When one thinks of an art-gallery the image that springs to mind is one of a white room, decorated in paintings or sculptures, a space where people can fully immerse themselves in art, shutting out the distractions of everyday life. The post-modern approach towards an art gallery however, such as the one taken by Deveron Projects, a small arts organisation in a small Scottish town called Huntly, involves taking and placing the contents of that white room in public or private spaces related to the piece’s conception. In Huntly, the “town-collection” is spread out in libraries, butchers or the police station and many other spaces not generally associated with art, using their approach of “The Town is the Venue”. This new approach causes art that was previously contained in a single space to be diffused into public space, allowing people to interact with art in new ways.
However, it does also create a new, unforeseen problem, namely that said diffusion might cause certain pieces to be rarely if ever be seen by an audience, as they might be difficult to access. Some pieces of the Huntley town-collection are only accessible on demand while others are miles out of town. Where previously a large amount of art was condensed into a small space, there is now only one piece in most buildings and it would take people days to see every piece, rather than a few hours. I personally doubt that the majority of people would be willing to spend multiple days to find every single piece, when they could just go to a traditional style art gallery and probably see a larger number of pieces in a smaller amount of time. Some pieces will rarely if ever be seen due to their inconvenient placement and thus never engage with the public which seems antithetical to the core idea of “The Town is the Venue”.
Now, while this sounds quite negative, I think that the flaw is not in the idea, but in the execution. However, the ideal version of the town collection I’m imagining is one not constrained by the real-world issues such as budget, regulations and logistical reasons that Deveron projects faces. The extreme I would like the concept of “The Town is the Venue” being taken too, is an entire town is dedicated to art. Every space, rather than a few select ones, would contain art pieces and people would visit specifically to engage with this concept. It would be a fully functioning town, but with the understanding that, with the exception of private residences, every other space from the local grocer to the hardware store would in some form be dedicated for art. It would probably need to be built from scratch as I do not think it would be possible to make a pre-existing town to adopt this model. In this version the visitor would not have to go off in search of the piece as he does now, because it would truly be everywhere. Only when the town transitions from being a space where art is present to being a fully realised art-space will the true potential of “The Town Is the Venue” be achieved.
gww 