Having done a stint as live-in curator for a year of my life and currently living in a gallery (although the current space dynamic functions more as a gallery gallery classically defined as the white cube) I’ve experienced the daily balance of art and life. Yet it seems that people have been doing some variation of this for a while now. It’s not just the recession, it’s about control, it’s about aesthetics, and it’s about redefining both home and gallery.
The white box exists in order to provide the artwork with a blank slate, a space void of external meta-meaning. But over time the white box has collected it’s own repertoire in terms of how we define high and low art. White cube = high, cement wall in an alley = low. Bringing the work into the home, therefore, has become the new non-space. This place where one neither lives nor shows art, but does both simultaneously.
As a visitor in a home gallery you are constantly discerning the difference between art and non-art. It becomes a game of defining semantics: tooth brush – not art, stick tied to chair – art. And the line between what has been made for you to observe and examine and what has been made for you to use and discard becomes blurred. It’s weird, if you think about it – it’s sort of like bringing grandma to shop for her own coffin. By bringing the art directly to the home, you are bringing it to it’s final resting place. Whether it’s on the wall across from John’s Senior portrait or on the mantle next to that wooden duck, it’s more interesting to discern these objects in context with someone’s life.
Bringing me to the point of this post. My only problem with this article and these spaces is that more often than not they fail to acknowledge the home itself as a gallery. It always has been and it always will be.
Read the full article here: Gallery in the Home
