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Art spaces

Galleries and art museums, I want them close and accessible so I can stroll down spontaneously a Sunday afternoon to see the latest exhibition.

Exhibitions transform the space of the room. Intimate miniatures force the viewer up close, one has to marvel at details and pass slowly from one image to the next. Giant sculptures reaching to the ceiling make the room seem to have shrunk. Video works with sound and moving images immediately catch your attention, but who stops to watch more than a few minutes at most? Installations that expand into the room seem much more engaging to me. Paintings may need to be approached, then distanced from, viewed at different distances to grasp the composition or to perceive the fine brush strokes. To restate an observation made by Kandinsky, art takes time. The point represents the shortest time, a momentaneous staccato, the line is already a stretch of time that becomes more prolonged the more wiggly the line is. One can rush through an exhibition, usually because it doesn't look interesting, because you rapidly decode it as another example of such and such a style, and you know what to expect. That is why I always prefer complex works that require that you take your time, and when you return to them later there is still something new to discover.

Art museums have their collections, usually much larger than they can show at once, so the audience doesn't get to see much of it unless they regularly change the exhibition. And the artists have their archives of material shown once, maybe never, all those drawers of prints and studios filled with rows of paintings. Much of it ends up as photos on the internet, but that's still probably only a small part of the total art production. Some of the more interesting works of art are challenging to document with photos. For example, this year one of the artists at the local gallery showed photo collages mounted in deep frames, with subtle 3D effects from sheets of paper lying slightly above the background plane of the image. There is no way a regular photo can do these collages any justice.

The institutional theory of Art holds that anything exhibited in one of the spaces consecrated to art, and made by an artist, is art. Yes, this is a circular definition, but it has some merit in certain cases. Works on the fringes of established formats and techniques might not be recognisable as works of art if displayed on the street, out in the woods, or in a shopping window. You could pick a dandelion and show it as a work of art in a gallery, but showing the same dandelion in a field among other dandelions would take a lot of explaining to make it a work of art; in effect, the explanation and documentation would become indispensable parts of the work.

Long gone are the days when art was predominantly concerned with beauty. After the expansive phase of Modernism with all its challenges to traditional aesthetics came another wave of experimentation with the limits of art itself. Duchamp brought in readymades, Yves Kline exhibited nothing at all in a gallery, there were land art, happenings, conceptual art. Now that this experimentation with the limits of art has largely been done with, the contemporary art scene is in certain ways less radical, and also less coherent, split up into many subcultures. The time of writing rabid manifestos is over. Oh, wait, here's a manifesto. I won't comment on it, just wanted to share the link.

Deerbard's art manifesto

Art is transformed by the space it lives in. Frame a print, hang it in a gallery, and it looks very different from the sheet of paper in a drawer. And the reactions to it may begin to influence what we look for in it.

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