CALLING A SPADE A SPOON
A boiling hot day was only temporarily relieved by a downpour that sent people scuttling inside, lots of visitors and lots of people up for talking to ‘the woman in the white coat’. That was me and, as an ‘expert’, I was inviting people to look at the exhibition annotations and see if they found them entirely trustworthy. “Ask yourself why we give objects certain qualities” I said, “Maybe you can think of other ones. Look around you. Who’s to say a pepper grinder isn’t a mechanical sneeze accelerator?”
Annotations have always fascinated me, their form as much as their content, the way in which they direct you to see things in a certain way. I had a lot of conversations with people who seemed quite pleased to be given the opportunity to say they didn’t have a clue what it was all about.
” It’s interesting to talk to someone who doesn’t think I’m dumb”
“I’m really glad you’re doing this. It gives regular people a chance to burst the bubble of ‘the bogus religiosity and undue reverence given to modern art.”
‘I’ve always been the sort of person to believe what i was told…”
I suggested people may like to make their own annotations around the building or to think how they would re-annotate the objects in the exhibition. Just look at things a little differently…. here’s some of them doing that:
Having thought about this for a while, two visitors went downstairs to gallery 1. “We have laughed” they said, when they came back. I thought that was probably a good thing.