The Savage School Window Gallery is situated in the window space of 7 Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG. At The Savage School Window Gallery the work on display is seen from the street. The ‘support structure’ or sculpture that dominates the window space is a replica standard cinema sign/light box. Cullinan + Richards invite artists and theorists to make projects for the gallery. Seen in terms of a text-based gallery, the first exhibition opened with work by Volker Eichelmann & Roland Rust in October, 2006, the light box then moved to 11 Saville Row, as part of a group show called “In The End Was The Word’ at Matthew Bown Gallery with a text piece by Cullinan + Richards. On its return to Vyner Street in March Savage School has invited The Jeffery Charles Gallery, who will show a piece by Graham Hudson.
As in previous work by Cullinan + Richards, The Savage School provides a sculptural and contextual support structure which artists, writers etc. are invited to use.
Take two text sculptures, one in the window gallery 7 vyner street, the other 11 Saville Row w2, and both interventions of sorts.
SLEEKS SLIPS SKIMPS SKAMPS JEANS SHORTS. These are titles of different mens’ pants found on a print plate dated 1973. Separating the words from the pictures reconnects conceptually with the kind of homespun publishing and mail order business the pictures were presumably used for. Using the titles without the pictures proposes a situation that invades a layer of truth about the history and provenance of the found object, and relates to how that object might be used independent of inherent meaning.
Vyner Street E2 – Composed of cut out newsprint and stuck to the front of the window, the words take on a sort of top shelf significance. There is a look or relation to the kind of top shelf ness you can find in corner shops in the area. The raggedness of how the text has been cut out is reminiscent of the rag trade that once pervaded the area and definitely the building itself, where holes in the walls were stuffed with bits of old dis-used rags or cut offs to keep out drafts.
Over in Saville Row W2 the cut is much cleaner, much sharper in every way. The feel of the street is of a stricter control of fabrication and controlled survival. The structure supporting the words [the sculpture] is made up of clothing rail in the effort to support something that does not belong here – the seedier end of town.
The actual methods of production adhere to structures of control which have become porous and opaque to the outside world – paintings are produced; drawings made; sculptures appear – with always a double responsibility and a fabricated context.
In this apparently venerable, even conservative age art works must learn that they have to exist in an acknowledged arena and that the life of such interventions is inevitably short, notwithstanding the boardroom conspiracies and parallel agendas (including ours).