Permanent Collection

Part of the 2025 Spring / Summer season at the Esker Foundation featured the exhibition When Sound Becomes Unsound by Babak Golkar, which included the interactive video work Throw(n). Along with a video loop where lumps of clay were projected onto a gallery wall with a satisfying punchy thud, a mound of wet clay sat on a plinth. What would happen next?

Beginning on opening night and continuing into the exhibition’s run, the attendees became more and more emboldened by this open invitation. Hand-held lumps of clay were formed creating projectiles for the projection. Competitions organically formed to see who could leave their mark highest up the wall or reach lighting and camera fittings. White walls were punctured by forceful throws, revealing the black guts of the gallery, and clay flew over the top of an adjoining gallery wall potentially disrupting the delicate wood and copper works of Caroline Monnet. Fourteen days after opening, both Babak Golkar and the Esker Foundation mutually agreed to remove this interactive aspect from the exhibition. Instead, on the left-hand side of the entrance to this Throw(n) room, a sign was installed: ‘Please Do Not Touch Artwork Beyond This Point.’

Entering Magic Circles

As a Cognitive Neuroscientist interested in game behaviour, I often think about the magic circle invoked during gameplay ^{[1, 2]}. Here, individuals enter into an often implicit agreement that the traditional roles and responsibilities we have in our ‘real world’ no longer apply within this new context. Behaviours that would be considered impermissible outside a game circle are now permissible inside a game circle. For example, we may tacitly agree to behave uncharitably or unfairly to others to increase our chances of winning. We may also agree to take on novel agentic roles: we are now forest animals participating in a Spring Festival ^[3], or, soldiers in the trenches in World War I ^[4].

Similarly, when we enter and move between public spaces, we have expectations about the roles we ought to play and the actions we ought to take: sitting in a dentist’s chair we adopt the role of patient (but know to leave the anaesthetic alone), standing at the front of a classroom we become a teacher (and make full use of the chalkboard).

These constraints representing subtle interplays between external environments and internal expectations may seem obvious or uncontroversial. However, there are also specific roles that we adopt as a function of space that lead to purely symbolic relationships with objects. For example, a rope barrier within an art gallery is clearly a physically ineffective way to stop people interacting with a work: all we need do is step over or crawl under the rope and we have circumvented the gallery’s intentions. However, a rope barrier acts as a symbolically effective deterrent from interaction, as long as both the gallery and visitor agree to the same implicit contract: “I understand the intention of the rope barrier and agree to abide by its symbolic but not physical function.” Indeed, even the natural language that we use in describing encounters with art further reinforce a passive and restrained mode of interaction within the gallery: in “attending an art viewing,” we are implicitly instructed to see (but never touch).

Adopting the role of an art viewer and the resultant permissible actions must however be learnt. This is clearly apparent when children visit a gallery. For a child, an art gallery can be a curious space as they must reign in their impulses to interact, play, explore, climb. For them, a rope barrier is not necessarily understood as a symbolic barrier to create distance between the art and the viewer but rather an object that can be swung or pulled.

In these respects, the child is responding naturally to the affordances of objects. Affordances describe the way in which objects suggest their own functionality through material properties ^[5]. An object that has a sharp edge may be used for (or affords) cutting. An object that is rigid and graspable affords throwing. Critically, affordances are defined in relation to the observer. When skimming stones across a lake, graspable becomes an available material property only by considering the interaction between object and observer: larger stones are ungraspable by a child but graspable by an adult.

An important aspect of Babak Golkar’s original work is the intentional omission of those polite rectangles of information and instruction related to each artwork. In the absence of information, the visitor is unable to contextualize the work with respect to its title, lineage in the artist’s history, material composition, or, intended purpose. In the absence of instruction, visitors only have their preconceptions about what they should or should not be doing within this particular space. When these art objects are designed to seduce one into interaction via their affordances, this makes the temptation of transgression much greater.

Affordances and the Order of Actions

Within a gallery, we may find a number of overlapping art magic circles, with each space generating different expectations, each object implying its own interaction. One approach to understanding the complex outcomes that arose from When Sound Becomes Unsound, is to consider the experiential narrative created by the spaces and objects within the Esker Foundation themselves.

Upon entering the museum, visitors were presented with three imposing clay pots (each composed of a conjoined pair: one larger and one smaller pot) tilted at an angle on sand bags (Scream Vessels). Upon closer inspection, the rim of the larger pot formed the shape of a human head: even with sculpting to accommodate the ears. As such, the shape of the pot affords the docking of head, just in the same way that we are invited to implant ourselves in the folds of a head cushion on a massage table. Once positioned, what else is there to do but shout into the black void? Here, the artwork by the nature of its material design entices the visitor to break two implicit rules of a gallery: make contact and make sound (in the context of an art gallery, making sound is an unsound choice).

Observing gallery attendees on the final day of the exhibit revealed a diverse range of interactions. A sender might produce a timid “hello” at the top of the pot to a receiver waiting at the bottom of a pot. Others leveraged this ceramic loud speaker to exorcize full-throated screams (the latter perhaps as an attempt to answer a question written in the negative space of clay on a large wall: “Where does the scream go once it’s muffled?”)

Here, the beginnings of a new dynamic, awkward interaction between artwork and visitor started to take shape. Continuing the exhibition, one moves left into a room with a large wooden bench covered in fabric on which sat a number of smaller pots (Scream Pots). In contrast to the imposing size of the Scream Vessels, these objects now unlocked a new affordance: they could be held.

Further seducing the visitor into interaction, indentations could be seen along the body of some pots, reminiscent of keys on a musical instrument or a more minimalist version of a Hollywood handprint ceremony. The negative image of the artist’s facial hair also appeared at one end of some objects. Both finger and mouth imprints imply that the object has been held in the past, so perhaps it can be held now? Again, on the final day of the exhibit, slow crude harmonies would drift from this smaller and more private room, once again reinforcing the permission that the visitor unexpectedly adopts an interactive, even communal, role within an art gallery. These awkward tones provided a background drone against which the regular punctuating foreground thud of clay hitting wall could be heard in the final piece: Throw(n).

In what might be considered the climax of the exhibition, within this final room, a video loop projected lumps of clay onto a gallery wall, which each hit accompanied by a wet slap. Directly in front of the visitor stood a waist high plinth and a mound of wet clay.

Through the progressive affordance of each of the previous artworks (Scream Vessels, Scream Pots), increasingly intense and intimate styles of interaction have been made permissible. In this final piece, the tension between the actions suggested by the environment, and the actions permissible from a traditional art viewer role, is at its highest. Here visitors are teased with perhaps the ultimate forbidden act within an art gallery: to manipulate the work itself ^[6].

An intriguing twist in Throw(n) however is that the object that suggests itself as the focus of interaction is not yet created. The visitors must be bold enough to apply what they have learnt from the previous two interactions: first I must be able to physically interact with the work; second, I must be able to hold the work, but now must do something more. I must manipulate the work in order to remove a quantity of clay into a throwable object (we may be again reminded of the relationship between natural language and action ^[7], and that when working with clay we ‘throw’ a pot to begin the process). Beyond what point is interaction with artwork permissible?

“Is it still freedom if you follow the instruction?”

Following the decision to close Throw(n), the parenthetical (n) in the title becomes central to the piece. Viewers entering the room now look back in time at an art space with an ambiguous history of action. The plinth, previously containing the inviting mound of clay, now sits empty, with only rusty two-dimensional streaks of this depleted material remaining. The once-wet clay has hardened and fallen to the ground, leaving scattershot imprints of previous throws. In some cases, upon falling, the dry clay ripped the cool white epidermis of the gallery wall—the damage continues to be done. But these dry, chalk-like stones piled haphazardly on the floor continue to offer affordances, resulting in some apprehensive and unconfident signatures and pictures on the gallery wall. The space now feels uneasy, containing echoes of violence, of spent resources, of destruction. Was this the aftermath of a performance piece? Did visitors break the rules of the gallery game? Standing on the threshold of this space, in the absence of context, exactly what happened here?

The installation of the familiar, gentle request ‘Please Do Not Touch Artwork Beyond This Point’—the only formal instruction in When Sound Becomes Unsound—then represents one critical, final action of the exhibition itself. The point beyond which artwork interaction is transgressive has now reset to its traditional status quo (perhaps because of what happened previously?). In doing so, this sign requests that the guests disconnect from the carefully cultivated, uniquely interactive agents they have become. As a result of these jarring shifts between different roles and responsibilities, the exhibition becomes a meta-space where the tensions between external environments and internal expectations are laid bare, representing a series of dynamic, on-going challenges for the gallery visitor.

Because if you follow the instruction, at least for now, this particular magic circle is broken.

References

^[1] Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston, MA: The Beacon Press.

^[2] Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

^[3] Taylor, R. (2022). Creature Comforts [Board Game]. KTBG.

^[4] Riffaud, F. & Rodriguez, J. (2015). The Grizzled [Board Game]. Sweet Games.

^[5] Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

^[6] Beck, J. (2024, 15 November). Rudolf Stingel: A trace. https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2024/11/15/essay-rudolf-stingel-a-trace/

^[7] Coopmans, C. W., Kaushik, K., & Martin, A. E. (2023). Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison. Psychological Review, 130, 935–952.