Press coverage

The Times, 14 April 1995

Blueprint, April 1995:
"We meet at his London studio to discuss Self Storage, the installation that Eno, fellow artist-musician Laurie Anderson and eighteen of Eno's RCA students are devising in association with Artangel for a 650-unit storage depot next to Wembley Stadium. 'It's a very neutral. strange space and mysterious because you are always wondering what's behind all these doors,' says Eno. The team has 30 or so empty units, varying from 50 to 4,500 square reet in size, to fill with unexpected diversions, sonic interludes and art stunts. A series of spoken stories by Anderson - 'some of them abstracted so they become almost pure sound' - are the starting points for these environments, but with one month to go Eno is candid about how much remains to be done." (Rick Poynor)

The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 1995:
"A walk along its echoing corridors invites speculation. What lies behind the padlocked doors? The contents of private houses, private lives? Caches of stolen goods? Cannibalised car parts? Cannibalised bodies? 'It's marvellous, isn't it?' says Brian Eno, musician and mentor to a generation. 'I think this one,' - he thumps on a door - 'is actually several tons of sultanas.' In an upstairs room, Eno and a team from the Royal College of Art are at work planning what - it is safe to say - will be the first-ever exhibition of art to be staged in a storage centre. In fact, exhibition does not quite describe it." (Mick Brown)

Evening Standard, 5 April 1995:
"In a windowless room in a Wembley storage warehouse, a woman is lying in a giant bucket of water, fully immersed as more water drips on to her from tubes stretching into the dimly lit corner. Upstairs in a different locked room, strange smells come out of a door, a goose egg lies smashed on a floor, 49 clocks are suspended in a darkened room and a hologram candle flickers and dies if you try to blow it out. This is Self Storage, a joint exhibition by Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson, and students from the Royal College of Art.
 
"[...] It may not be everyone's idea of art, but few would disagree that the one hour mystery tour through its corridors and rooms is great fun." (Tim Cooper)

The Independent, 6 April 1995:
"A seven-year old girl came up with the best analogy: 'It's like an advent calendar'. Just so, though the kind of advent calendar a hard-core surrealist might give his offspring to keep them weird and naughty. You walk along yellow lines and every so often an arrow instructs you to pull a door open and see what you can see: perhaps a huge ebony sarcophagus from Ancient Egypt, last resting place of Sisibeck, Vizier of Memphis; perhaps a bed of oversized "flowers" made of loudspeakers mounted on wires, waving in the wind from an electric fan; or a bank of power drills that burst into deafening, screaming life the second you prise open the door." (Kevin Jackson)

The Independent on Sunday, 9 April 1995:
"Open the first door and a bank of drills are switched on: eight of them, pointing at you, like a firing squad. I didn't know what they meant, but I enjoyed the shock. Next, in a bigger space, stands a vat of water, with a body suspended in it. It's a woman, in white, with a hosepipe running into her mouth. I gazed at her for ages, deciding first that she was dead, then that she was breathing through the hose, and finally that she was a waxwork. The second thought turned out to be the right one. The woman is the artist, Michelle Griffiths; the work is a modern self-portrait. It beats a dead shark any day." (Jack Hughes - read full article)

The Times, 14 April 1995:
"Self Storage itself is as much about where it is as what it comprises or who is behind it. The gargantuan storage centre on Wembley Way comprises 650 units, ranging in size from box to bungalow, in which most people lock away things they can't fit in their homes - the RCA team, however, have occupied a few, filled them with art, and left them open. Arriving in this North London wasteland is a crucial part of the experience.

"[...] Most who tread this famous path have come to watch football or lock away crates of shop-soiled longjohns. You have come for art. It takes the form of 'sculpture' - rendered here in sound and smell as well as in solid form. A yellow line on the floor guides you round the dim corridors, and among countless locked doors are those that open into exhibition spaces.

"[...] Never before have the corrugated plastic suburbs of DIY land seemed so full of poetry." (Giles Coren)

The Wire:
"While this may not be multimedia as readers of this page have come to understand it, the concepts behind Self Storage have direct parallels with, and gesture at, the 'new' medium while integrating, reinventing and reflecting existing media. Moreover, interactivity is integral to the success of the installation." (Mark Espiner)

Everything magazine, 1995:
"The maze-like building requires that you are escorted (you might step over the skeletons of people foolhardy enough to enter without a guide) and by virtue of that fact your appreciation of these self contained pockets of artistic activity becomes something to do with other people. Your appreciation of the work becomes collaborative because you have to take it in turns to sniff the door or to put your head betWeen the pipes. You discuss together whether it would be appropriate to sit in the chair in the room entitled Torture Chamber. You become aware of the unspoken etiquette which every informal group develops: tall people at the back, shorties at the front; don't push - take it in turns; come along, don't dawdle. And of course this fussiness is all part of the fun." (Pangloss)