Wayne Smith: Fragile: Sites of transfer, Stage 1
Bureau art space is a shop front and as such has an aquarium-like 24 hour a day display potential. Bureau not only brings art onto the street but also brings art into confrontation with its modern mentor: the society of spectacle, the society of cammodified desire - from the white cube into the glass cube.
In two separate and very different installations, both Smith and Stafford exploited the "capitalist realist" alienation of the shop window space in order to reveal some of the problems and contradictions inherent in art in our society of surface. Stafford pointed to the collusion between art and power, and Smith depicted the suicidal and destructive impulses which characterise modern man (sic.) and his attitude to his environment.
John Stafford's installation worked extremely well in the alienated shop window situation, and the palindrome which made up the title, (P)ART (T)RAP, seemed to reflect the wilderness of mirrors which is life in a specular culture. He also added the ironic subtitle "Circumstantial Muzak".
In the window stood a pedestal which supported a silver platter on which lay a pair of binoculars, no doubt placed there as the preferred way in which we could view the other end of the room where a small detail of Bernini's The Vision of St. Theresa was displayed on a light box set against a rich, red, pleated velvet curtain. In front of the curtain we were kept our distance by an art gallery rope - now the intellectual property of Hans Haacke.
St. Theresa's ecstasy ought to represent the sacred ecstasy which lies beyond social confinement, but here it represents the opposite. Superimposed on a light box like an advertisement in