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Art Galleries and a Consideration of
Space
The earliest art never resided in galleries. Rather, it resided in doing,
in making, in living one day to the next. In fact, it wasn’t until getting
along or warring with others—the social act—became important that art as
we think of it even existed at all, and then when it did, it resided in
the accumulation of knowledge necessary for survival and in the skill to
make objects which early man could use to put distance between himself and
mortality. And this distance, this space between life and death, is where
culture sprang up.
Culture has developed significantly since then, and art, despite a few
pendulum swings back and forth between democratization and elitism,
increasingly has been separated out of our daily life and living to
become, ironically, a luxury—a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, a
print—some thing we normally find in an art gallery, where, over bad wine
and worse cheese, we mingle in semi-rapt attention for a few moments to
ponder ourselves, ponder others, and ponder the means and reasons for all
our pondering.
Galleries. I suppose I have been thinking about galleries ever since I saw
a show in Washington, DC, some months back, which, coincidentally, was
about the same time I became aware of a letter written by an art dealer
who vitiated virtual art galleries to argue that the only true art
galleries are those committed to exhibiting art in physical spaces.
The show was at the Numark Gallery in the revitalized Penn Quarter, where
owner Cheryl Numark was exhibiting recent-ish works by Washington artist
Chan Chao. The show—18 or so life-size photographs of nude women—was hung
in the Gallery’s nearly square space so that when I entered the viewing
area I felt immediately surrounded by naked women.
I found the experience immediately and powerfully uncomfortable. My first
equation was that I had walked into a party of strange nudes, and my
second, once I had observed that the women were photographed in their own
domestic circumstances, was that I was somehow standing in their open
doorways and looking inside at them. It certainly didn’t help that I was
in the company of my mother, Washington art dealer Jane Haslem. I felt
simultaneously voyeuristic and inhibited. I didn’t want to view the images
despite my mother’s but especially Numark’s apparent indifference to them.
It wasn’t like the nudes were confrontational. Rather, in their homes,
they looked more than a little embarrassed and quite self conscious. I
wondered if my discomfort had anything to do with their discomfort. Or if
it had anything to do with the degree to which the women had stylized
their nether regions, so rectilinear and geometrically rendered were they
it was clear they had long been labored over. Or maybe my discomfort had
something to do with the medium itself. I mean, I more readily associate
naked women and photography with pornography than I do with art. Perhaps,
I thought finally, it had something to do with Chao’s technique, which
seemed much more interested in the clinical shooting of the subjects than
in the people themselves.
No, I decided, my discomfort had to do with the shave jobs, presumably for
public consumption. And with the women’s embarrassment. And with the way
they had been catalogued on the walls. And with something about the walls
and with something about the rest of the place. Open, with high lights,
and a huge garage-like door on one side, the gallery felt more like a
warehouse than an art gallery. And it was seeing these women, such as they
were, shot as they were, in this place that made me feel uncomfortable.
(That and my mother being there.)
A teacher, I am often asked what constitutes good art. How is one to
approach such a question, especially in a classroom setting where the end
of class seems never far off? Sometimes, I will talk about authorial
control over subject material, or about the felicitous interaction between
an artist’s personality and the genre in which he or she is working. Other
times, if I’m feeling long winded, and the clock is not ticking too loud,
I might begin with a history of aesthetics and chronicle its various
stages of development. Mostly, though, I take the easy way out and argue
in the most reductive of terms that good art equals compelling art, giving
in to our culture’s current fascination with subjectivity and relativism.
Seen in the latter of these lights, Numark’s exhibit of Chao’s work
constitutes good art, even if the work itself is not very good. For the
place brought out something in the work that compelled me to feel
immediately uncomfortable. The art was, well, the art, but the gallery
space itself provided a context or, more accurately, a kind of physical
commentary on the work. The space felt large and empty, emphasizing the
dehumanization of the subjects and pointing out our culture’s current
fascination with women right down to their neatly trimmed genitals.
Nothing new here, right? Perhaps not. But perhaps so. Perhaps Chao’s
work—seen in Numark’s space, her warehouse-like space—compelled me to
confront a significant shift in the way in which contemporary men and
women have been socialized to understand themselves and interact with one
another.
The shift, brought about by cultural forces which have long encouraged the
disintegration of self, has displaced the human face as the primary site
for the expression of individuality and social interaction and resituated
it in both the face and the genitalia. Concomitant with this shift--and
perhaps explaining it--is the idea that the contemporary woman, long
sexually objectified, has internalized this objectification to the point
where she now displays stylized genitalia as part of how she understands,
comports, and experiences herself.
I mention all this by way of addressing a really simple point, and that is
that place can matter when it comes to exhibiting art. It can matter for
better, as when the place lends some quality of itself to the artworks
contained therein, and it can matter for the worse, as when something
about the place runs at cross purposes with the art. But place does not
have to matter.
I think now of the galleries I have known, places of convenience—the
homes, lofts, and studios--or of necessity—the motel rooms and garages.
Commercial galleries mostly live on the margins, rarely well enough
capitalized to offer more than what is conventional—that usually white
space with little or no furniture to compete with the artwork. These
galleries are the norm.
I think, too, of the galleries defined by personalities: Sylvan Cole and
his print laden den, nothing but stacks of inventory everywhere; well
dressed Alan Frumkin and his immaculate digs reminding all of us that it’s
okay for art dealers to look the part of a professional; and rumpled Franz
Bader who was such a heavy smoker that cigarette ashes regularly lent a
new dimension to virtually everything and everyone in his gallery.
No, I just don’t see how art dealers have to be committed to a physical
space in order to be art dealers. Sure, there is something to be said for
seeing art work in person and for taking in its full scope and dimension.
And, yes, I do appreciate well conceived galleries and relish the
opportunities I have to visit them and to talk to the incredibly committed
and serious and helpful and knowledgeable people who run them. But the
virtual galleries are so convenient and variable and informative and
indicative of the personalities behind them that I find visiting them
really quite satisfying. I just don’t expect any cheese.
John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic
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