This visual blog post follows the installation and opening of an exhibition of contemporary art, written for us by Dr Laura Harris.
A highly stylized and aestheticised space, the art gallery repays visual methods. However, the public face of the gallery – its exhibitions – are only the most conspicuous part of the labour and skill invested in the space.
Taking visual methods to the ‘behind the scenes’ work of the art gallery opens up a world of activity left ‘invisible’ to most publics. Here, the space and its objects are transformed into the material basis on which claims about art, its meanings, and its value are made and substantiated.
Although the process of exhibition making is unique to each gallery, norms operating across the professional field of art evidence a shared symbolic apparatus. The camera frames the ‘behind the scences’ action of the art gallery, allowing us to see this social, material and symbolic apparatus which holds art in place.
Time is marked in many art galleries by the changeover of exhibitions. As one exhibition is removed (‘deinstalled’), the cultural and material conditions open up for a new exhibition to take over the same gallery space.
Things that were previously understood as art might shed this meaning and be reinterpreted as waste to be removed. ⠀
The aesthetics of the contemporary art gallery are a construction of neutrality, in order to present the anesthetising backdrop against which art can be understood as distinctly valuable.
However, as Henri Lefebvre writes, ‘if space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regards to its contents… it is precisely because it has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 31).
During the installation period, bodies engage with the material fact of art objects in a way that differs to how they are usually consumed. During the install, it matters how much an object to be presented as art weighs or how it balances, for example.
This has been a core theme in the sociology of art, as evidenced in Albena Yaneva’s 2003 paper ‘When a bus met a museum: following artists, curators and workers in art installation’ (Museum and Society).
As art objects are engaged with as objects during the install, they often require a unique skill set. This is the skill set of the gallery technician, who works upon often strangely shaped objects to position them in space in such a way as it can adequately bear the meanings attached to it by artist and curator.
They often depend on their ability to ‘feel their way’ through the install, displaying what philosopher Michael Polanyi calls ‘tacit knowledge’.
Gallery technicians often work in highly precarious conditions. More often than not they are not credited in the exhibition space and its guides. During the coronavirus pandemic, many were left without work and were unable to be furloughed like other workers at cultural institutions.
The impact of this is yet to be fully understood, but studies show precarious cultural workers leaving, or forced out of, the sector. Nonetheless, the delicate processes of their work are vital to the art gallery emerging as a site populated with meaningful art objects. ⠀
Art exhibitions tend to open with a celebratory event called a ‘private view.’ These are often occasions for highly choreographed performances of an art gallery’s institutional identity. Certain publics are invited, and certain stories told through speeches, which help consolidate the gallery in the general field of art.
The material trappings of the ‘private view’ contribute to an atmosphere of distinction. Wine is often served as visitors take in the new exhibition, and socialise or ‘network’.
‘Private views’ illuminate the ways that creative careers can blur the lines between private and professional lives as they are often navigated as sites of both business and pleasure.
In the art gallery, public visitors are directed towards art objects in certain ways. Usually this involves a ‘look but don’t touch’ principle – a contrast to the install.
Here, the invitation to the public is to enter the imaginative space to art, while navigating the gallery and its objects in a highly prescribed fashion. ⠀
However, the invitation to enter this imaginative space is not evenly distributed, and (despite discourses of participation) art galleries are sites of constant negotiation between publics, art objects, and their meanings. All of the ‘behind the scenes’ work of the art gallery hangs in the balance at this moment of interaction between a viewer and an art object.
This blog post is a slightly edited version of an article written for and published by The Sociological Review as part of their Image-Maker in Residence programme.
For the accompanying film, ‘Critical Focus: Study of an Arts Centre,’ shown at the Binks Hub launch event, please see the original post on The Sociological Review: The Sociological Review (2021, March 2). Image-Maker in Residence: Laura Harris [Online]. The Sociological Review Magazine
