An artist (Christoph Büchel) disguised (though artist and gallery use the word “initiate”) a high powered gallery in London (Hauser and Wirth) into a free community center with rooms dedicated to “computer classes, prayer, and counseling”, and complete with “locker room and gym”. As a free Community Center in Piccadilly, the piece of real estate (that was still in reality Hauser and Wirth) was used for all kinds of community activities ranging from neo-natal yoga to classes in aromatherapy and Algerian baking. It was attended qua community center by a certain class of people who were unaware that it was also attended, “un-qua” community center, by a completely different set and class of people: the art spectator class.
Was this "initiation" really art?
To quote a quote by Andrea Frazier quoted in the review I read about this, “the institution of art lives immaterially in the head of anyone who recognizes it.” Art or “institution of art”: how does one go about recognizing the Picadilly Community Center as such? What clues other than prior knowledge of the gallery location and “project initiation” point to the fact that this transformation is indeed art to the uninitiated? What on earth other than arrogant inside knowledge leads this immaterial action to be recognized as such? And if art it is, and art it is since it is in the system, what is it about?
According to author Alex Farquharson, “The Piccadilly community Center was an extraordinary installation…but ultimately it did not rise to the social and political challenges facing Britain today.” Am I to conclude that by initiating an unstable environment where “society’s most vulnerable and least visible” come unknowingly into contact with affluent enfranchised gallerygoers, while affluent enfranchised gallerygoers sometimes feel uncomfortable when the Center is in full swing, the artist is somehow making a statement about the state of the global economy and about the disenfranchised? Am I to conclude that this was a piece about global recession, over-leveraging, and the fall-out that comes from governments spending beyond budgetary constraints?
Sorry, no can see. What I see is a morally dubious action by players acting in an over-bloated market that still has not caught down to economic reality. But since its players seem to come from the classes that do not feel economic downturns, this market might remain hot and putting out this kind of "initiative" for quite a while to come. The Piccadilly Community Center might have been art, but not any art I care to see.
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