7.9 Cubic Metres is a free-standing structure within Stanley Picker Gallery, London.
7.9 Cubic Metres operates as an autonomous gallery within the public gallery. The artists project initiated by James Carrigan, is programmed independently by the curator Eliza Tan.
Through the development of a series of 12 exhibitions throughout 2009-10 within the space, the gallery and its archive will become the material of a fully-formed artwork, in and of itself.
7.9 Cubic Metres explores the gallery as a culturally charged and symbolically loaded site. It queries the process whereby cultural material acquires a given object status when it is validated, received and consumed within a white cube. The shifting roles which artists, curators, institutions and their audiences play in defining the nature, positioning and value of art within and beyond the gallery walls further come under scrutiny.
A temporary exhibition space, an architectural insert, a sculptural work, a collaborative document - James Carrigan’s 7.9 Cubic Metres is a curious coalescence of many forms.
7.9 Cubic Metres, as it currently is, is a free-standing structure which operates as an artist-initiated micro-gallery within Stanley Picker Gallery. The structure comprises a ‘white cube’ measuring 2.1 metres square and 2.7 metres high. As an autonomous and transitional project space curated by Eliza Tan, the 7.9 Cubic Metres white cube is programmed via a public call for submissions and serves as an open platform for emerging British talent and international artists.
7.9 Cubic Metres will showcase a series of 12 exhibitions, featuring 12 artists responding to 4 different themes over the course of 1 year. The exhibition program concludes with the beginning of the project’s second life; the structure and its exhibition archive will be returned to the artist as a fully-formed artwork in and of itself in June 2010.
7.9 Cubic Metres by no means claims to be a historical first: André Malraux’s Museum without Walls (1965), Yve Klein’s Le Vide (1959), or Maurizo Cattelan’s Wrong Gallery (2002) provide just some examples of how artists have contested the nature and situation of an artwork and the function of the gallery. The project explores the gallery as a culturally charged and symbolically loaded site. It queries the process whereby cultural material acquires a given object status when it is validated, received and consumed within a white cube. The shifting, and at times, reversible roles which artists, curators, institutions and their audiences play in defining the nature, positioning and value of art within and beyond the gallery walls come under scrutiny throughout 7.9 Cubic Metres’ operations.
The convergence of various artistic agencies and creative subjectivities culminating in the realization and multiple-authorship of the 7.9 Cubic Metres project postulate a shift in practices of collaborative cultural production. The project attempts to destabilize existing systems of signification in order to recontextualise art’s meaning and social value by demonstrating the work of art as a dematerialized process and engaging notions of both an end and the beginning of objecthood in art. 7.9 Cubic Metres provides a reflexive paradigm by which to consider the restructure-able conditions of art, exhibition-making as well as the inclusionary or exclusionary choices implicated in the process of aesthetic viewership and selection. Referring to strains of already historicized narratives of recent contemporary art and its institutionalized discourse, 7.9 Cubic Metres proposes a re-calibration of our perceptions of such, collapsing past and present into a live vision of the multi-faceted and fragmented moment of the here and now outside the box.
