Art - Charles Darwent is impressed by the New Art Gallery, Walsall
Oddly enough, it is likely to be your feet rather than your eyes that alert you to your arrival at Walsall's New Art Gallery. Head bowed against the West Midlands rain, you notice a sudden change in texture underfoot: an alternating scrunch and slither, produced by the humbug stripes that the sculptor Richard Wentworth has used to pave the square in front of the newly opened art space. These are clearly meant to deflect passers-by towards the NAG's door, although their function is as much allegorical as it is directional. Wentworth's paving is made from alternate strips of tarmac and the fine pebble aggregate used to mark zebra crossings for the blind. In the words of Peter Jenkinson, the NAG's ebullient director, the point of these is that they are, literally and figuratively, "the materials of the street".
The message is clear. The New Art Gallery is not merely in Walsall's high street, but of it. One reason that the £22 million NAG commission went to the unknown Caruso St John Architects - a young partnership which had never completed a building and whose biggest previous budget was £500,000 - was that theirs was the only design that actively set out to engage with the street. Those of far better known practices - Will Alsop, and the fiercely demotic women's collective, Muff - turned their backs on Walsall's cruddy shopping mall, focusing their gaze instead on a nearby (and rather more scenic) canal. "Caruso St John celebrated being next to Woolies and BHS," says Jenkinson. "They thought it was fantastic: the idea that you could buy your knickers and then pop in to look at a Titian."
Jenkinson's observation has an interesting provenance. The art historian T J Clark has linked the genesis of window-shopping in Baron Haussmann's Paris to the emergence of impressionist painting. Baudelaire's famous flaneur belonged to the first generation of Parisians to make the link between viewing things and consuming them. In the phrase of social historians, he became the owner of a "commodified gaze": a facon de voir detectable in everything from Caillebotte's street scenes to Degas's voyeuristic pastels of ballet dancers.
It is a theory of which Jenkinson, himself a social historian, is obviously aware. Walk down the high street to the NAG and you will see an unexpected new addition to Walsall's shopping scene: various blue cloth artworks are hung in the windows of Woolworths and BHS as a teaser for the gallery's opening show, "Blue". Continue on your way to Jenkinson's new gallery and you find yourself faced with a photographic installation, called Window Box, by the young British artist Catherine Yass. This is described by its creator as being "like a shop window, an interface with the town". Yass's slowly changing pictures show quotidian scenes of Walsall, including a sewer, a police cell and a man having a tattoo. By turning the process of looking at art into a kind of extended window-shopping, the piece suggests that galleries need not be scary things after all - that what counts above all is the impulse to look, to consume the world with your eyes.
This through-the-looking-glass feeling continues through-out the NAG. Comparisons may be odious, but you cannot help but be struck by the difference between Caruso St John's building and Herzog & de Meuron's Tate Modern, which is due to open this May. The latter treats art as a hermetic thing, sealed off from the world outside in windowless galleries. The NAG, by contrast, makes a point of interspersing artworks with artwork-sized windows, so that Walsall itself (something of a miracle, this) comes to look like a piece of art. On a miserable day in March, the view from the NAG's fourth floor is a Caspar David Friedrich townscape. The red neon Woolworths sign across Wentworth's Gallery Square, lovingly embraced by one of Caruso St John's windows, is a piece of Hopper or Warhol.
It has been a long-held truth of modern curatorship that the "white box" tradition of gallery design is a bad thing - that to engage the public, art must punch its way through institutional walls to become a part of that public. Walsall's New Art Gallery is the most impressive manifestation of this belief that I can think of. The blurring of lines between art and everyday life, window-shopping and gallery-going, Woolworths and Wentworth's, is handled with extraordinary intelligence and tact. The NAG speaks plainly, but it does not talk down. It is like one of those grids that can be used for easy and cryptic crosswords at the same time: it manages to offer something to everyone without disappointing anyone.
Most of all, it is a concrete example of the belief that art has a role to play in fostering good civics. Jenkinson is quick to link this to the need for free entry to the gallery. "We are passionately in favour of that fantastic British tradition of free entrance, " he says. "We're particularly interested in getting the people who bought the Lottery tickets that paid for this place to be built in the first place to come inside."
You can see why. Outside, on Wentworth's rain-slicked stripes, a man asks what we snotty London journalists think of the new gallery. He then offers the trenchant view that it is "all a load of total crap". For all the talk of urban regeneration, Walsall remains an economic black spot. Winning the hearts of Walsallers will be hard enough: winning their wallets as well would be impossible. The slow erosion of new Labour's electioneering free-entry-for-everyone museums' policy into one of free-entry-for-children-and-pensioners-maybe will carry a particularly dire message for Jenkinson and his team at the NAG. Chris Smith should pay them a visit.
For information on exhibitions at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, telephone 01922 654400
Charles Darwent is art critic of the "Independent on Sunday"
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