In trying to reimagine the gallery or museum space with the hope of offering alternative forms for spaces created to display art, I have tried to organize my thoughts by breaking down the challenges and potential factors that might be important in considering solutions.
- It is first important to define what the central problems are, as they currently stand.
- Inaccessibility/Exclusivity, both intentional and unintentional (privatization of public spaces)
- Proximity to power and the reinforcement of power structures
- Problems with financial sources and donors (thinking about Warren Kanders and the Whitney)
- The use of art as a means of legitimizing of the institution/Tokenizing of individuals for the sake of the institution.
- Exploitation of artists, erasure of artists, politics of curation, etc.
- The art economy has alienated art from itself. The valuation of art is abstracted when it enters gallery spaces, museum, and private collections etc.
- Given these challenges, what are factors to consider in reimagining art spaces?
A reimagined art space would be accessible, equitable and participatory. It would, ideally, be focused on the interaction of the audience with the art in the most direct and unmediated way possible, without the built-in power dynamics that gallery and museum spaces construct and maintain. There should be no alienation between artist and viewer created by the space, and no alienation of the art from itself. Situated within a community or city, I would hope that the art space could function as a fluid, engaged, working part of that community.
- What might these different, perhaps incomplete, alternatives look like?
When initially thinking about this question, I realize that I was operating on a few assumptions. The first would be that any solution to a gallery or museum space must be a similarly permanent, lasting fixture in society. As brought up by my classmates in discussion, it is also possible to think about resistance as being collections of impermanent processes. Gallery spaces or museum spaces can be reimagined as a number of different kind of alternatives, and changing alternatives, that don’t have to be confined to one model. In thinking about alternatives to these kinds of ways of displaying art, there doesn’t have to be a single, ideal model that serves as a replacement.
With this in mind, pop-up galleries and exhibitions more closely approach something I am envisioning. Architecturally/spatially, they counteract the basic social dynamics imposed by the physical construction of a museum and gallery. They also carry the ability to be more participatory, more accessible, and independent of institutional bureaucracy and money. Pop-ups can happen anywhere, and they are by nature impermanent and fleeting. Worth noting, however, is that pop-ups have also come to represent something potentially even more culturally/socio-economically exclusive, specifically thinking about retail pop-ups and the significance of pop-ups in fashion and hype culture. This is also a reminder that the art world relies on clout by association and being “in the know”, which poses an obstacle to the cultural success of something more community-focused and socially equitable. This doesn’t change the basic positive potential of the pop-up as an alternative model to gallery/museum spaces, but it is an aspect worth considering and discussing.
I’m also drawn to the idea of a “community living room” or communal space that focuses on a variety of services that might include art. Many of these types of spaces exist in cities across the world, and at varying degrees of separation from traditional gallery/exhibition spaces, although they are disparate and distinct from one another. If there were a larger movement toward more widespread adoption of certain kinds of new gallery spaces, I think that would be more productive in shifting focus away from larger institutions. Perhaps a new format of community gallery space might look something like the structure of a community library, and how a library-like concept might merge with an art gallery. Community libraries are centers of productive community building and offer a valuable service in the distribution of knowledge and resources. Thinking about the display of art from that standpoint of its relevance to a local community is useful and critical in imagining ways of existing outside of the framework of the “art world.”
The problem is that under the capitalist logic that dictates culture far beyond the art world, there is an assumed model of growth, economically but also culturally, that requires expansion into more corporate territory. Ultimately, the natural trajectory of an art space becoming increasingly known and successful is to become more of an institution tied in with more corporate or commercial models and involved with larger power structures within communities, cities, or on a national scale. This is not impossible to resist, but it is difficult, I think. As we discussed in class, you see this balance being juggled in live time by an organization like AS220, which comes the closest to a lasting model for an alternative to art institutions. It is interesting, though, to consider the fact that AS220 may encounter contradictions in trying to stay bound to their basic ethos while expanding, financially but also physically as landowners of more and more properties. That said, places like AS220 are crucial in moving towards better models of thinking about art, artists and the display and exposure of art.
As we discussed, perhaps there is a way to rethink what “growth” entails when thinking about the trajectory of art organizations and institutions. Growth does not have to mean expansion of physical space—it could also look like using increased resources to create models for other organizations to follow, or to create a network of smaller, one-off projects like the ones discussed.
Although this exercise in attempting to unpack possible alternatives is only a very early start at processing these ideas, it has at least allowed me to reframe my frustrations with the art world and has made me more hopeful and excited about future possibilities. As more people are questioning the underlying systems and structures of these kinds of art spaces, I’m sure there will continue to be emerging forms of alternative spaces and new ways of disrupting the current frameworks by which we think about art. With more awareness of the need for systemic change, the landscape of the art world will only continue to break and transform, so I am optimistic about the creation of new kinds of spaces.
Reflection
As you can see, I found the task of re-envisioning an art space to be difficult, and I wrote and rewrote thoughts as I changed my mind on different aspects of what I was trying to consider. Outside perspectives helped me arrive at more comforting solutions, especially in getting rid of my own assumptions about the nature of growth/permanence of possible alternatives to galleries and museums. I think a lot of my thinking about these concepts feels personal, since I need to inevitably grapple with the spaces and processes by which my art is shown, received, etc. if I want to have a career in visual art. This assignment, and this class as a whole, was extremely helpful in allowing me the space and resources to think about and challenge these concepts more critically.
Ultimately, I think it is always going to be more comforting to turn to processes of creation rather than thinking about ways of distributing or consuming art. For that reason, I also wanted to produce art for this final portfolio. I was talking to a friend about different challenges I run into with artmaking, one of which being the difficulty in finding a sense of freedom in the creative process once you become reliant on your creative practice for work, or once you cross a certain threshold of immersion in a specific kind of creative practice. Personally, this is a challenge I face with illustration and visual art. It’s certainly not that I do not enjoy illustration or visual art as much as I used to—on the contrary, my dedication to drawing and painting continues to deepen every day. The problem is that I am so involved in it that I often find myself limited by my own hyperawareness of the work itself. I am very conscious of the world/culture my work exists in, and the commercial art world and the fine art world come with their own sets of complications and structural/cultural difficulties that I am very conscious of having to eventually navigate.
Because of this, I thought that this final portfolio would be a good chance to explore outlets of expression where I do not feel as limited by my own expectations for myself. I decided on song composition. I played guitar for 8 years, but I lost a lot of my understanding of theory/technical ability and have barely written my own music. Over the past weeks, I’ve given myself the space and time to explore songwriting more, which has been nice and creatively fulfilling in a newer sense. I wrote a short guitar piece called ‘April’.
