On the sidewalk in the clamour of Wellington, New Zealand's Cuba Street, a small sandwich-board sign marks the location. Enjoy Gallery. Through a narrow door, up uneven stairs. There is a visitors' book outside.
Step through the threshold and you are participating in a work of art.
Enjoy Gallery is an example of a small public exhibition space that may play a vital role in the health of contemporary art. One-room spaces are the right fit for some types of creative work. In addition, they intensify the dialogue between artist and viewer, and, if non-commercial, such galleries can provide important opportunities for public education and arts community debate.
Art and the Importance of Place
In her book Art and the Power of Placement (New York:The Monacelli Press, 2005), Victoria Newhouse notes the significance of where Michelangelo's David was situated in Florence. "Had the David adorned the Cathedral, he would have been a biblical hero; in front of the town hall, he became a symbol of the city government". David , she writes, served as a warning to Medici family members in exile who opposed the Florentine Republic.
"Place" in art is critical. Large established galleries and smaller "fringe" exhibition spaces are likely to attract different types of viewer. For example, people visiting iconic galleries are typically more focused on "the collection" rather than seeking a creative interaction with a particular artwork. Moreover, smaller non-commercial galleries may in some cases be in a better position to stimulate debate on artistic issues. Enjoy Gallery, which sponsors artists' talks and sells difficult-to-source creative community publications, aims to "actively promote critical dialogue".
The look and "feel" of a gallery also serve as working material for the artist. Newhouse describes early exhibitions of Jackson Pollock works in New York's Parsons Gallery, a space that "avoided the slick look of most galleries and museums. [The] rough splintered floor was like the farmhouse kitchen's and the walls were painted only once a year".
Enjoy Gallery is one room, with a wall of windows looking out on the city and a small reading area to one side. A recent installation was Trenton Garrett's Our house (white indices). The work was presented as a "mess" of ceramic pieces scattered from a source, a box labelled: "tapes 2nd bedroom". A sort of extended sculpture, Our house used the intimacy of the Enjoy Gallery space to explore box-concepts such as accumulation and "private activities".
Studio-sized galleries may be particularly suited to some types of installation or ambient art. In their book Installation Art in the New Millennium (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), de Oliveira, Oxley and Petry identify such art as work that explores "new ways of assembling and presenting information". While investigating relationships between the artmaker, the audience and the space, ambient artists view their creation as a project that in part takes its shape from its location.
Building the Creative Community
One of the advantages of smaller gallieries is that they can build synergies with other parts of the creative community. For example, Enjoy Gallery keeps in its reading area copies of the literary and arts journal Hue and Cry, a young publication that, like the Gallery, seeks to push artistic boundaries. The first edition of Hue and Cry featured a satirical piece by Simon Denny on a children's educational book, in which children considered and debated the concept of boxes.
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