Art Review

http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022:BlogPost:849999

About a month ago I took part in an art performance organised by Danish art collective A Kassen, who are enjoying a residency at the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire. I say ‘enjoying’, because I can’t imagine a more charming place to undertake a residency. The centre’s bucolic character (it was originally a farm) is maintained throughout the 11-acre site, with permanent and temporary works scattered throughout including a gnarled twenty-year old tree house left to decay among the trees; a recently built home made out of refuse; and a walking home developed using some impressive, state of the art technology. As such there are some distinctly Utopian ideas floating around the place, and a curiosity about what artists are able to achieve using either technology, craft, or simple chutzpah. The piece by A Kassen was certainly ambitious, involving an orchestrated crossing of paths between a solitary light aircraft and visitors inside the gallery space. Part of the gallery’s roof had been removed to facilitate a moment of recognition between the aircraft and the people below, while cameramen filmed from each vantage point

The result is a projected film tracking the event, entitled Minus Roof. The piece is a kind of filmed diptych, juxtaposing the chaotic, aerial view from the airplane, and the calm, Turner-esque view of the sky from the gallery. These two perspectives merge at the point where the plane sweeps directly over the centre: onscreen, a tiny paper-plane cuts across the view of the sky from the ground, while the footage from the plane is shaky as it passes overhead.

I was lucky to be able to fly over the gallery and experience this unconventional look at the institution first-hand. Initially I assumed that the focus – the physical artwork – was the gallery itself but on reflection it seems to me it is more the rather transient act of looking. The aerial and ground perspectives converge at a fleeting mid-point somewhere between plane and gallery, locating the artwork in a broad and ephemeral no-mans-land. A meditation on space, perspective and the role of art in the wider context of landscape and community (the local Bourn airfield graciously provided aerial support), it suggested an alternative way of thinking about the “art space”. Bouncing along a worn-out runway in a 1970s Cessner practically held together with Gaffer tape, I wondered briefly whether all art should be thusly viewed.

Laura Allsop