<snip>
The art-space isn't hallowed, fetishism of the art-object cannot be the
primacy of our motive for looking at art. [RD]
<snip>
I don't think 'hallowed' is right either for what a gallery was or for what
it currently is.
Public galleries contain a great deal of material whose purpose has been
either lost or superseded (religious messages, demonstrations of social
status, the opportunity to stare respectably at ladies' bottoms and so
forth) but whose visible embodiment of materials and skill persist. So the
public troops around these rooms admiring a sort of sumptuous craft rather
than engaging with those other aspects. In which case, what is left that
isn't _merely_ craft? I'm of a mood to be pretentious, so I shall call it
*esteemable non utility*. The invention of *culture* as another form of
consumption seems to me to go along with modernity (with or without the
post-) and *esteemable non utility* is what art consumers consume.
So that's one aspect: we have rebranded a lot of stuff which retains its
status as *object*. And hard on its heels here's another. Along with
churches, courts, boardrooms etc, galleries (even virtual ones) sanction
both performative acts themselves and how they are construed. So what's a
performative act? It's when to say it is to do it, just about. So when
Duchamp says, for example, 'Anything is art if an artist says it is,' it's
in that context. You can't perjure yourself outside a Court. You can't
commit bigamy simply by living with someone: you need either a registry
office and/or a church. So in the case of galleries. The performative act
being sanctioned is *showing something artistic*, some *esteemable non
utility*, provided you are an artist. Duchamp breaks that rule twice over
with the urinal. However, that's not the same as breaking the hold of the
object. (Rosenberg's 'anxious object' was a response to a shift in the
degree information content contained within art objects, but not a great
deal more.) And when the public finally leaves the Impressionists rooms (if
it ever does) and starts to troop unwillingly round more recent stuff, a
certain confusion sets in: Is that a fire extinguisher or is it part of the
artwork?
What was it Isamu Noguchi said to Cage? 'An old shoe would look beautiful in
this room'? That's the effect of a gallery. Since it's also the effect of
*choice* by the artist one could argue either (a) that some artists use the
object to bring a sort of privileged gaze out of the gallery and into the
world, a useful thing to do, or (b) that creative practice has been absorbed
by the forces of cultural production and consumption, that the artist is now
just an agent of the gallery system, and that the world (around which we
continue to wander like alienated visual tourists) is now part of the
gallery in some sense, a condition of *real subsumption* in Marx's
terminology.
This is far too long. I shall stop.
CW
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'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
(Harry Partch)
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