Trisha Donnelly likes to let her work speak, or not speak, for itself. Relatively little known in this country, the 40-year-old American artist doesn’t permit explanatory wall panels, written gallery guides or even press releases in relation to her exhibitions. And that’s an attitude many gallery-goers will applaud. No more ponderous explicatory texts? No more of the sense of the curator standing between the viewer and the work? Perhaps this rule should be applied to all exhibitions.
The problem with Donnelly’s Serpentine show, however, is that it does little to inspire you to want to find out more. I found myself examining the gallery’s lighting vents before I was out of the first room, not because the exhibition makes interesting use of them, but because there is so little else to look at.
A speaker emits a variety of sounds from a bell-like electronic jangle to ecclesiastical organ music. A semicircular plaster plinth projects from a wall. Elsewhere we get two slabs of stone with inscrutable machined grooves cut into them, and various washed-out wall projections, some moving, including speeded up clouds and some kind of rippling fluid, which appear designed to be as unremarkable and uninvolving as possible. Oh and a section of plaster wall-panelling has been removed to reveal the bricks beneath.
My instinct to examine the lighting vents turned out to be close to the mark. An online ‘director’s introduction’, informs us that Donnelly makes a habit of tinkering with exhibition venues, removing window frames and door panels, adjusting lighting, so that the exhibition becomes an interaction with the space and the viewer’s experience of it.
But this is hardly novel. Artists, filmmakers and writers have been playing with our perception of ‘the medium’ for decades. Donnelly’s exhibits may be designed to challenge our ideas about artistic intervention, about how much an artist needs to do for a work to qualify as art, and how, if at all, are we supposed to react to it. But it’s difficult to imagine many people’s perceptions being changed by this calculated non-event of an exhibition.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/11113198/Trisha-Donnelly-Serpentine-Gallery-review-a-calculated-non-event.html