My friend Richard recently reminded me of a famous quote of Donald Rumsfeld. The infamous passage formed part of a Press conference at the NATO headquarters in Belgium in the summer of 2002. You might recognise it.
“The message is that there are no “knowns.” There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.”
This passage I have taken out of its context yet I think it’s really interesting spiel in relation to ideas of evidence and how people ‘know’ or experience situations they find themselves in.
During the final weekend of the Deptford X festival this year I went on a walking tour hosted by Q-Art and many of the festival’s organizers. We came to the ‘Information Centre’ - a room at the centre of a number of studio spaces open during the festival. On the walls of this centre there were racks full up with leaflets. These leaflets, which contained information about holidays, pet insurance, maps of cities around the world, theatre events from 2006 were organised according to colour, the welcoming and ever courteous assistants invited visitors to look at the blue leaflets, the yellow leaflets, the red leaflets or maybe even the green leaflets.
Nevertheless these assistants tirelessly professed no knowledge of the Deptford X festival or the venue’s involvement in the art festival. There was also not a scrap of information about this in the racks - the ‘proper’ information point being located in the cafe downstairs. This ‘Information Centre’ which formed Hatch Space’s contribution to the festival was an installation dealing with the bombardment of disparate information we are subject to daily. It was an interesting piece because of the contrast and pull between the semblance of helpfulness and the poor usability created by an overwealming volume of material.
But what about the audience? The person talking to us about the piece during the tour described some different reactions - some became frustrated with the assistant’s willful ‘unknowing’ of any aspects of the festival, others were more aware they were part of a staged encounter whilst some were just a bit bemused.
Bob and Roberta Smith put together a good book to coincide with the Deptford X festival entitled: ‘Hijack Reality: Deptford X, a how to guide to organize a really top notch art festival’. It is an apt title for a guide to a festival that saw such things as the Information Centre, it also brings to mind other works which (being very different pieces in themselves) place the audience at the centre of an experience, for which authenticity is questioned and reality essentially ‘hijacked’. experiences otherwise encountered in a ‘real’ context are reformed and projected as staged encounters back at an audience.
Who, if anyone used the attic living space during Hauser & Wirth’s recent transformation into an operational community centre?
Did the American Football players go on to win the last quarter and clinch the match after your rousing pep talk on the You Me Bum Bum Train ride?
Are you completely lost or did you already walk through that garage office? Am I going round in circles through Mike Nelson’s construction or is there an exit coming up soon?
Ryan Gander’s ‘Locked Room Scenario’ again recalled Rumsfeld’s much maligned spiel about the the nature of foreign intelligence gathering. I went with good friends and we spent a long time navigating the corridors and hidden spaces of the gallery complex, soon I met another another person on the stairs to the first floor, he asked me “is this the way to the exhibition?” I fumbled my words but eventually got out a vague “yes”, since - in effect - it was. I passed the man a second time, flying round a corner of the lower space. The last I saw of him was about 30 seconds later steaming away from the building (whilst diligently following the yellow walkway), taking the corner and out of sight. I never saw him again. I hope he is OK.
There are many different possibilities. I assumed that the man had spent so little time exploring the work because (I remember he looked completely lost when I encountered him on the stairs) he became frustrated and impatient in his search for the ‘art work’ and so left. But what if he’d understood what was going on and thought
‘this is brilliant, my mind has been completely blown to bits and now I’m off’
or ‘this is the totally *ullshit, I’m off’
or ‘I’ve got to collect my daughters from school, I’ve got to go right now’
or ‘I left the front door to my house wide open, my West Wing DVD boxset will be stolen’.
Any or all of the above.
Harold jokingly berated me for not giving the man a clearer explanation of the work, but at the time I didn’t want to say something like “hey there, you obviously look like you’re not ‘getting this’ - I’ll explain it to you in clear terms - this is an elaborate construction by the artist Ryan Gander made to resemble the after-image of an art show which includes several made-up contemporary artists. Any gallery staff you encounter are actors, the sound of the two people you can hear bitching about one of the made-up artists through the toilet door is a sound recording and the newspaper clipping showing an obituary of one of the made-up artists is also a fabrication.”
Pardon me - everything in the world is fabricated.
My reading of ‘Locked Room Scenario’ depends on many different factors, some of which are linked to my experience of the contemporary art and performance world. Nevertheless, someone who engages with a different discipline would no doubt have an equally rich experience of the piece.
This brings me back to Rumsfeld’s speculation about the danger posed by nations ‘hostile’ to the US, and a really cool TED talk by Kathryn Schulz about being wrong. Towards the end of the lecture she talks about expectations not meeting reality
“We think this one thing is going to happen, then this other think happens instead. George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a whole bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the middle east. And something else happened instead. And Hosni Mubarak thought he was gong to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. And something else happened instead. And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high-school sweetheart and move back to you home town and raise a bunch of kids together. And something else happened instead.”
Kathryn Schulz eloquently describes the feeling you get when you realise you are wrong - embarrased, yucky, annoyed etc. analogising this with Wiley Coyote who, having chased Roadrunner off a cliff only falls once he is aware he’s in mid-air. In some ways these emotions might have come into play with art pieces like ‘Locked Room Scenario’ or the ‘Information Point’. The feeling that your certainty about a particular situation or mode of responding is no longer ‘right’ (to use a dismal term) and that the rules have somehow (however subtly) been changed.
This is not concluded, and I don’t think it ever shall be be. There will, no doubt be more on the area in future blog posts.
