Revelations (Portfolio)

Gubb, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2412-7412 (2016) Revelations (Portfolio). UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This research builds on my interest in the research of Alfred Gell, specifically his ‘Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory’ (1998), where Gell discusses art in relation to his anthropological research, stating, “In place of symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result and transformation. I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.” (Gell 1998) This position is something I have examined extensively through my work, particularly the exchange between site, audience, artist and artwork, often outside of traditional frameworks for the dissemination of artworks.
‘Revelations’ was a multi-component project undertaken in Autumn/Winter 2016. It project consisted of two solo gallery exhibitions (SYSON Gallery, Nottingham, and g39 Gallery/Artangel, Cardiff), a solo art fair booth presentation (SYSON Gallery at Start Art Fair, London), three public works (two billboards – in Missouri, USA, and Southampton, UK, respectively - and an artwork on a plectrum, distributed via a rock band on a world tour), a 200- page publication (available to purchase) and an artwork sited in a magazine (CCQ Magazine). The dissemination of these works took place across two continents and multiple different sites and modes of presentation.
The impetus to undertake this research was to examine whether site-specific considerations, primarily associated with art in the public realm, could be applied to a set of artistic outcomes presented as a dispersed solo-exhibition.
A moment of artistic presentation is often identified as a single exhibition, performance or public work; this research was in the structure of the project - to examine the potential for a spatio-temporally dispersed set of artistic outcomes to exist as a coherent whole. In doing so, this also provided insight in to the potential for a dispersed-but-connected solo presentation to act as a site and a context in its own right, bringing its own interpretive and narrative potential to bare on the collective-project overall.
The method was in the creation and dissemination of a series of original creative artifacts, and their exhibition within a tight and over-lapped timeframe, in order to assess and examine the aforementioned potential.

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