The first stop on my MIF tour is the Do It exhibition at the
Manchester Art Gallery. It’s on approaching the gallery that I hear a familiar
voice hanging in the hot air, it’s the voice of 6 Music DJ Mark Radcliffe. He is
enthusiastically announcing ‘A time sale! A time sale!’ whether it’s the jolly tone of
voice or the familiarity of its putting me in a buoyant mood.
I work through the gallery my clomply footsteps echoing off
the other visitor’s quiet contemplation of art. Noticing that across the floor
there as numbers of small brightly coloured rectangles suspecting that they
might be connected to the exhibition I scoop one up and discover I was right. It’s
an element of Suzannes Lacy’s contribution to Do It.
To see its completion I head towards the main space and I’m
faced by the memorial wall of artists names or should that be rota of artists
who stepped forward to undertake prewritten instructions of other artists. Getting
in the exhibition space proper I am confronted by a number of objects, a vending
machines, upturned fridge-freezer, walls made from doors and volunteers. It’s
busy.
Wondering whether to approach it methodically trying and
pondering each one or just wander to whatever one takes my fancy. I fall in-between
and methodically wander around. One of the first pieces I decide to interact
with is Andreas Slaninski bike seat lemon squeezer. The instruction is tip a
bike seat so it can squeeze lemons, and with a half a lemon in hand I set out
to make lemonade. Something happens I attempt to move the seat thinking that it
has been configured to squeeze the lemon in a new exciting way.
Only it hasn’t it is a literary undertaking of the instruction.
This feels like a problem one that runs throughout the exhibition that most of
the instructions are done in quite a straightforward manner. I keep mentally referring
to La Monte Young’s Composition1960 the Fluxus and Conceptual movements. Which have
seen the production of similar ‘instruction pieces’ in part to challenge and
reconfigure the conventional artist/viewer modes but ultimate to allow the
viewer the preceptor to complete the work.
To stimulate something unique within the viewer to allow
them to become part of the work. As I carry on looking around the exhibition I feel
a sense of distance, of eavesdropping into other peoples conversations. For
this viewer the concept that underlines the exhibition has thrown up a barrier
of sorts that I’m not involved in the work somehow. Even if I climb the ladder,
move the clothes, squeeze the lemons I’m not involved in the completion of the
work. I am adding to a system which has already decided the outcome.
From feeling buoyant I move to feeling less buoyant? It seems
to be a contradiction it is a good exhibition and there are interesting pieces
including having to hum to an uncaring security guard. Ultimately I felt there
was something missing somehow perhaps a return visit might fill that gap.
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