leave it to the insiders

A certain percentage of culture to be absorbed in a city is art. You might be a person who doesn't care, but if you live in a city you'd understand--it's unavoidable. Exhibition advertising can sometimes rival that of blockbuster films and galleries sometimes seem nearly as plentiful as restaurants. That said, it's often true that it's the hidden ones that are the most exciting--hidden enough so that the artist or curator has an uninhibited freedom that a large instituion can't. This is the perfect example of something slightly in between.

Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario. It's exactly that--a scenario. But Ryan Gander isn't that new of an artist and the people behind the venture aren't amateurs or mysteries either. Artangel and the amazing James Lingwood have brought us Rachel Whitereed's House, Roger Hiorn's Seizure and now this. The thing these all have in common is that they were all widely talked about in the paper, in TimeOut or in the culture circuit. They theoretically weren't hidden at all, but when you experience them it only feels like you're the only one in the room and you've come across this thing as a gem in the average urban landscape. 

In this particular case, you will probably actually be the only one in the room. Ryan Gander has created a situation whose circumstances are difficult to fathom. The experience happens in stages, starting with a mandatory online booking, then a mysterious text message from an unknown number, then upon entrance in the east end warehouse space you first notice a bizarrely placed fold-up table and a normal looking man with a clipboard awaiting the restricted 8 visitors per booking session to stroll confusedly through the gate. Walking into the space is uncomfortable. Maybe not just uncomfortable but rather calmingly eerie. You know this is an art piece. You know the closed doors are probably meant to be opened. You know that whatever lies on the other side of those doors is as equally non-descript as the office-y environment. The atmosphere initially reminds me of walking down the corridor in my father's engineering office building at night, except then there were no disheveled postcards or strangely placed velvet ropes. Nor were there iPod listening, McDonalds eating teenagers blocking the entrance to the stairs. It's like playing Clue, except the version created for intelligentsia in the 21st century. 

In art it is a common, usually monotonous and stale endeavor to purposely make something seem unintentional--but this is a rare example that actually succeeds. Ryan Gander admits us into a space where every detail down to the things in the skip outside or the crumpled paper on the floor is intentional but so much so that the viewer is guaranteed to forget that what he or she is experiencing isn't real. Everything is accessible to the invader, that is, everything except the textbook definition of art--that stuff only exists in the locked room. 

What all of this makes me realize is that what makes contemporary art successful is its ability to make someone feel like they are intruding. We are indeed invaders of the think tank--the final product at the tip of the artists working fingers. The unknown makes us uneasy and the uneasy makes us curious. In actuality that's just it: the viewing of art is a process that takes a viewer through stages of intrusion, curiousity and at last, an open-ended conclusion. 

Photo: The work of one of Gander's fictional blue conceptualist artists, Rose Duvall