How to summarise?

Last night was the closing party for ‘Laboratory’ (wiping away a wistful tear as I write… and holding an aspirin…), so today I’ve been thinking about how the many issues raised and explored in ‘Laboratory’ can be summarised. I started drawing up a mind map (see below), but soon realised that there were so many themes explored that all the links I needed to draw would soon become an incoherent mass of lines (I stopped at the point when I was trying to draw a line linking Mia with Collaborators).

The mind map was a useful start though in producing the following list of the many questions that ‘Laboratory’ has raised. Although a number of exhibitions profess to be about raising questions rather than providing answers, this idea seems to be the very core of ‘Laboratory’. A large number of wide-reaching questions have been tackled by the artworks created over this last month, many of which have been further discussed in the blog (and the latter has touched on a number of further issues in its own right).

Here’s the list:

• About the artists
• What do contemporary artists need?
• Can the artist’s studio be transported into a gallery?
• What role has been played by the outside collaborators brought in by the artists?
• To what extent have the artists wanted to stage an exhibition for the closing party?

• Working in the galleries of Jerwood Space
• To what extent are the artworks influenced by the architecture of Jerwood Space?
• How influenced have the participants been by working in a high profile gallery and the expectations that come with that?
• How important has interacting with the wider community around Jerwood Space been for the artists?
• There have been many peer discussions generated by ‘Laboratory’ – between the participants (artists, curator, writer & photographers), with the public during the show, with the public on the evening discussion of 17 August, with Kathleen Soriano from the Royal Academy – how important have these been?

• Examining traditional categories
• To what extent should the participating artists be labeled a painter, a sculptor and a film maker?
• Do distinctions between artistic media make sense in ‘Laboratory’? Have sculpture, performance and installation all merged?
• Has ‘Laboratory’ blurred the boundary between the art and the exhibition catalogue?
• To what extent should a blog document an exhibition and to what extent should it be a parallel creative work?
• Given that ‘Laboratory’ has focused on work in progress, to what extent have the participants and the visitors still been influenced by preconceptions about what a gallery exhibition should look like?

• Finished vs Unfinished
• When is an artwork truly finished?
• To what extent has ‘Laboratory’ been about art as a process more than final objects?
• When does ‘Laboratory’ end? At the closing party on 27 August? On the last day at Jerwood Space on 30 August? When the last entry is posted on the blog?

• Being on public view
• What is learnt by putting all the elements of staging an exhibition – art making, designing, writing – on show?
• What does it feel like to be creative – for both the artists and the curator – while under continual public scrutiny?
• Have the visitors grasped the concepts behind ‘Laboratory’ and to what extent have they appreciated them?
• Can ‘Laboratory’ be experienced via the blog, or do you need to be in the galleries at Jerwood Space? Are these two different shows?

• Being experimental
• Given free rein, how important is experimentation for an artist? Should your current practice be extended or reinvented? Is there a danger of being experimental for the sake of it?
• Are failures, false starts and changes of mind interesting in their own right?
• To what extent is ‘Laboratory’ similar to, and different from, other experimental exhibitions?