FACTSHEET
Creating a Community:
A Place of Play
A gallery is one of the places that Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia or
“Other Space”. He means by that a sort of ‘Room of Requirement’ (for those
that know Harry Potter), a place which is not to be found on any “marauder’s
map”, a secret place where anything goes. The steps of the Opera House or
the large porticos of big institutions help slow us down from our everyday
frenetic pace; they prepare us to enter into the ‘sacred’ space of art.
In the past audiences experienced magic whilst walking in a gallery where one
moment you were in ancient Rome the next in Revolutionary France, the
gallery could be all places and times at once. Now, in the hyperreal anything
goes with contemporary art, the gallery is a place of not only paintings and
sculptures but dance, performance, video, piles of bricks and urinals. The
gallery carves out a place for contemporary art and helps define what art can
be.
The gallery helps mediate between the artworld (the artists, curators, writers
etc) and the public. It is a difficult role. On one side there is the problem of
elitism and artworld snobbery but without a little bit of this art would disappear
totally into the banal. Appealing to an audience, similarly, is clearly not a bad
thing, we want art to be accessible and meaningful to people, but on the other
hand when does cheap populism creep in? These questions are for you to
decide.
For some art should provide a point of critique on society, something that
challenges the status quo, for others this seems to be impossible especially
from within the safe walls of the gallery space. Perhaps this is the major
paradox. However as artists, the gallery does play a crucial role in protecting,
archiving and exhibiting art.
The High Altar and Art Priests in the White Cube
Indeed from a Romantic sense art cannot exist at all without a gallery. Modern
art is defined by being autonomous from social uses (say in a king’s court or
church). The Romantic artist was a free roaming poet beholden to no-one.
The artwork also was free and transportable, the opposite of a fresco. The
audience too was free, a group of individuals, a public, that could feel and
think about aesthetic things. In the premodern period you didn’t find peasant
art critics slowly pulling apart the artistic merits of an icon before they knelt
down and prayed. So the gallery is a modern invention, a sacred place for the
public. The first public gallery was the Louvre, a palace raided during the
French Revolution. The first purpose built gallery was Dulwich, in 1817. Art as
we know it only comes about as a product of modern cities, modern politics
and modern ideas about art.
The white cube gallery, with white walls and white light, is even newer.
Although Corbusier or the Bauhaus crew had already designed studios and
galleries along those lines it was with a new MOMA in 1939 that the museum
director, Alfred Barr, took us into the white cube era. The white cube is a more
extreme mode of Romantic autonomy. In these spaces art is purified and cut
off from everyday concerns (like politics and society). If you think of Pollock’s
abstraction, that spirituality in art needed an equally spiritual space.
So on one side there was the myth making that the gallery was totally apart
and above the dirty world of society and politics. It was a place of beauty and
sublimity that would affect the higher feelings in people. There was a hidden
hope though that this would indirectly effect the morality and ethics of the
society. The gallery was seen as a ‘civilising’ agent, which really was code for
pushing certain ideological barrows and civilising myths. Tony Bennett calls
this role of the gallery “The Exhibitionary Complex” where the gallery helps
control the public not set them free. The idea of the Greek columns at the front
is that we are all descended from the cradle of civilisation, Greece. The story
of what was beautiful was decidedly Eurocentric. But what if you were
Chinese or Aboriginal?
Backlash
We are all in the contemporary gallery still responding to many of the
criticism’s leveled at the modern art gallery from the sixties onwards (and not
just eurocentrism). The purity of the gallery became oppressive. How many
times can you paint squiggly abstract lines or black squares? In the end artists
did in fact want to reengage with the everyday and social problems (like
Vietnam, the civil rights movement or feminism for example). Art for them had
become too distant and purified. So some of the approaches to the gallery
during the 60s and 70s saw the wholesale disavowal of the gallery institution:
Land Art, Happenings, Underground Performance, Art Walks, etc. The idea of
Documenta here is very important, instead of a gallery it is called the 100 days
museum where art just bubbles up and then goes away again never to
coalesce into the ‘civilised’.
After the riots had died down the gallery type that was invented to accept the
challenge to the old academic model of the gallery was the Pompidou Centre
(a postmodern celebration of transparency and inversion). The legacy of this
space was that the gallery became a ‘cultural centre’ that could include a cafe,
a theatre, workshops and residencies for artists, a cinema and a library. The
gallery became more involved in the society and less in the elite as it became
less about educating its audience into the art world instead allowing a more
democratic approach to art in the first place.
The Contemporary Scene
This more open museum is definitely the contemporary model. Audiences
have become “emancipated spectators”, able to bring their own feelings to
things rather than kow-towing to the artist-god of Romantic genius. The new
curatorial models have become so free in relational aesthetics that the
audience makes the work themselves. There is no doubt that lecture series’,
supplementary public programs and workshops will have an increasingly
important role in the gallery. Artists have already responded to this more
public role expanding their practice outside the gallery spaces.
The white cube still exists but perhaps in a different way to its modernist
legacy. It is not necessarily so pure, but has become the universal symbol of
‘showing’. If you do not use a white cube then you want your audience to see
something else in your choice of exhibiting space (for example painting the
walls another colour, or showing outside the gallery). You might want the
audience to read in your work in the legacy of history that critiqued the white
cube. The white cube model is like a Westfield, easy to light and easy to
clearly see the work. For something that has been attacked so vehemently it
has remained surprisingly lasting.
Conclusion
The gallery is a dynamic machine for exhibiting work. The contemporary
gallery is constantly reappraising its role in society and how best to serve art
and its public. There are some artists whose work should only exist in the
gallery institution rather than the commercial gallery. There are some artists
who can only exist outside, on a walk, engaging directly with the everyday.
The gallery space has become a yardstick which as artists we can choose to
play with or against.
Oliver Watts
Copyright of NAVA and the author 2014. Information in this factsheet is presented as general
information only and should not be relied on as legal or financial advice. Legal advice should be sought
on specific legal issues.