«Multiple conversations», Veronica Ryan's exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, is a Haiku of which you only have one verse.
But let's take a step back, because I'd like to talk about the relationship between the paratextual signs that surround an exhibit and the exhibit itself. The most obvious is the name of the exhibition itself — usually a big sign, repeated across all the materials. Next comes the literal wall of text near the entrance that tells you about the artist and the show; and, perhaps the king of the paratextual, the label next to each artwork that contains, at the very least, the name of the artist, the medium used, and the date it was created.
It is my opinion that great art does not need labels. There's something interesting going on in «Las meninas» by Velázquez: that much is obvious. Approach the label, and you'll get a very interesting story of what exactly might have been going on. That's a great use of a label: something interesting becomes something remarkable.
Rarely, the art is in the label. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a bunch of pictures of clouds acquires a narrative through the labels. This has to be done by design; it's very clever and seldom seen, but awesome when found in the wild — and still interesting when someone tells you that the novel is actually in the footnotes, not the text.
Sometimes one is forced to look at the labels to make sense of what's going on. I don't much like that. But I like it even less when the information given is so trivial that it paints no story and offers no explanation.
There was no one talking to me in «Multiple conversations». While looking at a sequence of objects made by Ryan through the years, I wanted to know if there had been a material change, a shift in focus, a fixation with a particular colour… But the objects might not even have been placed chronologically (though critic Lucy Lee posits they were displayed “roughly reverse chronologically” — I missed that). So I couldn't create a narrative in my head. It all reads like a «found object» festival where the focus is not the object, but the finder. With this egocentric focus I don't know if I'm in a gallery of art or in someone's personal closet of quirks.
Well, that was a long-winded way of saying I didn't like it — especially not at the price of £16.50. Zero out of four cookies.