Queering the art gallery
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There’s an inherent alienation embedded in art galleries. The uniform white walls, ambivalent to what’s hanging on/within them. The blunt modern furniture nobody sits on. The suffocating silence that’s never enforced but always implied. We don’t live like this, art isn’t made in these places, but the institution has its own rituals. A gallery is a gallery is a gallery; a transitory exhibition void.
These spaces feel eternal but are a modern art world quirk. Brian O’Doherty’s series of essays, “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space,” explores the confounding austerity of the modern gallery in great detail, recognizing its position as the intersection of shifting economies, ideologies, and the function of art in the 20th century.
Is the artist who accepts the gallery space conforming with the social order? Is discomfort with the gallery discomfort with art's etiolated role, its cooption and vagabond status as a refuge for homeless fantasies and narcissistic formalisms? During modernism, the gallery space was not perceived as much of a problem. But then, contexts are hard to read from the inside. The artist was not aware he was accepting anything except a relationship with a dealer. And if he saw beyond it, accepting a social context you can do nothing about shows a lot of common sense. Most of us do exactly that. Before large moral and cultural issues, the individual is helpless but not mute. His weapons are irony, rage, wit, paradox, satire, detachment, scepticism.
The purpose of a gallery is part curation part preservation, but within that is also the implicit counter of exclusion. Not only of which works are and are not displayed but also who is permitted to see them. Like theater, art galleries exist primarily for the wealthy. They are often overwhelmingly white (in both patrons and artists) and the work itself varies from elevated to intellectually ostentatious. There is value there – I have enjoyed all of the handful of shows I’ve attended – but it is intentionally inaccessible.
One of the promises of the internet (which has broadly come true) is that access to art – alongside information, history, culture, etc – is now more attainable than ever. Wikipedia is one of the greatest accomplishments of the 21st century; the Internet Archive is an invaluable asset to cultural preservation, digital or otherwise; ROM sites are making playable large numbers of games which would otherwise be forgotten to degrading hard drives. I do not need to haul myself to the nearest blank box to see great art. I am overwhelmed with the wonders of human creativity.
But there is part of me that still yearns for the particulars of an art show. The intentionality behind each piece, the careful arrangement. Art shows are shows, fully, even if the lack of movement can make it easy to regard pieces as elaborate wall ornaments. Digital archives make wonderful vaults but poor curators. Everything is equally important; where to even begin?
Queerheart (Afterglow Games, 2019) is an attempt at a digital gallery. It compiles vintage adverts, poems, clips of silent films, alongside original works taking a variety of forms exploring queer culture and identity. Click around the halls and you’re taken to different non-spaces: a vaporwave poetry corner, some hotel rooms hiding text-to-speech memoirs, a tv playing clips of early queer cinema. It is the inversion of the white cube – Queerheart is vibrant, messy, enveloping. A poem is not only a series of lines but the hinting of the text, the collage of images underneath, how I have to drag the page further left to catch the words just outside my monitor. Queerheart imagines an art gallery that is queer in content and construction.
It is always in wild subversion that I am able to recognize my frustrations with existing structures. I may have not liked galleries before, but when presented with a contrast like Queerheart’s newsroom – each piece of poetry visually distinct, playing with the background, erupting onto the screen like a dare – the conventions of modern installations feel stifling. There is something so freeing in my inability to anticipate the form Queerheart will take on the next screen.
It could be argued that Queerheart is just a series of individual works, theoretically achievable in traditional gallery spaces with some clever stitching and projectors. But it is not only the work itself that is transgressive but its ideological opposition to modern art. Queerheart is free, it is playable on any laptop, it can be expanded and altered with a simple update and doesn’t require attendants to live in New York or London. The fact that it is a game is not incidental but what allows it to succeed as something radically queer, empathetic, accessible. It is concerned with digital aesthetics and economies, so to try to transpose that into crisply endowed buildings would miss the point.
Its closest parallel would be punk zines. Underground art that is grimy and unpredictable, distributed by hand and through word of mouth; something that can’t be coopted by capitalism because its very essence is against it. Queerheart is just one small experiment like this. Projects like the DiMoDa are playing with VR exhibits made freely available, and Babycastles continually reinterprets their gallery spaces to be messier, busy, more engaged with the artist. But these parallel projects don't undercut one another so much as further inspire me that art does not have to be isolated in echoing halls. It can be present. It can disrupt. It can be wholly for us, without compromise.
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