Gabriel Coxhead

For the second in a monthly series of posts introducting our trustees and asking them to delve into our archive, we meet Gabriel Coxhead:

Please introduce yourself, and say why you are a trustee at Matt’s Gallery:

I’m a critic and writer, and also the director of the artistic Estate of my late mother, Susan Hiller. I’ve been coming to Matt’s Gallery for literally as long as I can remember, and some of the most memorable and formative exhibitions of my life – Richard Wilson’s 20:50, Rose Finn Kelcey’s Bureau de Change, Susan’s own An Entertainment – were ones I experienced at the original Martello Street space as a child. I became a trustee because I wanted to help maintain that legacy of ambitious exhibition-making for future generations.

What have you chosen from the archive and why?

I was tempted to revisit some early exhibitions Susan did at Matt’s; and I did come across some nice images of me, aged two, with my parents at the private view for Work in Progress (1980). But actually it was my late father, David Coxhead’s, connection to Matt’s that became my starting point, via the essay he wrote for the publication accompanying Amikam Toren’s exhibition, Actualities, in 1984.

In a strange coincidence, one of the subjects mentioned in David’s essay happened to feature prominently in the news on the very day, some 40 years later, that I visited the archive, namely Israel’s participation in the Eurovision song contest. Also, looking over various layout drafts for the publication (from the era when typesetting was required), Robin Klassnik pointed out how David’s text had been conceived as a kind of acrostic, the initial letters of each paragraph together spelling out C-A-G-E.

From there I was led to a whole range of material relating to Actualities, including contact sheets of unpublished photographs documenting Amikam Toren’s whittled-down chair-skeletons and wall-mounted cardboard boxes decorated with cardboard-pulp images of themselves – objects which seemed to have been salvaged, reprocessed in some ironic way, and fed back into themselves. Equally interesting were binders relating to Toren’s first exhibition at Matt’s, Bluff and Double Bluff (1981), which contained amongst other things a 1976 manifesto where he satirically proposes a new commercial enterprise selling off units of time from his own life. The invite card for that show, too, was a work of art in itself, the image depicting a ragged fragment of typewritten text pinned to a wall: a sort of anti-biography, a career summary in negative, comprising statements that precisely did not apply to Toren. So it was a witty, philosophically provocative piece of text-based conceptualism – yet one which it was fascinating to see being developed materially across numerous drafts, with different typefaces trialled, and multiple attempts made to achieve just the right amount of distressed effect for the paper, the precise degree of tear and crumple and scrunch.