Next Door (The missing subject)
Stuart Brisley has made performances, installations, public interventions, films, videos, drawings, photographs and paintings for over 50 years.
To mark PEER’s acquisition of the lease on 97 Hoxton Street, which will enable the organisation to expand into next door, Brisley will take up temporary residence amongst the trash and pandemonium of the former shop. Adopting the persona of RY Sirb, Brisley’s Curator of the Museum of Ordure, he will investigate and interrogate this transitional space before its transformation as a place of social order and cultural endeavour.
... Time passes, autumn comes before winter, summer precedes autumn, spring comes before summer and before that the first winter when it all began. Next door the shutters were down, the doors were locked, the windows were boarded up. Nobody has been there for months on end ... progress continues at a snail’s pace... It leaves a trace of slime marking its path and there it all is, the letters and emails and the memories of phone calls and mushrooming conversations where the word hopefully recurs, rings out as a sad punctuation among the exhortations, the pleading and the official explanations of procedures ... There is the ironic recollection of letters and emails recording the euphoria when it was first agreed that a lease could be forthcoming that first winter ... To replicate, to double the available space this side of the wall with an exact mirroring of the space that side of the wall with the acquisition of an architectural doppelganger. The prospect of doubling up gave a sense of impending achievement ... However a new problem has arisen, it appears that the keys have been misplaced. Where are they? Somewhere in the Department of Small and Missing Items of course, where else? However, a person from a Department of something somewhere has promised to come with or without keys...
Excerpts from the artist’s preparatory notes for Next Door (the missing subject).
Open to the public on these days from 2.30 – 6.30pm at 97/99 Hoxton Street, from Wednesdays to Sundays.
For further information about PEER and the gallery programme, please visit www.PEERUK.org
Review by Richard Gott in The Guardian