Alexander Barr
Temples of Art
This isn’t about the Prado, MoMA, Tate Britain, Guggenheim Venice, The Hermitage, the Musée d’Orsay, or anywhere else that houses a permanent art collection. Those places do hold temporary exhibitions, but not as their main enterprise. The galleries that fascinate me are the ones that stake their entire existence on the unknown and untested. That commit themselves to ever-changing exhibitions of new work.
I relish visits to those places. Which may seem odd, because only about ten percent of the time does the work on show inspire me. If I don’t engage with the other ninety percent that’s my idiosyncrasy. (My wife loves zucchini and cauliflower, which I find tasteless.) But I always enjoy the space. Just as eating in a restaurant is about much more than food, the experience is about much more than the exhibits. An installation or sculpture in the centre of a floor draws attention to the expanse of parquet or terrazzo around it, as an island draws attention to the sea. A video projected on a wall emphasizes tiny cracks and blemishes whose significance alters with each new image. The penumbra round the projection can seem alive with mystery.
I’m intrigued by those expanses of white or gray wall, corridors, lifts, flights of stairs, arrays of roof lights with remote-control blinds, electric lights that need tall ladders or scaffolding towers to reach, air-conditioning trunking, notices with subtle graphics, and of course attendants, one to a room, inscrutably watchful. What might they be thinking? And my fellow-visitors—where are they from, are their clothes foreign, and if couples, are they deeply in love or about to part?
I imagine the effort it takes to bring all this Art together: specialized packing-cases, experienced removers with serious faces, concern about the sizes of doorways, lifts, loading bays, and roller shutters. I admire the capacious bellies of those oddly bloated freight aircraft that ferry loans from Beijing, Tokyo, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro.
I’m fascinated by the products that support the exhibits—wires, brackets, shelves, bolts, stands, plinths, projectors, detailed lighting, complex patterns of electrical leads, many in temporary arrangements for the current exhibition. They aren’t the kind of bits and pieces you see in your local hardware store—too elegant and unusual, their stainless steel more subtle and finely contoured than the steel of my kitchen knives and pans. I imagine some mysterious resource known only to art curators. If the work on display is three-dimensional I sometimes do a double take, mistaking a stand or bracket for yet another piece of sculpture. But why not, if one aim of art is to make us see the world through different eyes?
An interesting sidelight on this is when the whole space becomes the exhibit. Two occasions stand out in my memory, both at the Venice Biennale. Each country has a pavilion, and that year Romania’s was completely empty. A printed statement announced that this was intentional, to arouse a sense of loss and memory as one looked at traces of previous events—scars on the wall left by tape and placards, screw holes left by fixings, unexplained gouges in the plaster. The barn-like building itself had no charm, but somehow held an air of expectation, like an empty apartment awaiting a new tenant. That sense of endless possibilities before the clutter of daily living narrows everything down.
The other space that became the main event was the large empty foyer of an exhibition building. Despite there being no art works, there were three attendants in the usual self-contained postures. Suddenly they all moved, dancing round close to the walls chanting, “This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary,” repeating the chant until just as suddenly they froze in their previous positions. The effect was delightful. The space had come alive.
What of the works of Art themselves, the galleries’ raison d’être? Even when unmoved, I’m impressed—definitely impressed—because someone, or someone’s team, has filled sketchbooks, bought steel or resin, collected unusual objects, applied for grants and bursaries, glued and drilled and welded, applied paint, helped to choose those specialized fixings, sweated for hours in some cluttered studio or sat on a cold mountainside or sweltering prairie with a camera. Sometimes, if their work is unusually large, they persuade the curator to demolish part of the building to allow it in.
All this effort proves that the artists (whose ‘statements’ I always read) have no doubt their work is worthwhile. That’s a big issue for me. Whenever I try to create something I struggle against a nagging inner voice that whispers, ‘What’s the point? What difference will it make? Who the hell are you to do it anyway?’ (I suspect that voice might come from my parents. Bless them—they did their best.) So those works, sanctified as Art by appearing in one of those temples, are my role models.
Those hallowed gallery spaces answer the agonized question ‘What is Art?’ To quote Marcel Duchamp (aka R. Mutt) on the celebrated urinal,
‘Mr Mutt . . . CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.’
He chose it! Art is indeed a matter of choice: what to leave out, what medium to employ, what tradition to ignore or follow. We could call choice Step One in defining an oeuvre as Art. Step Two would be the title (or new title). As with the names of God, a title confers power, raising the work beyond the commonplace. Finally, selected to appear in one of the galleries I’ve described, which risk everything to present the new and untried, it achieves its apotheosis. Its status is now beyond question. Displayed, labeled, accompanied by an artist’s statement, then, my friends, it’s Art.
I used to worry about the puzzlement and emptiness that many of those installations, assemblages, collages, canvases, videos arouse in me. Then I realized: puzzlement is good! It has the mind-expanding quality of a Zen koan. Emptiness is also good. Marveling that those vast suites of rooms exist, paid for, staffed, maintained, serviced, promoted, I bring to the scene my tribute to whoever provided them, in the form of my own emptiness.
