An improvised display area, rigged up from diverse bits of furniture covered in sheets. The things on display, an odd assembly of rejected works and test pieces donated by artists who no longer want them - kitsch little sculptures and 'bad' paintings mostly, purposefully ugly and indicative of a prevailing DIY aesthetic. The sad history of these works, the ghost-like quality of the sheets draped over tables and chairs, the basement gallery and the dim lighting came together to produce a brooding atmosphere, and a work that was spooky and melancholic. In hindsight I can see that this piece (made with the artist Matthew Leahy at Cubitt Gallery in 1999) was the prototype for what Goshka Macuga has since expanded into an oeuvre. Several elements already were in place which have become hallmarks of her practice: the improvised sense of community represented by this 'snapshot' of the scene; an interest in marginalia; the idea of the museum display; curatorial work; collaboration as a methodology; and the production of strongly immersive environments.

Museums by artists are nothing new, and it is unsurprising that those who have conventionally relied on museum structures to provide a frame, an interface with the public and a depository for the future should turn their critical attention to it and seek to claim ownership in both conceptual and material terms. Perhaps the most frequently cited of these (besides Marcel Duchamp's) is Marcel Broodthaers's Musée d'Art Moderne, Département de Aigles, Section XIXième Siècle, which, according to his longtime collaborator Jürgen Harten, was an attempt to produce a different kind of public space. Coming out of his participation in the 1968 Cultural Revolution debates at the