Unknown, and Unknowable?

Readers of the blog will know that the Archives and Museum’s recent show at the Bethlem gallery, Unknown and Unknowable?, featured work from the collection by anonymous artists.  In curating the exhibition it was interesting to consider how we respond to art with little or no context, no title or date and no clue, other than our own perceptions, as to what we are ‘supposed’ to see, what it’s about or whether it’s ‘any good’?

There were no titles or attributions for the works in the exhibition; the labels merely represented the thoughts and questions they prompted in the minds of the curators.  Visitors were then invited to record their own reflections, responses and suggested titles for the works on display.

This striking image attracted the most comment:

The way out Freedom – one step at a time Slowly crawling out of the depths of despair Keep going up the slope. Hope is above. Dante’s purgatorio

Examples of other comments and alternative titles:

	A Royal Academy Entry The strange observer
	Set in stone
	Angels dancing Ghostly fairies in the dell An appeal for help
	You see my outside self. Only I see my inside self. This I find the most moving piece in the show.
	Prayers before bedtime Mother love A perfect night
	Tables turned!
	Ophelia before
	Silent deliberaton An evening with Dr Smith Posh gatherings Before TV

Further reflections from blog readers would be welcome.

Unknown, and Unknowable? Bethlem Gallery Exhibition opens 27 July

The Bethlem Gallery invites you to an exhibition curated by staff at Bethlem’s Archives & Museum, opening on Wednesday 27th July 2011. Here is displayed a selection of works by patients of past generations whose names and creative intentions are lost to posterity, and whose artistic visions survive only in their output. The Exhibition has already received interest online, with reports in Unfolded Magazine and Cassone Art.

The exhibition bears haunting witness to that loss:

• to faces lost in a crowd
• to faces lost in thought, or bereft of it
• to faces impervious to, or turned away from, our interrogating gaze
• to figures held captive to, or struggling to surmount, nameless opposition.

Can their stories ever be told, or will they even be heeded?

Like patient data in epidemiological research or subjects in restricted legal proceedings, these artists remain unknown, but the questions their works raise are insistent. Is anonymity to be craved, or rather recognition? When we have lost our names, have we lost everything?

The name of the artist, the title of the work, the year in which it was created. That’s all most galleries put on their captions accompanying artworks on display. Maybe a brief description of the subject of the painting. Everything else is just interpretation, and doesn’t belong on a label, does it? But what if the names of the artists and artworks were unknown? What if there was nothing to put on the labels? What if all we were left with was interpretation?

‘Developing Unknown, and Unknowable? has been a fascinating experience,’ says one of the exhibition’s curators. ‘The absence of the kind of contextual information usually available – artists’ names, titles of artworks, dates – is an invitation to reflect on the ways of seeing the world offered to us by these rarely shown works. Even if we knew the artists responsible for them, they would still be extraordinarily evocative. As it is, they are utterly compelling.’

The exhibition will run from its opening on 27th July to 19th August 2011, and will include a Saturday opening on 6th August (which will feature, at 12 noon on that day, a brief talk) as well as the normal Wednesday-Friday opening hours. Visitors to the Gallery are also encouraged to explore the Archives & Museum.

www.BethlemGallery.com