 The gallery’s co-founder Martin McGeown on art as advertising, why writing matters, and how shared ideas can be put into practice

‘Propaganda and Decoration’: How London's Cabinet Gallery keeps reinventing itself

In 1991, Andrew Wheatley and Martin McGeown founded Cabinet Gallery in London. Working with artists such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/news/ed-atkins-avatars-animations-experimental-writing" target="_blank">Ed Atkins</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10081/Lucy-McKenzie" target="_blank">Lucy McKenzie</a>, it has cultivated an enigmatic yet distinct identity ever since, with a particularly strong emphasis on permeability between creative disciplines. In this interview, McGeown discusses the impulses, ideas, and plans that have shaped Cabinet's unique character.Clément Dirié: In 2016, you celebrated the 25th anniversary of the gallery. What kind of feelings do you have or conclusions do you draw when looking back at the gallery’s history?Martin McGeown: My answer is not limited to the gallery, nor indeed to the art world, when I say that there exists a shared sense of increased unnamed discontent, and a tendency toward a more resistant position after years of an aggressive acquiescence of which we have all been equally guilty.What were your backgrounds before you opened the gallery at the beginning of the 1990s? What was it like to open a gallery in London then?We were floating around, intermittently employed, working in the casual undocumented physical labor market, or parlaying gigs in the public sector, cashing income support checks to buy books, watching, reading, waiting, critiquing. Opening a gallery in 1992 was a way of giving status to this condition: it named it, armed it. Financially it was absurd.Your gallery is strongly associated with artists like<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17132/Marc-Camille-Chaimowicz" target="_blank"> Marc Camille Chaimowicz</a>, Ed Atkins,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10082/Henrik-Olesen" target="_blank">Henrik Olesen</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/18551/John-Knight" target="_blank">John Knight</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7471/Mark-Leckey" target="_blank">Mark Leckey</a>, and Lucy McKenzie. They are all from different generations and work from different perspectives. How would you define Cabinet’s identity and program? On your website, there used to be an entry titled&nbsp;‘Propaganda &amp; Decoration’. What does that say about your program?I don’t really know how to answer that question, so instead I will quote the following by Jean-Pierre Faye:&nbsp;‘The object is not simply to reel off the facts, but to question them from every angle, like a crystal in which one sees not reflections, but innumerable stories. What is more we discover along the way an event manufactured in such a way that differing versions of it are circulating before it happens, and even as it happens.’&nbsp;As regards Propaganda &amp; Decoration, I guess it was a way of saying: this what a gallery does. It was meant to be simultaneously disparaging or self-critical and sort of&nbsp;‘go-getting’&nbsp;and assertive at the same time. It was inspired by the Soviet Union. All art is advertising, except paradoxically Pop art, which is about advertising.

An important part of your program are the publications and special projects. You&nbsp;publish many books&mdash;not only about the gallery’s artists&mdash;like the Pierre Guyotat publication you did in 2017. Your first exhibition in 1992 was in fact a book launch. Can you expand on why it is so important to you to have this kind of publishing activity?It’s not really about books, or publishing as such, it’s about language. The writers who attract us are those who bestow upon the text a physical condition, for whom language is experienced as such, sometimes painfully so. The writing then is real, and stands equally among things. A resurgence of writing in the younger generation is testimony to the fact that writing is a way of asserting this reality when you have no other means at your disposal.In 2016 you opened a new space designed by the architect Trevor Horne for which artists from your gallery had been commissioned to design architectural features. Is the new building a way to embody the way you conceive your work as a commercial gallery?The building was conceived by Cabinet collectively, and many of the features were specifically designed by certain artists in response to the ideas which arose from our conversations. The main artists involved in this aspect of the building were John Knight, Lucy McKenzie, and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. They are all connected, in different ways, to ideas of applied art and architecture. Finding, literally, a concrete form for these shared interests was the impulse. We saw it as a something to be made. It was also practical in that it was a way to escape the terrifying and draconian property laws that shape and darkly shadow many people’s existence in this city.

Extract from the Art Basel&nbsp;| Year 48 book. For more information, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/about/books" target="_blank">click here</a>. Top image: Ed Atkins, Performance Capture, 2015-16. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet, London; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, Rome; and dépendance, Brussels.

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The gallery’s co-founder Martin McGeown on art as advertising, why writing matters, and how shared ideas can be put into practice


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The gallery’s co-founder Martin McGeown on art as advertising, why writing matters, and how shared ideas can be put into practice