If you haven’t visited an art gallery in a while, you might be under the impression that they are places of solemn reflection where gilt-framed artworks can be viewed with the quiet reverence they deserve. If so, the last thing you might expect to find upon entering a highly respected museum such as Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), is a pair of colossal children’s slides. With a table of white Lego blocks adjacent and a balloon-filled room upstairs, it is clear that reverence has been traded for playful activity. GoMA’s audacious recent exhibition, ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ teemed with such unusual and interactive installations, defying the notion that the experience of an artwork should be a uniquely solemn affair, and raising the question: can contemporary art be entertaining, yet serious and thought provoking at the same time?
Why shouldn’t art be fun? In creating work that defies the convention that ‘fun’ means ‘not serious’, two of the exhibiting artists, Martin Creed and Carsten Höller with their respective works Work No. 956: Half the air in a given space (purple) (2008) and Left/Right Slide (2010), took an enormous, yet ultimately effective risk. While the exhibition was criticised as a whole—proclaimed as having turned the gallery into a ‘carnivalesque’,1 frivolous ‘fun park’2—Höller’s work was specifically disparaged in a scathing review written by Christopher Allen of The Australian. As Sally Butler outlined in her article, ‘21st Century: Installation Art in its Prime’, Allen ‘laments how the exhibition fails to create a setting where contemporary art could be meaningful, and how so-called pretention and populism are incompatible with “real seriousness”’.3 Creed’s and Höller’s installations... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline