The Show House is a site-responsive temporary intervention in two neighbouring flats on the Goswell Road in London. There the work of sixteen artists has been co-curated by four principle artists who studied together at the Royal College of Art and graduated in 2010.
The Show House is also a home for three of the curator artists; the pieces are the remnants of daily life. The art on display is multi-disciplinary and examples include: a video screened in the sink of the bathroom showing the artist Cian McConn acting out the role of a female character in Twin Peaks; distinctive half erased spray paint marks on the exterior wall of the building; a large photograph of a dog asleep in its basket that has been folded to look real, placed on a shelf up high; an installation in which an illuminated light bulb is slowly dragged across the floor by a hidden mechanism; a plain wooden bird fixed to the wall; and a kitchen chair made using baked resin.
There is also a collaborative performance piece featuring the voice of Vivienne Griffin in a combination of both pre-recorded and live song and speech. It also features monologues by Cian McConn and Mark Carberry recounting the history of two treasured items of clothing that reveals details of their past.
Many of the art works on display explore themes of replication. The half erased spray paint marks on the exterior wall match patterns on the living room curtains, found once again on the wall above the desk. The photograph of the dog replicates the real dog living in the flat. The monologues also mirror each other, as do the use of pre-recordings and live sound.
Deliberately void of any signage but steeped in its own context – the domestic setting of the house and all its things – the work presents a curious exercise in both trying to figure out who lives here as well as establishing what constitutes the artwork. In one of the bathrooms there are three potential pieces: a mural, a collage and a shower curtain seemingly related to one another; but since there is no sign the viewer cannot know for sure and has to acknowledge and embrace the possibility to look a fool whilst eyeing up what might just be, after all, a shower curtain.
The use of repetition helps to distinguish the pieces on display from the ordinary objects of the artists living space. It is a powerful device and builds on the renowned piece by Gregor Schneider in Whitechapel (2004) that used repetitive motions performed by similar looking people inside identical twin houses.
Having a show in a private house is not a new idea. I can think of, for example, Chambres d’amis, the exhibition in Ghent curated by Jan Hoet in 1986. During the height of Cold War, just after Chernobyl, Jan Hoet invited 58 artists – amongst them Sol Lewitt, Daniel Buren, Carla Accardi, Maria Nordman, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham – to each make an installation in ordinary people’s houses. Though inevitably many of those houses belonged to wealthy collectors, the exhibition gained a strong poetic resonance of trust.
Another person making a show of his home was Sir John Soanes, the Bank of England architect who literally bought the house next door to where he lived with his family at the time, and turned it into a museum of his private collection, completed a few years before he died, still standing today. Less than two hundred years later Hans Ulrich Obrist curated an exhibition inside this home titled Retrace your steps; remember me tomorrow.
Within Show House, and in this context of a growing history of the domestic as setting, outside of the narratives of private collectors and the emergence of museum spaces, it is interesting to look at what this kind of set up can to generate today. On an initial glance, it feels like it is brings a certain warmth through conversation between the people attending, staying long after the beer is finished. In a city like London, with its socio-geographical housing structure being such that pretty much anyone could be found to live anywhere give or take a few exceptions of extreme wealth or poverty, we can never really tell who lives inside these thousands of flats we pass daily. When in larger groups we mostly socialize together elsewhere, being aloud to enter safely into the home of a stranger feels like a gift.
This gift however influences the way we perceive the work. Here not only is the artist present but we are his guests. The generous act of opening the door to your home must be reciprocated and I suspect it makes us rather involved when discussing the work on display. We want this work to be good and feel protective of it for we have met its creators in their most intimate of spaces. When overhearing more than one visitor saying they wish every exhibition were like this, questions of form, style and location begin to dissipate.