How do people experience art galleries? Lately I've been thinking about how to convert an abandoned storefront in Long Island City into an apartment and art gallery. It's a clean well lighted space in the front with all the amenities pushed to the sides in the back. Visitors who come in can look and linger, sit and read a book, have a drink in the kitchen or chat outside on the deck. While working as a docent at The Frick Collection I've seen the impact of a domestic setting on the visitor's experience of a place. It's hard enough to imagine living in a place like the Frick, but people love the intimacy and immediacy of the rooms, and I believe that atmosphere allows them to get close to works of art, stay with the images and attend to the details.
Art galleries could use a bit of that--being more welcoming with respect to the viewer's comfort and intelligence. White walls present works of art in a clear and undistracted way, but the space as a whole has to be conducive to looking and thinking. People still look to galleries and museums to escape the intensities of life outside, but what are the political and esthetic implications of these rooms? My idea for The Homefront is to invent a sense of interiority while engaging the entire affective and mental, critical and collective capacities of our bodies. I want to expand the private domestic function of the apartment with the public display of works of art, defamiliarize my surroundings, inhabit a pedestrian space, and bring together the tensions between work and home.
Here are some photos of the place:
The former tenants were real estate agents selling units in the new high-rise condo across the street, which explains the décor. My parents and I had a first look at the place two weekends ago, and took some basic measurements. The back wall is currently closed off, but there's the potential to open up a door and build a nice deck.
I've not been but Melanie Flood was running her home as an art gallery in Brooklyn. She has since moved though. It's being explored more and more, perhaps as the need for work and home to consolidate or the convenience of it as well. There was an article in the Times about it last month, there was a picture of a woman with her jewelry cases in her dining room. We visited the Frick in Pitt. over Christmas and there is def. something different about interacting with art in a domestic setting over an institutional one.
ReplyDeleteI also thought of the Times article when reading your post:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/garden/10galleries.html
I attended an apartment show put on by one of the rotating exhibition programs that the article describes, but there were too many people at the opening to really experience how the art functioned in a domestic space. It also seemed somewhat contrary to the nature of a domestic space to have it completely taken over by the show and then deserted for the next venue.
When I visit collectors' homes, I certainly feel an ease when looking at art that I don't in an institutional setting. On the other hand, the personality of the collector is often so present in their acquisitions and presentation choices that it can bias my understanding of a work in a way that might not happen as much in an institutional setting.
Your project appeals to me because it promises to give the art the permanence that a rotating domestic exhibition program lacks. As a storefront space, it also creates a balance between the sterility of a public institution and the smothering influence of the collector.
In your post you brought up the political implications of exhibition spaces. For this project, I wonder whether a domestic space necessarily entails an art adjusted in its format and content to bourgeois domesticity, of the kind that has dominated artistic production since the nineteenth century. Or would this hybrid space encourage a similarly hybridized art, and if so, where could it ultimately find a 'home'?