Behind Closed Doors
Until May 1; Dundee Contemporary Arts

If DCA took the easy route, and hosted a string of solo shows one after the other, few would grumble. Rows of related works would unite the four big walls. The hangar-like space would find comfort in coherence. The curator would only have to correspond with one artist, one agent, and one courier.

While the majority of DCA’s programme consists of such shows, every so often the gallery ventures into unknown territory. Picking a challenging theme, curator Katrina Brown looks far and wide to find artists whose work fits the bill. Favouring art with a conceptual bent over that which offers instant gratification, Brown’s shows can be hard work, not only for her, but for the viewer too.

Behind Closed Doors is not a pretty show. With the exception of Candida Höfer’s sumptuous photos, the overall impression is grey, documentary and uninviting. Classical ideas of beauty are nowhere to be seen, and instead there is wrinkled paper, gaffer-taped trestle tables and broken glass.

It’s a show about buildings, and their private histories. It’s not an architectural display, but a far more complex interrogation of the secrets embedded in bricks and mortar. Its two star attractions are mainstays of early Conceptual Art, guaranteed to feature in any textbook about the movement.

Hans Haacke’s Real-Time Social System, Shapolsky et al., sent shockwaves through New York in 1971. The three walls of photographs and data were a shocking exposé of the slum landlords of Manhattan, whose real estate holdings were all shown to lead back, circuitously, to one corrupt Harry Shapolsky. The Guggenheim cancelled Haacke’s show, on the basis that art had no right to play a directly political role.

Haacke’s influential work is an important piece of history, and it’s worth visiting the exhibition just to see those yellowing sheets of hand-typed information, laboriously researched and presented in full.

The second anchor of the exhibition is Dan Graham’s landmark Homes for America of the late 1960s. Designed as a magazine layout, colour photos of boxy pre-fab housing were combined with dead-pan text, explaining the various combinations of design and colour which were available in any one housing development. Thus, factory-made, minimalist modules found their way into suburbia, to shape people’s lives.

At DCA, the text is absent. We are presented instead with six of the photographic prints from Graham’s essay. Taken in isolation, the images fail to tell their story, and can only have meaning for those in the know. The audience for Conceptual memorabilia in Dundee is probably quite limited, and the rest of the population is left in the dark.

These two 20th century masterpieces aside, the bulk of the show is made up of recent work by new and emerging European artists. Young Greek, Vangelis Vlahos, has made a brand new work called New Markets Require New Structures, continuing directly in the tradition of Haacke and Graham. His cardboard models of four Eastern European tower-blocks are faceless, corporate and dull. Like their real counterparts, they give nothing away.

On the walls behind the models, Vlahos provides us with the kind of information we usually never see. Full lists of commercial tenants, past and present, document the economic changes these buildings have seen. Their vulnerability is also revealed when you read of their reconstruction in the aftermath of revolution, or their destruction in the midst of civil war. These sheets of data, not the accurate scale models, are the real portraits of the buildings.

Monica Bonvicini, whose work you might have seen in Tramway two years ago, dominates the main space with two complementary pieces. Chains, steel and broken glass make an aggressive wall, and running parallel with it is a graffiti statement citing architecture as the ultimate erotic act.

It might not make sense as you first walk through this intimidating corridor, but viewing Bonvicini’s work from the other side of the gallery, you see it next to Höfer’s luxurious rococo interiors. The sensuality of rococo has never been in doubt, and next to Bonvicini’s violent steel chains, it really makes you wonder about the sexual politics of all those glass and steel towers we live and work in every day.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.03.05