White Cube
by Iskra Vukšić ︎︎︎My phone rings, wakes me. “Hello?” I answer weakly. “Are you on your way?”. On my way whe….o shit.
I barely remember the exhibition through the fog in my brain, but I should have been in the centre already. Forty minutes later I enter the space where my friends are already on their knees, building. In two hours, the show will look as if it rose out of the earth for you. Now, it’s ladders, scalpels, tape, cables, drawings unceremoniously scattered, a garbage bag blocking the entrance. It’s disorienting, really, moving straight out of quarantine into that dusty chaos that the artworld secretly rests upon. I try to shake the fog, reorient myself, find some crates and cables to grab on to. I glance into the large hall — flashback to that New Years when I stayed until the party emptied out. Until the bright ceiling lights chased me. Now, those same lights mess with my documentation, alternatively casting a pink and green hue onto each photograph. This is not exhibition lighting, this is a refusal to play along. A long history of short term planning. A lack of funds too.
I’ve always considered this somewhat of a white cube. But as I push a wall to the side to reach a hidden storage, I notice the irregularities. Fire hoses, useless doors, plugs and the traces of drilling holes appearing as whiter stains on white walls. I glide the wall back in place and smile at a new memory. The entire hall filled with copy-machines, A4’s of scanned body parts scattered around layer upon layer and people smoking over them. Risky. I tape a cable to the floor and the vague image of cool concrete in my mind replaces itself with the real thing — a sickly pink wood. I’m told that there are paintings under this floor, found during a renovation and left there because they had nowhere else to live. This is not a museum.
It is a profoundly different experience: entering an art space as a visitor vs. examining it as the conditions for your own exhibition. (1) a drink in hand and too occupied with social interactions to notice even the art (2) with my face thirty centimeters from the floor scratching at old tape-marks. I had planned to exhibit here at some point. There is an aged rejection in my mailbox for proof. Now, here we are. The institution steps down its pedestal to greet us, quirks in sight. And like a beautiful face whose smile reveals a wonky tooth — it’s more cool this way. I know of art spaces that don’t like drilled walls. That don’t like raw clay. Or loose sand. Or red wine. Definitely not the combination of paper trash and cigarettes. Definitely not the hole in the floor of our show that we force visitors to navigate around semi-safely. I once saw a black and white photograph of this space in the eighties. Some artist hanging above the audience on some kind of rope bridge. Back then, it was a space that formulated the cultural life of the city. Are we here to follow its subversive spirit or are we here to institutionalize? On the second day of the show, a young man reaches me a tiny piece of rolled paper. Although it’s been about ten years since I saw one of those, I recognize it immediately: a squatters invitation. I unroll it and glance at the scribbled date. “I’m sorry, I can not”, I answer, “we’re building down”. I politely return it and turn to greet a tourist wandering in.