Katie Millis explores secret art at the De La Warr Pavilion.
A Secret Service is an exhibition based around the notion of secret art, unintended art, art that has been created for an audience never meant to see it. The Hayward Gallery touring exhibition was made in collaboration with the Hatton Gallery and is showing at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea until April 15 2007.
A Secret Service attempts to satisfy an audience’s insatiable fascination with secrets. Work by 16 international artists makes up the exhibition, which explores numerous aspects of the clandestine: magic, alchemy, sexuality, dreams, religion, political conspiracy, assumed identity and the covert workings of the State.
The collection of previously undisclosed facts and images is the antithesis of art that is created for the purpose of viewing. Visitors might feel alienated, voyeuristic even, looking at such a display of secret works and behaviour. The revelation of art to a sea of eyes that were never intended to see it poses the awkward question: are we supposed to be looking?
German-born Kurt Schwitters was the central inspiration for this exhibition, curated by 1980s performance artist Richard Grayson. Originally influenced by the Bauhaus and Dada movements of the early 20th century, Schwitters maintained a distance from them, preferring to develop his work as 'Merz' from 1919 onwards.
Schwitters created complex architectural constructions and installations from refuse and everyday materials. He assembled texts and objects into collage and compelling cocoon-like sculptures, drawing the outside world into the matter and material of his artwork. Eventually his Merz concept expanded to cover his full range of activities.
The Merzbuildings were a collection of four of these constructions; images and objects were layered, expanded and transformed to create them. The Merzbahn (1947-48) is one of his final creations, and a rare surviving example of a Merzbuilding. Intriguingly, the artist only revealed these confusing works to his most trusted friends.
A Secret Service exhibits rarely seen documentation, photographs of the personal Merzbahn environment taken by Schwitters himself, allowing an audience to contemplate the identity and thoughts of a deeply private human being.
Henry Darger is another fascinating artist represented at the show. The American 'outsider' was a recluse who experienced mental health problems and hardship at the hands of adults as a child. He lived a limited existence as a janitor in mid-20th century Chicago and his works were only revealed when his landlady chanced upon them following his death.
Untrained in any form of art - it is thought he considered himself untalented - it appears he created between 300 and 400 pieces of work. A Secret Service reveals long compositions, bodies of collage and watercolour that tell strange dark narratives.
Darger makes cartoon images of children into something sinister with a background of violent goings-on. The works tell grotesque stories that will only ever be understood by the creator himself, whose innate compulsion to make art can only be speculated upon by new audiences. Darger requested that his creative works be burned and destroyed by whoever found them - a fact likely to imbue viewers with a sense of guilt.
Sophie Calle exploited her position as a chambermaid in a hotel to investigate the rooms of various guests in the 1980s. The resulting, inquisitive photography reveals an intense documentation of the private lives of strangers.
The Hotel (1981) is a series of photographs and writings that lifts the lid on Calle’s voyeuristic behaviour. The images portray a cool investigation of the glamorous, disordered and conventional identities of 1980s leisure time, as lived by people we, and the artist, will never know.
The hidden performance work of Tehching Hsieh is also available for view at A Secret Service. The artist’s aims - to make art, and not to show art publicly - are laid out in the meticulous detailing of his strange, alienating performances. He claims that only documentation of art leaves a trace of the art remaining once work ceases to exist.
Hsieh carried out performance projects that lasted for one year exactly. From September 30 1978 to September 29 1979 he confined himself to a cell, and from April 11 1980 at 7pm he punched a time clock in his studio every hour for one year. Hsieh’s work is exhibited as a series of documentations and photography of such one-year performances.
Other artists whose mysterious and ambiguous worlds are on show in the exhibition include Roberto Cuoghi, Gedewon, Katarzyna Jozefowicz, Joachim Koester, Mark Lombardi and Jeffrey Vallance. A curious audience will certainly have the door to artists' intelligence work on society opened.
