On Monday morning, the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art (SMCNCA) announced it would be closing temporarily, though with an air of indefinite pause, after it was discovered that the main Slough site had become saturated with lingering traces of nitrous oxide, more commonly known as laughing gas. The cause is still under investigation, but early reports suggest that a recent performance by Estonian conceptualist Jaan Karksi, entitled “Breath of the Commons”, may be to blame. The piece, intended as a critique of east European euphoria, involved the controlled release of medical-grade nitrous into the museum’s central rotunda. The control, it seems, was short-lived.
Since then, the museum’s staff have reported light-headedness, disorientation, and in one case, spontaneous giggling during a conservator’s condition report on a 17th-century Dutch still life. The painting in question, a solemn Pieter Claesz vanitas, features a skull, a guttering candle, and a timepiece. It is not meant to be funny.
“We thought it was a reaction to the irony of the museum’s existence,” said Nina Cartwright, founding director, in a statement issued from a temporary office in Reading. “But after several trustees began laughing during a board meeting about budget shortfalls, we realised it was more than postmodern tension.”
The irony, of course, is suffocating. This is a museum that has always trafficked in temporal slippage, pairing medieval devotional objects with contemporary sound art, or displaying a Rothko alongside a misattributed Etruscan bronze. Its very name flirts with paradox: a museum of both the new and the not-new. But laughter, unbidden, chemical, and contaminating, has now become a very literal vapour that suspends meaning, rather than complicates it.
In the words of the late Robert Hughes, “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.” What, then, to make of a museum overtaken by involuntary joy?
For all its eccentricities, the Slough Museum had begun to matter. In a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by bloated franchises and biennial fatigue, SMCNCA’s Slough outpost remained a strange and sincere curatorial experiment. It was a place where you might turn a corner and find a 1970s land art film projected onto a bin lid, or where a teenage gallery assistant would offer you a cup of builders’ tea and a pamphlet titled “Nonlinear Futures in the Age of the Algorithm.” There was earnestness in the absurdity.
Now, that absurdity has turned gaseous.
One can’t help but recall Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés, hidden behind a wooden door for decades, a tableau both revealing and obscure, beautiful and deeply unsettling. That’s what the Slough Museum was becoming: a secret you had to know how to look at. To see its doors sealed now, with hazmat tape fluttering beneath a disused banner reading “The Future Was Then”, feels like a minor tragedy in the art world’s long history of strange closures.
Cartwright remains hopeful. “We’re ventilating. We’re reassessing. We’re laughing less.” She says they’ll reopen once air quality levels are deemed safe and “the works can once again be viewed with the appropriate degree of tragic solemnity.”
Until then, Slough will remain silent, and perhaps all the more poignant for it.
