Double Agent or double crossed?

A title like Double Agent immediately prompts us to question the ethics of the contract between artist, the 'others' and the audience involved in their work: I wonder whether there is an expectation from today's art audiences that art might intend to deceive them?

'Last Lecture' (2007) by Barbara Visser and 'Them' (2007) by Artur Zmijewski seem to demonstrate this tension to me, leaving me with more questions than answers. Visser's video piece folds in on itself several times over. It is a video of a performance, involving a performance, which in turn involves a performance that was originally from 1997. The original performance was staged with an actress in place of Visser herself, linked by a remote microphone to the artist who provided live instruction on how to respond to the audience. This is repeated in the subsequent performances. The fact that Visser wasn't visible herself made me begin to doubt what I was seeing, leaving open the possibility that she was never there in the first place.

In Artur Zmijewski's video piece groups of Polish political and religious groups destroy each other's painted symbols and slogans over the course of four workshop meetings, seemingly designed to foster understanding rather than hostility. The piece ends with the eventual evacuation of the building and smoke filling the screen. Although Zmijewski has ostensibly provided a simple record of events; there is the chance that this action was directed and the events were set up - it feels like the political satire is stronger in the end as we can't quite tell.

In Pawel Althamer's work (jointly billed as 'Pawel Althamer/Nowolipie group') a group of disabled people from Warsaw are both the artists and the protagonists. The exhibition programme states that Althamer has worked with this group for over a decade, and that the works that they produce are an oblique form of self portraiture. I wonder if it is possible to better understand an artist's perspective when they are one or more steps removed from our experience of their work?

Phil Collins' piece 'you'll never work in this town again' (2004—ongoing) in many ways was the straightest in the show. Collins presents portraits of critics and curators that he has slapped in the face before photographing them. The rosy cheeks of the faces of the subjects in these portraits serve as the evidence that this has actually happened. The piece includes the curators of the show itself, Bishop and Sladen and their presence reveals their willing collaboration in the process.

On the other hand, deception does seems to be the crux of Joe Scanlan's presentation of the 'artist' Donelle Woolford. She was not present on my visit to the show, but her studio and work are in the centre of the exhibition space. Woolford is described as an up and coming artist from Harlem, but there are clues in the ridiculous arrangement of her studio that something is not right. She is said to be making work that references Cubism, which is presumably the reason why there is a postcard from Cuba on the wall. The scene is a naive stage representation of what an artist's studio might be like. I had prior warning though that the whole thing, including Woolford, is a creation of Scanlan's, and I ended up feeling kind of pleased that such a joke was unfolding in front of me. How successful can this piece be though if only some of the audience get the joke?

The show's remaining pieces involve the audience in their actual execution. In Dora Garcia's piece, 'Instant Narrative' (2006-2008), a writer sits at a desk across the room and surveys in real time what is happening in the exhibition space. As they type the words are projected onto a large screen opposite, in a kind of real world version of the subtitles that appear on live TV broadcasts. There is a moment too in Christoph Schlingensief's work 'The African Twin Towers – Stairlift to Heaven' (2005) when you realise that as an audience member you are participating in the work. I found the chairlift irresistible, and quickly realised, as I was halfway up the wall that I had become an object in the piece itself. I might have felt tricked into participating in these works, but really I was delighted that they were directly engaging me in their implementation.

The exhibition notes say that an approach, which uses others as agents in the work, raises questions of authorship, but in the end, for me, the question was really how much this displacement of authorship ultimately serves to lead us straight back to the artists themselves?