Openness, a recent exhibition by Noel Hensey, consists of a site-specific sculpture inspired by the visual humour of the 1980’s American television series Police Squad! (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, 1982) alongside a video work entitled History. The sculpture, Openness Sculpture is specifically concerned with a scene in the series where the central character Sergeant Frank Drebin is in a police lab with a lab technician.
In the scene, Sergeant Drebin and the technician walk from one room to another, the technician opens a door between the two rooms and Sergeant Drebin follows him, not by walking through the door, but by walking around the wall of the programme’s set itself. The work is a visual metaphor for physical openness and is interactive, allowing exhibition goers to navigate the door and wall how they see fit. The video work History consists of a screen recording of the artist’s internet browser history and deals with emotional openness (see: https://vimeo.com/706705370).
The gallery is a small, white cube space, and Hensey has resisted the urge to add any extra flourishes which might detract from the main installation. On entry, the visitor is confronted with a stud wall which runs neither the full height nor width of the space. Instead, there is a large gap to the left and across the top, through which a projector and its projection can be glimpsed, making clear the not-fully-functioning nature of the structure. Despite this, the wall is fitted with a door, providing the visitor the option to either walk through it, or around it. On the other side, the projection piece comes into full view, displaying the last year of data which conveys the artist’s private inner world.
Rearranging the physical makeup of the gallery brings artist and visitor closer together. The installation is immersive, which allows you to feel out the themes only as you move through the space. The interactivity and element of choice provided by the structure enables a dialogue where authority is decentred in favour of vulnerability. The experience becomes an exchange, where Hensey opens himself up to the possibility of judgement or acceptance – or perhaps both. Meanwhile the audience must permit a degree of sincerity in order to engage effectively with the work, and both parties create space for each other. There is also a pervasive sense of humour to the installation which functions to diffuse pretension and further elicit trust. It almost feels collaborative, as if the act of being ‘open’ demands a reciprocal person to act as a viewer.
The work speaks to a desire to be known. Or at least to be seen. To have someone bear witness to your existence. To be perceived is an experience that can be as reassuring as it is terrifying. At various times in my life, I have gone days without any human interaction. During these periods, reality begins to distort, dissociation sets in, and it can feel like I am disappearing. It is as if I have become a secret. Sometimes it is enough just to be seen in the supermarket. Skipping the self-service to make eye contact with the cashier. When I finally do speak to someone, the dust clears in my throat, I can feel the ground turn more solid, and reality shifts back into focus as I become a part of it again.
Walking through Hensey’s door and being confronted with History stirs up echoes of this same dizzying sensation where interiority and solitude meet with the material world. These fallow periods of life can be brought on by bouts of sickness or mental illness, or just getting really sucked into a project and losing myself for a while, but in a world of self-checkouts and contactless delivery, where busy-ness gets in the way of social lives, it is becoming easier to move through life unnoticed. Conversations often take the form of auto-corrected text messages, uncorrupted by individual voices or handwriting, reduced to the stilted cycle of cancelling and rescheduling catch-ups and living lives in parallel without ever actually meeting. Under the scarcity of tangible human interaction, intimacy is diminished, and ‘openness’ is evolving.
The internet has become an arena for outpouring. People share details of their lives with varying degrees of truth and depth, and it is the compulsion to share that propels the machinery of Social Media. Personalities are cultivated and commodified in exchange for actual money. People post real time updates about everything, from the sublime and inimitable beauty of a life that can only exist through the lens of an iPhone, to painful realities intended to expose the grimness of the human experience. There is certainly an abundance of openness online, but authenticity can be harder to come by.
History conveys a digital footprint that is more difficult to curate. While the artist himself admits that the final cut is a ‘clean’ version, and I am mindful of how increasing surveillance and data mining might impact our search habits, I feel that this is still probably as close as it gets to a direct transcript of someone’s thoughts. Apart from anything else, the overwhelming mundanity of the content relates to a level of credibility which stands in stark opposition to the highly polished influencer Instagram feed.
The association of such sensitive information with scandalous and often quite dark activity makes it slightly unsettling to consume. The physical installation, a very literal reference to the notion of ‘breaking the fourth wall’, suggests Hensey’s own presence in the space. Engaging with art is typically a voyeuristic process, where the viewer approaches from the outside, as if for the artist being observed is only secondary to the creation of the thing. Hensey subverts this expectation by lifting the curtain and looking back at the audience, and the interaction ceases to be one sided.
There is a certain tenderness to this that is at odds with the tongue-in-cheek nature of the exhibition, an intimacy at which my stiff disposition struggles to soften. I wonder if this unease is justified – has a boundary been crossed? Is the work a form of trauma dumping? Am I a victim here? The eternal campaign to raise awareness for mental illness has ushered in the popularisation of ‘therapy speak’ and encouraged people to treat interpersonal relationships as procedural. In 2019, a text message template went viral and quickly became a meme. Originally intended as a response to a friend reaching out for emotional support at an inconvenient time, it read:
Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity / helping someone else who’s in crisis / dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect [later date or time] instead / Do you have someone else you could reach out to?
This message feels like the natural conclusion to years of awareness-raising without meaningful change. It is this sentiment that Hensey’s work appears to interrogate. People still don’t have time for each other’s problems, but at least now we should deal with them with level-headedness and cool professionalism.
Openness
Noel Hensey
9 – 18 June 2023
36 Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.
Review by Roxanne Watson
Images by Sally Ann Norman
noelhensey.com
What do you think?