“… historical evolution of everyday life showing: a) the gradual dissociation of quotidian [i.e. pertaining to the everyday] and non-quotidian (art, religion, philosophy) and the consequent dissociation of economics and direct returns, work and production, private and public affairs,” writes Henri Lefebvre in Everyday Life in the Modern World.[1] Lefebvre explains that the repeated continuing division of labor in late-capitalist society encourages a similar continued division in space; what was once few are now endless in quantity. What does this have to say about the division of the space of the everyday and art? Before the construction of the space of the art gallery around the 17th century, art could be termed as an everyday interaction, religious icons, tonal paintings for the middle-class, and so on.
The invention of the art gallery/museum space – at least close enough to its present form – was beginning to arise as urban structure during the 17th and 18th centuries, from the early example of the private galleries of the French aristocracy, to the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford built in 1683, to the large museums (built in the 18th century), such as the Louvre, British Museum, and Uffizi Gallery. However, the gallery/museum space seemed to have a consequence, leading towards a greater division between art space and everyday space. Obviously, the division could not be said to be polar opposites, for instance, recall at public sculpture while walking in a park and outside a government building, and this has been happening for centuries.
But my concern is not public monument, but rather the gallery space, specifically the gallery space as what Foucault described as a ‘heterotopia’ in his lecture “Of Other Spaces” in 1967 (although not published until 1984 after his death). Heterotopias lie somewhere between reality and utopia, yet is place-less place. The museum is one of these because: “Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit … the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.”[2] Although it seems Foucault is perhaps speaking more about the large ‘everything’ museums of the Metopolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, National Gallery (London), etc., it is still applicable to an understanding of smaller specifist galleries –such as Henry Moore Institute or the National Museum of Photography (Bradford) – changing exhibitions and a space for display.
Early avant-garde gestures (such as those by Marcel Duchamp) and moreover artists of the 1960s and 1970s – especially those starting off from a Dadaist position. Brian O’Doherty (a.k.a. Patrick Ireland), in his articles for ArtForum during the 1970s entitled “Inside the White Cube,” discusses issues of the frame and horizontal/vertical space in the gallery, arguing that the pure white gallery walls are coded with the ideology of museum/gallery laws – historical contextualized. O’Doherty presents artists whose second-order gestures have subverted the frame and the supposed “content-less” empty walls. With the avant-garde collage, the gallery itself became a kind of canvas. However, n the artists O’Doherty uses in his argument (Schwitters, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Duchamp, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Klein, and Arman, just to name a few) are not simply working ‘against’ the gallery system, as if they are in an epic battle; obviously there are dealers, collectors, curators, and money behind these anti-gallery gestures.
However, my issue at hand is not primarily the frame, but rather how several artists have gestured toward not simply a collapse of space between frame and wall, but gallery and “the outside” (i.e. everyday life), the entrance of the gallery doors so to speak. The everyday aspect of the geneology of Dadaism has perhaps been taken for granted; that is to say there is more than simply the statement: ‘artist X uses everyday objects A and B, influenced by the Dadaist readymade …’ Yet the convergence between what the gallery traditionally meant and the everyday-outside, is a interesting collosion spatially.
It may seem appropriate to begin at the earliest instance, but first let me begin somewhere in the middle with Duchamp’s readymades. The Fountain failed to be accepted – under the pseudonym R. Mutt – in the exhibition for the Society of Independents in 1917. O’Doherty – although referring to Duchamp’s Coal Bags (1938) – explains that: “If it is successful it becomes history and tends to eliminate itself. It resurrects itself when the context mimics the one that stimulated it, making it ‘relevant’ again. So a gesture has an odd historical appearance, always fainting away and reviving.”[3] Although, Duchamp’s unassisted readymade became more successful through its rejection, and more recognized in its later display in the mid-20th century through fabrications (the original was lost). The Fountain, as a urinal, is an object misplaced – or rather replaced – from the private space of the bathroom, to the more public space of the exhibition. Duchamp is a spectre preceding over art during the second half of the 20th century. As an initial statement, his urinal is ‘out of place’ in the gallery environment, a space “constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church.”[4] Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862-3) – or even Olympia – also illustrates this theme of the out of place: the out of place nude with clothed men, that the spaces of the history of the classical nude and the idle middle-class of Impressionism have been collapsed onto a single 2-dimensional surface. My intent is to discuss issues of out of place/replaced issues, specifically that of the everyday, especially that of production, reproduction, commodity, and time; and the ruptures or discontinuity (recall Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge) that can occur. A point where Lefebvre divisions (and consequently the limits or borders) of space, in late-capitalistic society, are questioned or displaced: when neither can remain the same as long as memory holds.
French artist, also part of the New Realism movement, Arman’s Le plein (1960) staged at the Galeries Iris Clert in Paris, was “an accumulation of garbage, detritus, waste. Air and space were evicted until, in a kind of reverse collage, the trash reached critical mass by pressing against the walls. It could be seen pressing against the window and door.”[5] The gallery was filled with junk, products/commodities – now waste; moreover, the gallery was filled so much so, that it was impossible to enter the gallery, the visitor was forced to remain outside on the pavement, looking through the windows. What is particularly interesting about this is that it is a gallery event (it is not the same a sculpture park), and the visitor can never really enter the gallery, inside existing still within the everyday of walking down the street, i.e. transportation and the time it takes to walk from point A to point B.
Further to this idea of transportation is Greek artist Jannis Kounellis’s Dodici Cavalli Livi (1969), held at the Gallerie de L’Attico in Rome, a work consisting of twelve live horses. Perhaps of all the artists I have mentioned herein, this artwork in particular has a very direct sensory and proximity effect upon the viewer: through sound, sight, and smell. This is akin to the audience anxiety of seeing a live performance, of the proximity to stage presence. Obviously, the stabling of horses is something that is acted inside/indoors, of course in a stable; the inside of the gallery is not the same as the inside of a stable – the division of spaces in high civilization. The choice of twelve horses was not accidentally: there are 12 apostles, 12 months of the year, etc. Also, horses are part of rural farmed landscape; yet with the invention of mechanical technology, the horse has become more associated not with work, but rather with play and leisure. For instance, carriage rides in NYC central park. There are many artists and periods I could have selected when discussing an issue such as the out of place, the gallery, and the everyday. However, this particular piece (performance perhaps) stood out because the gallery acted as if it were a stable, complete with water and hay; even Arman’s work of a gallery acting as a junk yard.
Relating to this theme masquerading gallery space and the crisis of inside/outside, Martha Rosler’s Monumental Garage Sale (1973) first held at the student gallery at the University of San Diego – then later again at the artist space La Mamelle’s actual garage – was a operating garage sale within a gallery environment, as both your everyday garage sale and simultaneously an art event. Currently, this piece is being re-gestured at the ICA in London. Rosler was addressing issues of the effects of social relations in commodity value, as well as representation (recall Kounellis) in her piece, coming out of a West Coast USA counter-culture – the everyday of commodity exchanges. The audiotape being played in loop during the event repeating sentence such as but not limited to: “What is the value of a thing? What makes me want it?” and “Will you judge me by the things I’m selling.”[6] Space is an important characteristic of much of Rosler’s work, such as her Bringing the War Home series of photographs superimposing images of the Vietnam War onto images of high middle-class living, bringing together the space of war and domestic capitalism onto a single photographic surface.
In Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze explains that exact reproduction is not possible, that even if these resemble each other, they can still be different in kind: “Repetition can always be ‘represented’ as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind.”[7] The garage sale, the stables, the junk yard as art gestures are different since, of course, they are being made in art world and market; they resemble the everyday, yet different because they are questioning gallery space rather than reproducing it. The heterotopic gallery/museum is under an identity crisis (especially during the 1960s and 1970s and the decades question of traditional rigid systems), as familiar spaces are brought out of place into gallery spaces.
[1] Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London, England: Continuum, 2002), 38-9.
[2] Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" (1967), fourth principle.
[3] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 70.
[4] Ibid, 7.
[5] Ibid, 90.
[6] Catherine de Zegher (editor), Martha Rosler: positions in the life world (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 131.
[7] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London, England: Athlone Press, 1997), 2.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Porte Spazio (2005)
Leeds City Art Gallery, England
"Negotiating Us, Here and Now arose around connections with Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy, whose aim as expressed in the installation ‘Porte Spazio’ (above) is to integrate art with other realms of society. Alongside this work each of the six artists represented in the project negotiated with people and communities in Leeds through different and effective artistic tactics or methodologies. These included performance, dialogue, humour and confrontation."
Martha Rosler, London Garage Sale (2005)
Insitute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London
"It is easy to state that a work of art is a commodity. It is much more difficult to determine which commodities are works of art.' Boris Groys ... Garage Sale, with its reference to the status of the art work, art history and art audiences, is interested in examining art as a fetishised object and commodity. It is also a representation of a subjective history and a way of thinking, and it works as a potent metaphor for personal and social relations — especially given its genesis within the highly politicised context of the women’s movement in the 1970s."
Jannis Kounellis, Dodici Cavalli Livi (1969)
L'Attico Gallery, Rome
"Carried out partly to confront the economic interests on which galleries are based, this installation took place over a three-day period. The artist chose horses of various breeds and colours, associating them symbolically with energy and power. At the same time he set up ironic art-historical associations with equestrian statues or the horses in the allegorical and mythological paintings of the Italian Renaissance."
David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000), 171 fig 87.
Arman, Le plein (1960) - Iris Clert Gallery, Paris
Also see 4.jpg)
