Unrealised Potential

Issue 44, October 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Cornerhouse, Manchester
17 July – 12 September

By Benjamin Tallis

“How do I win?” asks a confused would-be contestant in the Cornerhouse, uncertain whether or not to actively join in with RELAX’s What Is Wealth? (2010), The Zurich-based artists’ contribution to this group show. Standing amidst what looks like the spoils of the Arcade Fire’s house clearance, it is easy to feel caught between the wall, the wheel, the chairs and the cage with which RELAX have answered the wealth question. Thankfully, a ‘guard’ is on hand to reassure potential players, explain the rules and encourage us to spin the neon wheel of personal fortune.

What Is Wealth? And its attendant interactions introduce Unrealised Potential’s key concerns: participation, the frameworks within which this can (or can’t) happen and the contradictory impulses in both creative endeavour and communication, and their intertwinement with pasts and possible futures. RELAX’s answer to ‘What is wealth?’ is the latest part of Gavin Wade’s ongoing Strategic Questions (2002–), which reconsiders 40 questions originally posed by architect Buckminster Fuller. In tackling such trivia as ‘What do we mean by universe?’ and ‘What is truth?’, Fuller sought utopian consensus. Back in the present, with utopia foreclosed, the guard is symbolically stationed in another cage – a repository for the remnants of strategic answers that Wade has already received.

Continuing along the route of the hostess-led exhibition tours, which seem central to Mike Chavez-Dawson’s curation, we’re serenely ushered into a beautifully realised blue and white room where information abounds: wall texts, a disembodied voice, brightly lit reading tables and – of course – a Mac. This textual feast supplies the background to Sam Ely and Lynn Harris’s Unrealised Projects (2003–10), Chavez-Dawson’s Potential Hits (2003) and their fusion into Unrealised Potential. A proudly displayed legal contract sets out the terms and conditions of 67 unrealised artist projects. A mere £50 buys the sole right to complete the work within two years: you too can pay-to-play your part in resurrecting Robin Nature-Bold’s dream of freeing the Chapman brothers or Barbara Kruger from their (un)creative cages; or take the rap for Richard Wilson by rolling burning barrels of tar into a gallery.

Liam Gillick’s potential (Planta de Anodizado – to display the products of the Mexican company LGD Luck SA) has already in fact been realised, as the centrepiece of the exhibition. In rescuing this project from creative limbo, artists Len Horsey and Brian Reed have simultaneously closed down its possibility of becoming something else. The smiles and symmetries of the gliding hostesses who present Luck SA’s ‘compensator’ and ‘complete drive’ are juxtaposed with supposedly unsettling statements about the realities of neoliberal capitalism. Disappointingly, these trite critiques fail to tear the immaculately imagineered corporate curtain, resulting in a skewed mashup of Vogue and Adbusters which reproduces what it purports to resist. This is potential exhausted, rather than unrealised.

Gillick’s brand of relational aesthetics has perhaps become reified and thus easily co-opted, leaving its resistant potential dull and void. However Wade and Chavez-Dawson et al. leave open possibilities – of recovering lost voices, engaging with plural pasts and decolonising our futures. Unasked questions and unspoken answers jostle for attention with what is manifest in these works. And there’s also a refreshing para-relationality in engaging the guard/guide, leaving us better able to ask, “So, winning is what?” rather than merely “How do I win?”

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