Drawing : Reflections on the Salon Hang

Being hung by the salon

It has been said that to hang a picture is to kill it. By that it was meant that to hang it up on a wall was a sign it was finished and therefore 'over' as a living thing. However there are some other connotations. But first I think we need a reminder of the reality of hanging. This is what George Orwell had to say about it.

“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.”

To remove a mind from the world is an awful thing, the hangman's knot or noose used to be called the Jack Ketch knot. Named after a man who presided over botched executions, eventually Jack Ketch became a proverbial name for death.

Art galleries have been described as mausoleums. One being a building for dead people, the other being a building to house dead peoples’ art. This is a terrible indictment which is also why I wanted to be reminded of the reality of hanging by George Orwell. If art is to be an alive and living thing, then we have to take its presentation seriously. If it is on entry into a gallery made a dead thing and a lifeless corpse how is it useful? I am trying to be provocative and still exhibit my own work in gallery spaces, but by asking the question I can perhaps unsettle some lazy ways of thinking.

Perhaps an artwork changes its use value once it has been 'finished'. As an externalised thought it might help the artist in one way and the audience in another. If you think about a very different artist, one that rarely even gets thought of as an artist, we can see a much clearer relationship between artist and audience. Imagine an artist designing souvenirs, let's say a ceramic dog or frog. First of all they would have to come up with an idea that could be slip-cast easily with not too many joints, preferably two halves as this would be the easiest to mass produce. They would have to deal with 'form follows function' and think carefully about their audience. Their creature probably would have 'soft' rounded features, (see this earlier post on Disney) so that a potential buyer would be sentimentally attracted to it, it may be made to smile and its surface smoothed out so that it feels 'nice' to the touch. These are a lot of considerations for the artist to think about and they are issues that are all about 'feelings'. Like most artists several versions will probably be produced and unlike most artists, these versions will probably be viewed by another person who's sole responsibility will be to assess whether or not someone will be prepared to buy this small sculpture. It is interesting that I had to think about whether or not to use the word sculpture in this case. Why? I suppose its because of another word, 'kitsch', or art considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, often associated with lower class taste. Hmmm.

This is what Greenberg had to say about it:

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money-not even their time. The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

So we have genuine culture described as something that stands aside from 'faked sensations'. The artist sculpting the small dog or frog, is yes hoping that someone will look at the object and immediately 'feel' something when they see it. But what is wrong with this? The artist in this case is using a knowledge of shape and form and an awareness of formal association (big eyes make something feel like a baby etc.) to make a sculpture that will become generally available in gift shops throughout the country. There will therefore be no 'rarity' value, this art is 'as cheap as chips' but is this not a good thing? The work is made available to all and at a price that doesn't deter anyone from a purchase.

Kitsch sentiment

Kitsch display

I'm sure the artist that designed the little dog and frog sculpture knew what he or she was doing and they were probably paid to produce ideas for these things by the hour and as soon as they were done the object would passed into the hands of the manufacturer, who would be mainly concerned with reproduction and then distribution. The display above is a 'sales' display, designed to look as if you are in an Aladdin's cave of delights; it is constructed to make you feel as if there must be something for everyone here.

Originating in 17th century France the Salon de Paris was the only major art exhibition in France, and it exerted a massive influence on the career prospects of artists. Commercial galleries were very limited, so being shown at the Salon was critical to an artist’s success, as Salon exhibitions were visited by serious art collectors, dealers, curators and patrons as well as thousands of ticket-bearing visitors. Artists whose work was displayed at the Salon won prizes, gained commissions, and enhanced their prestige.

The Salon was an annual juried art show conducted by the the Académie des Beaux-Arts (which also ran schools of art instruction). The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie. However, Greenberg in his essay on kitsch states;

'All kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt "front" for kitsch.'

So if the academic is kitsch, according to Greenberg, Kitsch is also academic. By 1820 the Salon was staged in large commercial halls, packed floor-to-ceiling with paintings hung in rows, this 'salon hang' is also constructed to make the audience feel as if there must be something for everyone. The work is put on display in the same way as you would in any goods market.

The annual exhibition of the Académie

The paintings and sculptures were of historical subjects, religious themes and portraits, whilst landscapes and still lives were seen as lower down the artistic pecking order. Although this was art for the upper classes its presentation was again rather like an Aladdin's cave of delights. The artists were working to the dictates of the time, their work following the rules as set out by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Classical subject matter was used to permit nudity, heroes were depicted as a celebration of Classical learning but with a good story attached; fantasy and religious subjects could also cater for sentimentality and history painting made to bolster up national pride. If you wander into a seaside emporium and explore the kitsch available you will find frivolity and sex, next to religion and superheroes and even the occasional union jack. The Académie des Beaux-Arts had in effect simply put a stamp of approval on a way of making images that appealed to people of a certain class, gender, nationality or background. These were not images to make you question the status quo, they were designed to reinforce it and the images we find in a seaside souvenir shop are also in many ways designed to appeal to people of a certain class, gender, nationality or background. They are also reassuring in the sense that you can find images and objects that you experienced as a child and can now look at with the affection of older eyes.

But who said art should be about questioning the status quo? If you look at let's say Egyptian art, for several thousands of years images were made to order by artists commissioned by the state apparatus and these images were designed to reinforce a certain dominant view of the state of affairs. Greenberg suggests that authentic art, is art that questions itself, but I find it hard to consider Egyptian art as being inauthentic. The academic tradition you could argue was lazy, outdated, intellectually vapid, a school for the boys who fitted in, and a way of trying to avoid change, but it did suit some people and taste together with manners would seem to have been very important to certain people at the time. In fact during the second half of the seventeenth century as French influence spread throughout Europe, French taste dominated art, costume, fashion, architecture, gardening and comportment. When Louis XIV (1638-1715) assumed the throne in 1661, his ambition was to establish a position of dominance not just in France, but in Europe as a whole, and he would achieve this by using style and taste through supremacy in the decorative arts and in visible royal refinement. So like so many things this was also about power and this when confronted can lead to dangerous and bloody times. The French Revolution managing to remove the royal family but not the processes of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, but what had been a useful tool for Louis XIV, was not fit for purpose by the end of the 19th century.

The salon hang was because of its association with a failed system, consigned to history and the modernist idea of the white cube gradually replaced it, until eventually we arrived at the state of exhibition aesthetics as we see it today.

So where are we now? The white cube aesthetic has become the norm, galleries even calling themselves by that name. See: The White Cube Gallery Certain conventions have arisen, such as the centre of paintings in galleries and museums being often hung at 57”. (Measuring from the floor to the centre of the artwork or grouping of artworks.) This height reflects a particular standard eye-height of an average 'male' person, and is another convention that can be questioned. Were people in wheelchairs considered?

In 1976 Brian O’Doherty wrote a series of essays for Artforum magazine which were collected together in his book 'Inside the white cube'. In these essays O’Doherty highlighted the different types of meanings that the white walls of a gallery implied. In particular he pointed to the new church like aspect that galleries were now imposing on the 'read' of contemporary art.

All the norms for hanging exhibitions have been questioned and it would now seem to be part of the artist's role to explore various possibilities before deciding on any one format.

The point about this and other posts about presentation is that it is never neutral, when we are told the clean flat white wall is simply to allow us to see the work without distractions, we are actually being subtly inducted into a particular modernist idea.

If you look at the various exhibitions in the city, in particular those held in artist studio complexes, you will find a variety of approaches to these issues, sometimes putting work very low down, so that the audience has to bend down to look at it, sometimes up very high, so you need to look at the work through binoculars, sometimes clustered organically in clumps and using second hand frames, sometimes mixing conventions, so that one wall might use a white wall convention and another a salon hang. This is an exciting addition to the artist's armoury, and can be played with as part and parcel of your work's meaning, so don't avoid it and leave it to the curators.