CityLife

Exhibition: Unrealised Potential - Cornerhouse

Artist-curator Mike Chavez-Dawson

July 17 to September 12, 2010

Collaboration between artists and the  audience is usually restricted to the moment when everyone stands back and stares.

But letting the audience influence the outcome of the work? That is a rare privilege indeed. And yet Manchester has welcomed many world class audience dependent exhibitions – recently, Spencer Tunick’s Everyday People and Marina Abramovic Presents... at the Manchester International Festival – and this weekend welcomes another at Cornerhouse.

Unrealised Potential is a fascinating project that takes the shelved ideas of dozens of artists and gives visitors the opportunity to make those ideas their own.

For a fee of £50 (intended to make someone purchase the rights out of ambition rather than novelty), visitors can sign a contract that gives them two years to turn their chosen idea into an exhibition ready work of art.

The idea is to put art into everyone’s hands, creating new working relationships in the art world and letting people get under the skin of an artwork.

A collaborative group exhibition instigated by artist-curator Mike Chavez-Dawson, with support from Lynn Harris and Sam Ely, Unrealised Potential is split into sections that tell the historical background to the project and lay out the ideas waiting to be realised alongside one already completed by the curatorial team.

The final section presents a caged display of Gavin Wade’s Strategic Questions 2002-2010 asking ‘What is wealth?’. After a little game of swap shop with the security guard, visitors can get inside to read the answer.

“For some artists, once they get an idea on paper that’s almost enough,” says Mike. “Others just write their ideas down. But a majority of people want to see the work.

“That there are differences in where artists feel they can leave an idea makes you wonder where a work becomes complete in that process.

“Some of the ideas are virtually impossible to achieve and I’d be very interested to see people try. Some are more fun, some quite controversial.”

It was Andre Breton who said: “Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale”. And that’s the theory that Unrealised Potential runs with; visitors can buy an artist’s dream and turn it into something physical.

Concepts by TV Burp host Harry Hill (for a group of performers in Nazi uniform to recreate The Beatles’ Help album in German accents to set up the tension between love and hate), David Shrigley and ArtLab are among those up for sale.

To inspire them, Mike has worked with Len Horsey and Brian Reed to show the end result of one such purchase: LGD LUCK SA, based on Liam Gillick’s Planta De Anodizado concept.

The original brief was to recreate a Mexican factory, but instead Horsey and Reed ran with an interpretation that has transformed part of Gallery Two into a mock business pavilion full of hostesses pushing their products.

One of the Mexican hostesses, actress Amy Rudolph, will also lead weekly tours around the exhibition.

“As an artist I have hundreds of ideas and it takes a long time even to realise the simplest of ideas,” adds Mike.

“Getting sponsorship, researching, getting a gallery, making it happen: it’s a lot of effort.

“Artists might only realise 40 per cent of the work. The idea of this project is that it activates all these ideas into art.”

Free. Closed Mondays. Weekly tours with Amy Rudolph, Wednesday 6.45pm (free, booking essential).