Accordion Fields

Which is more important – noise, or signal? I don’t really know. Does anyone really know why Accordion Fields is the name of a group exhibition, found on Edgware Road, beside a comprehensive school, along a street which reaches all the way up to Barnet? I don’t.

It’s an odd walk that one – Edgware Road, a weird place. It’s not uninteresting in any capacity but it’s certainly peculiar. The towering bridge above shuttling chunks of metal, you hear that. I mean you really hear that. And the building sites, the iron scoops sifting through earth. Quite frightening really, I would have done well with those ear defenders, or maybe I just needed a gallery – they’re usually quiet. But I wonder if quiet is what I want to find. If silence is what I seek then what happens to the noise. It wouldn’t dissipate, only I would be focusing elsewhere.

There is a certain comfort in noise. If I think of language, I think of words – but then I take away the word and all that’s left is a sound, a melody even. Why would I strive to control sound? It’s another language, one which precedes phonetics. A less formal vernacular. I like the chips on steel, the bass of a subwoofer – the two duetting. Sound wants mix, and to clip that ability would mean losing what is otherwise uncertain. And in that space where we can’t be certain of something, I often find myself most surprised.

To a sound engineer, noise is excess. It is the background shifts and snaps of motion in the periphery of the music being performed. To an otolaryngologist, signal is whatever sound we are paying attention to, the rest, is noise.

‘Noise’ is often overlooked. As our own little chambers of sound shrink smaller and smaller, as does our social proximity. I now walk down a street with one ear open, so as to hear the noise. That noise gives context, it reminds me of my position within the larger complexion of a city. I may cross paths with a stranger but the security they hold in their own private arena of sound will never be shared with me – I will hear what I choose, they will hear what they chose. There is very little ‘noise’ which remains shared.

How much of anything is still shared? I know I walked past two small, beaten down offices enroute to the Lisson Gallery. I also know the gallery’s door is worth more than the stock of both shops put together. ‘Stock’, that’s a weird thing. I walk past a window and the stock is cigarettes, food; the next is shit for your hair, I walk past another, and it’s so called ‘stock’ is paintings. Those paintings aren’t too cheap either – certainly less than a cab journey out of Edgware.

The stock of a gallery is its paintings, its sculptures or another form of production. The artist is not part of their stock. It’s cynical, but an idea I found myself leaning towards as I left the concrete pavements of Edgware Road. Accordion Fields was an art fair, not an exhibition. Many galleries will build an exhibition or attitude around the artist, or artists they exhibit. That forms a relationship between the works, the artist, the building and the viewer – all remain in conversation with one another – I didn’t feel that happened here.

And I feel that’s important. A gallery, without relationship to its environment becomes a dull sort of beacon. One lacking any identity, it almost just stands there, meaning held between the walls but nowhere further. The artist’s work remains stuck behind the muffling concrete, so how can any idea supersede its 4 corners – its restrained instead.

I don’t mean a gallery must strive to be ‘local’. Bright welcome signs outside, or semi-generous scholarships from a collector to the ‘better’ local school of Rugby. It is important for a gallery to avoid isolation. The location is as important as its polished floor. If a gallery is predicated on its ability to fabricate a new context to the work it exhibits, then how can that be done without an awareness of where it sits. This doesn’t make the Edgware Road an unachievable ideal of where a gallery could never operate. Instead, it serves as an example of a how a gallery should relate. If you sit somewhere incoherent, work with that. Do not ignore it. A coherence can be found in ‘waste space’, meaning can be chiselled out. Why choose eight artists who don’t relate? Allow each to find a connection. Not just the art school they attended over a half century period, but something in the noise of outside.

In failure to recognise each artist as individual, their works fell afar. I found myself rather disorientated – boiling vermillion here, strikes of blue there. Each work was so imposing, so large in its scale and ambition, that no space was left bare – I found no noise, everything was signal, all of it was begging for my attention, but none would share. I was being asked to look at everything with such intensity, yes; that’s it, the intensity left no room for noise, for any bad ideas or mistakes. I had to whore my attention so far as to never leave an idea to rest.

That is where I find value in noise. Noise is needed to make coherent what is otherwise confused – the noise of the outside, the noise of mistakes, the noise of the artist. It gives space to both the idea and the viewer. In its purge of anecdote and connection, Accordion Fields became a show of pieces and parts, of ideas that could never link. They could never link because they didn’t hold on to the less good ideas which brought context.

In Johannesburg, South Africa there is an institution known as the Centre for the Less Good Idea. I like that idea. A place in which the mistake can be followed. Amongst a project or group, the differences can serve as the impulse, the incidental cracks can emerge as discoveries. The noise is not disregarded but embraced and the signal becomes confused. There is no longer a single focus, but an openness to what could be.

I see no reason a gallery shouldn’t also look for ‘the less good idea’. An aversion to it will only confuse. By covering the cracks and muffling the noise, ideas are strained. The gaps you don’t want, form, between the intention and the result. That’s the problem I have with Accordion Fields. In removing itself from the context of the Edgware Road, in making the gallery a perfect white in the grits of grey slabs; in removing artist’s work from conversations with one another, isolating them in their respective corners; in axing the idea to leave only paint: the buzz is lost, the noise is muted and all that is left is signal – small arenas of signal nearing one another, but never quite stopping to converse. Feels a little familiar.

It’s a bit ironic really, a group exhibition that doesn’t relate. There’s something almost selfish: Tim Stoner a Ghibelline, Dexter Dalwood a Guelf. A war amongst white – the pristine gallery walls provided the perfect backdrop. That’s how it felt, like a war of Florence. One against the other. A room of four walls – the rightward wall a whitish, dirty yellow. The left had the tint of a Fosse blue. That was powerful. But how could I move from blue to yellow, idea to idea? I wanted noise. If one painting lay there flat, and some were vertical, one with its subject raised, another soles aloft – how could that be known a group exhibition?

As a group, the artist should be left to explore impulse and connection, not in isolation but together. They can scrap, strike, chime against one another during the process of production. The result is that they may follow the less good idea – the secondary idea which cast itself in collaboration. Perhaps the results will find coherence? or not? but at least a bit of noise will come from that same clash of metal. That must create something anew.

Maybe it’s the old ways? If the Lisson Gallery is stuck, then perhaps they fell back to what works? Mute the noise, hang the signal, sell the work. There doesn’t need to be anything in-between, it’s just more money, and when you have to shift the stock, you need that money – everyone knows that, off-license or gallery, that’s the rule.

This won’t help art be liked.
It won’t help artists relate.
It will push the viewer further away.
While contemporary art tricks itself higher up, and further from the Edgware Road.

User: Danny Fisher
14 Apr 2024