Putting it in the window. Some thoughts on display mechanisms and enclosure

Artist, occasional curator and current Goldsmiths PhD candidate Mike Cooter looked at the intertwined relationship of art, design and architecture with regards to display strategies, the structured encounter and acts of enclosure. Taking the works and research material contained within Display Show as a point of departure, this densely illustrated talk charted the idiosyncratic path from the 1851 Great Exhibition to the present day, looking at how objects and artworks are articulated, presented and choreographed, and how architects, designers and artists have explored the co-dependency between artefact and environment…how, for example, Frederick Kiesler’s writings on department store display in the 1930s can be seen to structure Nathalie Du Pasquier’s recent campaign for American Apparel.

Mike Cooter’s work investigates the structural agency of objects, be they sculpture, cinematic props or other anthropological artefacts – objects co-opted or created to drive narratives, fictional or otherwise. Interdisciplinary research is resolved into audio, film, text and layered installations that incorporate correspondence, interviews, loaned and re-fabricated artefacts and archival material. He is currently post-producing a six-part radio drama about an object, Dingus, to be released in late 2015, and writing a PhD on the MacGuffin at Goldsmiths in London, where he lives and works. In 2013 he curated In form express and admirable (in a sense lying, in a sense not), documentation of which can be found, alongside other projects, at www.mikecooter.org