[working title]
May - June, 2000
Stanley Picker Gallery,
Kingston University,
Kingston Upon Thames

Curated by Susanne Clausen & Alun Rowlands

This work is part of a series by Johnny Spencer whose work featured in the British Art Show of 2000. They present research into aspects of our social and cultural life - from hairstyles to economic groups. Information is gathered from a wide range of sources and re-presented as an authoritative examination of the subject —‘The Poor’, ‘The Mouflom’ ‘Coffee Tables’ ‘Incarceration’. These works raise questions about academic practice and the way that we collect information to define and theorise both small and vast areas of experience.

Inventory is a collective enterprise set up by a group of writers, artists and theorists looking to explore the alternatives to the limitations imposed on these disciplines. Inventory operates on a number of fronts ranging from a regularly published journal (‘Inventory’) to organized events, lectures, interventions and exhibitions. Inventory proclaim a sociological trawl through the city. In acts of re-appropriation, found objects are modified, altered, written upon and carved into and the street becomes the site for defiant interventions. Acts of subjective and collective resistance to established order rally against alienated existence, consumer culture, and the regimentation of urban space. Inventory’s work exists primarily as an agitational force, concerned with ideas, content, and communication, creating an enthused writing that penetrates the marginal and the everyday, the theoretical and the sensorial, for a readership that refuses to be crushed by this meagre existence.

Excerpts from videos of their public action Coagulum (2000), in which a group of individuals suddenly assemble into a sort of rugby scrum formation, inside a local shopping mall —Coagulum.

‘We have no desire to transform social life into art or vice versa. In a manner similar to that of a strike, our Coagulum is a refusal of our role, of our work as consumers. Play flouts work - it produces nothing other than itself. It is a paroxysmal movement that produces nothing but its own energy - which it expends uselessly. Coagulum is a siege machine for infecting organisational space. Building more transitory micro communities, accelerating a process whereby sociality begins to assert itself, seizing and squandering human energies.’

—Inventory (excerpt from Coagulum, Inventory, Vol.4 No.1, 2000)

[working title] brings together artists whose practices question how art can act within, and against, the systems that produce it. This exhibition revisits experiments in self-organisation, critical fiction, and social play. It asks what forms of agency might still be possible for art when its institutional critique has already been absorbed by the institution itself.

Liam Gillick’s The Winter School (1997) inhabits this same tension. Printed as an offset poster, the work revisits 1971 from the perspective of 1996. Gillick imagines a school that might have been — a collective structure for thinking and reformation. The text alternates between recollection and speculation, treating “school” as both memory and model, as a shifting form for shared production. Gillick’s modest print becomes a proposal —that education can exist outside institutional walls, in temporary, revisable forms of assembly.

Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz’s book Demolish Serious Culture!!! (2000) asserts that seriousness itself has become a form of paralysis: “Seriousness is a freezer with cadavers in it and the not-serious is a rotting flower.” Their provocation opens a space between renunciation and renewal —a refusal of the moral weight that often freezes political and cultural discourse. For Brener and Schurz, the not-serious is not apathy —it is an act of resistance, a strategy of refusal against the deadly seriousness of cultural orthodoxy.

Tilo Schulz’s E.W.E – exhibition without exhibition (1999) expands this notion of the exhibition as a distributed network of thought. This project has travelled across Europe as a lecture-performance, accompanied by a set of artist pamphlets in a blue binder. The usual apparatus of exhibition — catalogue, poster, lecture — became the exhibition itself. By displacing the show into its supporting structures, Schulz and his collaborators blur the line between presentation and mediation. The result is both a critique and a reinvention of the curatorial form, one that foregrounds the circulation of ideas rather than their visual consolidation.

Johnny Spencer’s series of laminated prints, including Winston Churchill as a Painter (1995–96) and The Artist – Adolf Hitler (1995–96), extend this critical approach to the production of knowledge. Spencer’s works parody the forms of academic research — classification, typology, and authority — to expose how culture constructs its categories. Spencer’s “research” into artists, politicians, or social groups uses data and imagery to mimic objective study, while revealing its ideological underpinnings. In doing so, he collapses distinctions between scholarship and satire, seriousness and absurdity.

Inventory situate their practice directly in the street. Guided by Walter Benjamin’s phrase “the inventory of the street is inexhaustible,” they conduct interventions that disrupted the rhythms of everyday life. Coagulum (2000) is a spontaneous scrum of bodies inside a Kingston shopping mall rejecting both the role of artist and the role of consumer. The performance is an act of refusal, “a siege machine for infecting organisational space.” Inventory’s journal serves as both record and manifesto, fusing theoretical writing with anarchic energy. Their work recalls Situationist tactics, and reclaims them for the late capitalist metropolis — where even dissent risks being commodified.

Salon de Fleurus offers a different mode of reconstruction. Re-creating Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, once a cradle of modernity, through painted reproductions and staged interiors. By remaking the salon as a fictional space, the project reveals how art history itself is built on acts of copying, storytelling, and myth-making. The salon’s simulacrum become more telling than the originals, exposing how modernism’s narratives were curated, circulated, and domesticated. We encounter not authenticity, but its performance — a self-aware history lesson that questions the museum’s claim to truth.

Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen’s Info Centre (1998–99) continued this institutional questioning. Info Centre transformed an office space into a hybrid reading room, archive, and meeting point. Visitors could browse artists’ publications, drink home-brewed beer, and engage in informal discussion. Info Centre was a deliberate act of “self-institutionalisation,” — the creation of an institution for alternative practice. Rather than reject structures altogether, they proposed new ones —flexible, accessible, and sustained by collective care. Their project anticipates debates around art’s social responsibility and the politics of access.

Volker Eichelmann, Jonathan Faiers, and Roland Rust’s Do You Really Want It That Much… More! (1998) turns the lens toward the cinematic museum. Their crash edited video compilation of film scenes set in art galleries exposes how popular culture imagines these spaces —as sites of romance, crime, and spectacle. Through montage, they show the museum as both fortress and stage, a place of forbidden desires and social codes. The work asks why cinema repeatedly transforms the museum into a theatre of excess. It reveals the institution’s double role as a space of reverence and a screen for projection.

[working title] revisits artistic practices that refuse to remain confined within the gallery, acknowledging the paradox of “critical” forms, which simultaneously absorb critique. These projects use fiction, publication, performance, and self-organisation as tools to unsettle the hierarchies between artist, curator, and publics. [working title] is an ongoing possibility — the exhibition embraces incompletion as a method. It understands that the institution cannot be simply rejected or redeemed. It must be continually reimagined from within. The ‘work’ suggest that the task of art today is not to demolish the institution, but to keep it in motion — to treat it as a provisional fiction sustained by the people who use it.Through these reassembled fragments, [working title] stages both memory and rehearsal, a re-encounter with past gestures of resistance, and a renewed invitation to invent new ones.

Alexander Brener & Barbara Schurz //
Mark Dickenson & Martin Clarke //
Volker Eichelmann, Jonathon Faiers & Roland Rust //
everything Editorial //
Alec Finlay //
Salon de Fleurs //
Liam Gillick //
Henriette Heise //
Inventory //
Tilo Schulz //
Jakob Jakobsen //
Pavlo Kerestey //
Johnny Spencer //
Szuper Gallery //
Markus Vater //
Christopher Warmington //

Salon de Fleurus is an artwork, a contemporary reconstruction of Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon that existed at 27 rue de Fleurus from 1904-34. It is a work that displays and references a story of modern art’s origins through one of the first gathering places for burgeoning artists such as Matisse, Picasso, and Stein herself. It was in Stein's salon that paintings by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso were seen exhibited together for the first time both by her peers and transatlantic art experts who spread the word back home, eventually creating the American narrative of European modern art familiar today.

Through painted reproductions exhibited within a constructed interior, the Salon de Fleurus questions where, why and how certain narratives of modern art originated through the salon structure that first canonized them. These copies are perhaps more significant and tell us more about history than the original artworks themselves by weaving fiction into history and leaving space to contemplate and reconsider the past. When one looks at Picasso here, they are viewing Picasso through the lens of Stein.

Beginning in 1992 Salon de Fleurus exists as a semi-private salon in lower Manhattan. It has appeared in fragments in Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles. The exhibition contains painting reproductions as well as a historic timeline of Stein and her circle, and training script for a “doorman” or gallery monitor to best evoke the story of the salon to visitors.

The first info sheet of the Info Centre stated: “We are committed to an understanding of art practice that is not exclusively related to the making of art works, but also includes the establishing of institutions for the experience and use of art and generally the making of institutions for human life.”

Info Centre attests to the need to institutionalise alternatives in order to care for them. The refusal to support alternative practices with the institutions that they need and deserve to thrive. We do not need to avoid institutionalisation, we need fuller, wider, and more diverse forms of institutionalisation. Institutionalisation for the few needs to be replaced by institutionalisation for all.