Curatorial Essay

• Read about Dominic Molon's unconventional research for the exhibition.

  “Don’t wear your trainers,” Gillian Wearing cautioned me after agreeing to serve as my guide to Broad Street, the nightclub district in her hometown of Birmingham, England, and the subject of her most recent video installation, Broad Street (2002). After meeting with her in London to discuss the logistics of her upcoming exhibition at the MCA, I donned the appropriate footwear and made my way up to Birmingham. We met for dinner and, braving the gale force winds and rain ripping through Britain that February, ultimately made our way to the nightclub Brannigan’s, where much of Broad Street‘s action takes place.

  We arrived at Brannigan’s around eleven o’clock. What struck me first was what undoubtedly made the club so important for Gillian—the decidedly unfashionable nature of the place. The majority of art made in recent years about clubbing and nightlife has attended to its hipper components—the style and substance of modish techno and electronica culture — rather than those that fashion and time forgot. In Brannigan’s Gillian found the ideal place to document the effect that the social ritual of nightclubbing has on human behavior. That’s certainly what occurred to me as I absorbed the cheesy décor of the sprawling interior and winced more than once at the DJ’s similarly outdated musical selections (exemplified, perhaps, by a medley from the late-1970s musical film Grease.) “I’m not letting you leave here without dancing,” Gillian informed me, which was fine with me, provided something remotely danceable eventually worked itself into the mix. Securing a couple pints, we snaked our way through the crowd to a decent vantage point near the multilevel dance floor in order to watch the action. Gillian occasionally pointed out some of the regulars who appear in the video, one of whom was line-dancing with her friends.

  For the entire time we were at the club, I was involved in an exercise of split visualization — observing the activities in front of me and trying to imagine how they might be translated into Gillian’s video installation. While I witnessed none of the more dramatic forms of human behavior that one sees in Broad Street—furtive romantic interludes, lovers’ quarrels, drunken fisticuffs, and shivering girlfriends abandoned by their dates—I did get a new sense of the spectacular sociability that such places inspire. This aesthetic and philosophical contemplation was interrupted by a remix of Earth Wind and Fire’s “September,” a favorite of mine since childhood and, as I duly informed Gillian, a song finally worthy of introducing my dancing “talents” to the United Kingdom. As we made our way to the dance floor, I became aware of my transformation from detached observer to participant in the festivities and began to feel more than a little self-conscious. In a sense, Gillian’s insistence that we dance was utterly in keeping with her artistic practice, requiring viewers to recognize their own participation in the tragicomedy of human existence by observing the behavior of others in her work.

  Broad Street demonstrates how a particular place shapes human behavior (or conversely, how people tailor their behavior to their experience of a particular place). Though Gillian and I maintained a level of studious detachment from the proceedings, the surrounding space was charged with genuine spiritedness, which made the walk home through the empty, rainswept streets of Birmingham that much more quiet. And while the next day’s destination—Manchester’s Old Trafford stadium for an afternoon soccer match—reinforced the relationship between space and social conduct in a British context, my evening with Gillian on Broad Street remains one of most unforgettable and enjoyable forms of “exhibition research” that I’ve ever done.