(Above) Film still from The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery (2010). Courtesy the artist
Exhibition: The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, April 16 – June 27 2010
Milton Keynes Gallery will be celebrating its 10th year with a special exhibition curated by 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown, the Director of London's Cabinet Gallery.
All the material for The Life and Times of Milton Keynes Gallery has been taken from the Gallery's archive.
To whet the appetites of gallery-goers the two curators have released a statement made from the text of previous MKG press releases, offering a cut-up collision of artspeak. In the best traditions of postmodernism it represents an artwork in its own right:
"This is an attempt to capture the atmosphere of a classic British institution with rudimentary pictures. Its formal qualities coincidentally reference the gridded Master plan of the host city Milton Keynes.
"Not simply documents of places, they explore the poetic and continuing possibility of private reflection. Images that represent the chaotic forces of sex and money. The resulting work embodies a distinctive playfulness and inquisitive curiosity into the dynamics - architectural, spatial and aural - of the gallery, town hall, factory, bank and asylum.
"These are the actions in a given space at a given moment in time, re-presented to the audience in a given space at a given moment in time. The surroundings are not simply a neutral place that hosts the work of the artist, but the raw material from which it emerges and takes form.
"Eyelids and acacia thorns, a puddle, a leaning rail, a pruned tree adorned with snooker cue tips. Baptisms at sea, penguins in a zoo and the chrysalis-like forms of cast aluminum tents. Gathered and patterned, like compressed clusters on the body’s inner landscape, or a sequence of echoes and reflections.
"As the construction grows and extends, it begins to become part of the space that it inhabits, taking on the characteristics of the host environment, mutating over existing structures.
"At the end, nothing of the intervention remains; the materials are cleared away, the original space is returned to its former self and all that remains is photographic evidence and memory."
Mark Leckey, MKG Dreams (2010). Courtesy the artist
As well as playing William Burroughs with past press releases, Leckey and McGeowan have created two new films from the Gallery's documentation of previous exhibitions and events. Cartoonist Lee Healy has also been asked to contribute additional interpretations.
The MKG opened in 1999 and has played host to a range of more than 50 international contemporary art exhibitions, including works from Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George and, most recently, Marcus Coates.
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