When you’re walking through a gallery, there are a few tell-tale phrases to look for to see if someone is totally clueless. “My ten year old daughter could make that…” or “It just seems like a lot of naked people.” But by far the most reviled and lowest guttural phrase from the Philistine vocabulary is “I don’t know where I would put it in my living room.” Some of us have said it to meet the cold gaze of the artist, the calm before the snark, inevitably followed by “Yeah, I don’t know either,” as they turn to the champagne and search for the most immediate exit from the conversation. It’s almost like a swear word. But I challenge the notion that picturing a painting on your kitchen wall can serve as a certification of idiocy! I think it comes from the right place, and a place we need to consider before whipping out the knife eyes and shaming anyone who pictures art (god forbid) on their wall.
(Before I continue, I want to say that I am aware that the purpose of art is almost always larger than decoration. Of course it’s communicative, a reflection of self, a set of values, or the values of a culture or a niche of people, it speaks and demonstrates a range of views, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I also understand the implications of the phrase “I don’t know where it would go in my living room.” It pigeonholes a piece of art into a purely decorative function, and can show a limited knowledge of what art can do.)
All that said, “I don’t know where it would go in my living room” comes with a set of important statements and questions, the first being “I don’t know where this belongs, but it doesn’t seem like it belongs here.” This natural recoil at seeing certain art on a white wall with gallery lighting should tell us something about how we treat our art. It’s clinical, emotionless, placed in the blankest possible cool gallery ethos, often separating the piece from the hints at the feelings, ideas, and stories that inspired it.
The word “museum” often brings to mind both a place to muse, and a collection of muses, though the word has become a bit debased from its root. It also seems a bit paradoxical. Picture a bird watcher thinking back to seeing his first birds as a child, musing over flight, or sound, or color, experiencing them with fresh eyes as time is at its most potent. Then his life continues as he adds variations and replicates the feeling. The spark of the muse couldn’t have been created by a caged bird. Picture him at the opposite end, deep in expertise, leading a team deep into the rainforest on the brink of discovery, droplets hitting skin, parrots and frogs chirping, the ripe smell of petrichor, the excitement… then picture the trees and sounds fading. The entire landscape turns a flat blank white and the bird he’s looking for sits on the only tree left. It would be anticlimactic, maybe enough to halt a career of bird watching. Or maybe he just finds it in a room lined with cages, a perfect specimen, safe and untouched. If the bird were released it could become damaged. It could even die. It would be safer to keep all the birds safe from predators, and regulate their diets to make sure they’re healthy, and let people occasionally come in and marvel at all the things they could possibly do, right?
Of course not! “God saw bird so he invented trees and the open sky.” The beauty of a bird is seeing it fly, letting it be free and live. So then, why don’t we do this with out art? At least when someone is picturing it in their living room they’re trying mentally to take it out of the cool ethos of the box. Sometimes when you look at something closely you realize some of the fundamental axioms are out of place, and I believe the Postmodern mentality when viewing art can easily be seen as misplaced.
We go to museums and see marble columns and Greek gods and Impressionist landscapes, and we marvel at them a bit, but not nearly to their potential, because we expect them to be right there in the museum, untouched and on a pedestal. If the bird is released out into the sky, it could get eaten by a predator and sucked into a jet engine. Life is ephemeral, beautiful things are often frail, but that is a part of their beauty, they are a the final moments before the sun disappears over the horizon, a kiss too short, a book that leaves you wishing for words.
The infinite preservation and isolation of museums and galleries has some benefit, but I don’t think it has enough to be a standard. Why can’t we invent trees for our art to perch in as it pleases? Why can’t we just chase our wild muses through the landscapes?
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