What happens in the exhibition stays in the exhibition

There’s a moment in Succession, during the episode ‘Too Much Birthday’, when, upon entering Kendall Roy’s bad acid trip of a 40th party, guests are asked to hand in their phones. “Kendall would like his present to be everyone being present,” says the check-in attendant. 

I’ve had my phone seized a few times before entering an exhibition. Mostly, it’s been an inconvenience. Sometimes, it’s meant rawdogging the mediocrity of a brand-sponsored ‘immersive experience’ during which I would have given my left eyeball to have the crutch of my G-Mail inbox. Once, for Tomás Saraceno’s Serpentine exhibition, I was grateful to have my phone confiscated. There’s something about boxes of live spiders that command full attention. 

I’ve had to view exhibitions almost exclusively through the screens of others. I’ve heard people say they’ve only been to exhibitions “for the ‘gram”. More worryingly, I’ve been to shows curated specifically to the ratio of an Insta post. I’ve often wondered if banning phones in shows is a good idea. It’s every art institution’s dream to have as many visitors ‘present’ as possible, but for most, the prospect of losing social media reach is a sacrifice too far. Digital technology has made art more inclusive, but it’s also shrunk the opportunity for tangible engagement – you know, the stuff that actually gets under your skin, and lingers longer than a 24-hr Insta story. 

So when curator and advisor Daniel Malarkey arrived in my texts inviting me to the first of an ‘Offline’ exhibition series held at his gallery-office in Bloomsbury, I bit. The only comms was a single message containing the artist’s name and the date from which works could be viewed, and some house rules:

No images will be shared in advance.
Photography, video and social media use are not permitted.
Visitors are invited to engage with the artworks directly and without distraction of digital devices.
Pricing is available upon request, and works may be acquired through direct conversation.
Images of artworks can only be shared with printed press.

I thought, “Crikey, he’s got his work cut out!” I reviewed one Tate exhibition as a ‘pre-Internet journalist’ and nearly got Carpal tunnel syndrome. But I admire anyone with a punchy concept and some discipline in an age of complacency. Plus, I love a tease. And according to the many Gen-Zs I find myself around these days, apparently it’s ‘edging season’.

Harriet Lloyd-Smith: Let’s go back to the beginning. You said this idea had been in the works for a while. 

Daniel Malarkey: The idea for Offline relates to an experience I had in my early twenties. I saw Munch’s painting Love and Pain at the Met, New York. I didn’t have a camera phone at the time, just a Nokia. I remember my whole body shaking and the feeling of butterflies and excitement. I’d seen in textbooks growing up, and never thought it would create such a visceral reaction in person. In my role as an advisor, I need to take videos and photos very quickly when I’m seeing an exhibition to share it with clients. So I wanted to re-establish the emotional relationship between an artwork and the viewer, and I felt it was only possible to do that if you are not able to record it in any way while you’re looking at it.

HL-S: Working so internationally, digital media will be a huge part of your day-to-day. How do you square that with a passion for seeing art IRL and how do you encourage your clients to do the same? 

DM: My clients all would love to see artworks in person, but due to the distances between galleries and timings, they can’t always view a work in time for a decision that needs to be made. So I think that digital media is really advanced and useful, and I love it. I love being able to take very high res raw images on my camera, as well as videos, and proportion shots and I describe with a voice note to my client how it feels, and how the colours can look different in the photos they do in person. 

HL-S: That’s interesting, you’re adding another sensory experience via verbal communication. 

DM: Yes, I’ve had to fly to Italy, New York, Portugal to see an artwork to describe the client exactly how it looks in person for them to make a decision, especially on higher value works. So yes, I do think the digital side of collecting is here to stay, and we have to use these tools. My clients don’t have time to fly to every exhibition around the world. 

HL-S: Whenever anyone makes an artwork, puts on a show, publishes an article, they’re hoping it gets as much exposure as possible. Doing an offline show, were you worried about not reaching people? 

DM: The first show is about the manipulation of truth, fake news and that truth itself is actually hard to come by. I’m comfortable with the fact that this show won’t have the same kind of international reach as it would if the famous people who come and view it Instagrammed it. But I think that’s the point of the show; it’s about word of mouth, about seeing something that feels like an exciting experience. Although Wilfredo Prieto is a super respected, institutionally loved artist who showed in the Cuban pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, all the artists I chose haven’t had a huge amount of exposure in the UK. So it’s through art-world whispers that people will come to see it. And that is more powerful than social media. 

HL-S: You’re much more likely to talk about something if you’ve actually had the chance to digest it. Wilfredo’s canvases (which I got to see IRL yesterday!) are beautiful. Delicate, rhythmic mounds of paint – some blended, some staccato – which each respond to different headlines from fake digital news stories, including Thailand’s king isolates himself in a luxury hotel in Germany with 20 concubines (2020). Why did Wilfredo’s work feel like a good place to start? 

DM: I had already decided I was going to do these Offline shows, and then I saw his work in person, and I was in love with how the paint has come out of the tube untouched on raw canvas. Sometimes he decides to work that paint in, and other times he leaves it, and it feels almost edible. Originally, when he made these paintings, they could only be shown online because it was during Covid and no one could travel. He was doing these paintings in response to fake news articles, they were then shown and sold online by his galleries. Now they can’t be shown online. It just felt like a poetic tour de force. 

HL-S: How do you hope the shows will be a positive experience for the artists and the clients? What’s the aspiration?

DM: The first aspiration is that you come here and you see the work, and it’s actually like you’ve come to my house and the artist is present and you’re meeting him for the first time. That’s about relating and reacting and connecting with the artist directly, which is actually sometimes uncomfortable because we don’t know how we’re going to react to work, just like when I was in front of that Munch painting and my whole body started convulsing with this energy I couldn’t understand. And the second part about it is to go back to an old way of seeing, which could be said, is a new way of seeing, which is to really see the work. Then when they go to see another gallery show, their eyes feel fresher and clearer. I’m asking people to actually see, think, and don’t just take hearsay. You know, a lot of people put big opinions about artists out there, and I still think we have to go back to looking at the work itself.

HL-S: You started off talking about walking around a gallery with a Nokia. A lot of people reading this will never have experienced art without a camera phone at hand. Are you personally more conscious about how you view art since thinking about this series? 

DM: How I view art has been growing over many years, from practicing making art a huge amount when I was young, to learning about art history and the market. My practice is a lot of research and learning. And when I look at images, I think, “where do they come from? Which artists did this before in a different way?” So it’s a more analytical approach to reading pictures. It’s really important to my practice as an advisor. I felt I needed something slower, more conversational, that didn’t have that kind of pressure of moving at such a high speed. 

HL-S: You’ve got shows with Lewis Chamberlain, Mia Kokkoni, and Claudio Montini coming up next for Offline. All very different artists of different generations. Why do you think each of them will work in this format?

DM: I actually saw two of them on social media first! I’m making choices with some instinct, but I have reasoning and a rationale behind each one. But I’m not a gallery, I have no interest in being a gallery. So this hybrid space is a really creative situation. And I think each one, in person, will do something different for you. 

HL-S: You say you have no desire to be a gallerist, but you’re showing these works in a small gallery-esque space within your offices. What’s it been like having people come into your office to view the show? 

DM: It feels very comfortable for me to have people come to the space because it’s different without the phone. You feel relaxed, you feel like you’re not being recorded, and you’re having this experience with someone. The image not being taken changes it completely.