet uncertain.
The work lies in the proliferation of objects, information, resources; a
network of references that elucidate and betray their subject, that support and
skirt around it. The exhibition acts as an immersion in this atmosphere, one
which explains our intentions but offers no clues as to how this explanation
should be deciphered.
We were presented with many responses by those who saw the work; some accepted
our proposition, some doubted it, some told us they had us figured out and
sited imagined or inaccurate evidence to support their claims.
Though a lie, a fairly solid deception, is the seed of this exhibition, whether
it is successful or not is circumstantial. It is a component of a greater
scheme of misdirection, an attempt to provoke the interpretive faculties used
in the viewing of a work of art and reveal something of their nature. We offer
no answers; they can only come from the viewer, and as such do not exist.
However, now we contradict ourselves, as all deceivers eventually do, (and perhaps
our concept even obliges it). We offer this presentation as a moment of
clarity, a time when the fog clears, when all questions will be answered to the
best of our ability. Whether any of you take this opportunity is up to you, but
the floor is now open to the potential of transparency.