Just recently, I was speaking with a friend and fellow artist, and I mentioned that because of the way we had rearranged our lounge room, I was now able to hang a rather large painting of mine I was about to pick up from an exhibition. He said that my house might become like his; that is, filled with examples of our own work. To which I immediately responded with an emphatic ‘no’. I’ve never really hung my own work in my own house, a fact that other people have always told me is a bit odd, but I’ve never really understood why I didn’t want to. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come to this conclusion, I’m a bit of a snob. Let me explain.
Viewing art is a wonderful thing. A good work of art can teach us something new every time we look at it. It can hone our minds and make us more worldly, intelligent, and even better people. And I want everything hanging in my house to do just that. This is also what I expect when I go to an art gallery, but I have a different set of guidelines as to what I think belongs in a gallery, and what should be hung at home. Not everything that belongs in a gallery can be hung in a home, and vice versa. The best way to describe this is to tell you about two paintings I have in my home.
The first is a painting that is quite clearly in the ‘gallery’ camp. It’s a painting by Grant Stevens titled Short Time Only (2002). I’ve owned this painting for quite some time, but it still gives me pleasure to see it in my dining room every day. It’s a fairly minimal painting, a white background with the title text roughly stencilled across the surface in a deep red. The reason it’s a gallery piece is that it’s part of a critical practice designed by the artist to make a statement. It wasn’t designed specifically as a piece of decoration, it just so happens to appeal to my particular taste. It conjures up ideas of parking signs and late night infomercials. Being told what to do with our time, but only by those authorities we largely ignore. When we have visitors, they’ll often ask us what it’s about, or give us their own interpretation of the painting (these have ranged from “I don’t think it’s finished” to “an existential comment on the fleeting nature of life”). This is where the value of this and other ‘gallery’ works lay. I’m not talking dollars here, I mean the intrinsic value, their purpose for existing in the first place. They make you think. Grant’s painting creates a situation that forces you contemplate something. He chose that exact, ambiguous phrase for that very reason. Not everyone thinks about the same stuff, but he makes you think nonetheless.
Quite a lot of art is designed to only be seen in a gallery context. I’m not sure how many people really want one of Damien Hirst’s dissected and preserved animals in formaldehyde as a coffee table, or one of Jeff Koons’ huge, bordering on pornographic photo prints as a conversation starter in their lounge room. Sometimes there are parts of regular life or non-art that creep into a gallery, like the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s excellent 2010 exhibition of memorabilia of the band Queen[1], but these are slices of the everyday that have been carefully selected to be held up to a higher standard, they’re not just Aunt Mildred’s LP collection Blu Tacked to the wall.
The other painting I’ll describe is one that I treasure just as much as Short Time Only. It was painted by my son, Colin, at day care using paint-coated wool on a cheap, ready-made canvas. I love it, but does it belong in a gallery? Is it art? Well... no, and only sort of. We often hear people say things like “my toddler could do that”, and in this case it is quite literally true, my kid did do it, and it looks a bit like contemporary art, but you will never visit it in a gallery. The purpose of this painting is to look cool, and to be a touching reminder of his development. Just because it’s slightly Pollock-esque doesn’t make it an Abstract Expressionist masterpiece. And here’s my point in all of this, things you hang in your home should be something you’re willing to live with day in and day out. They don’t have to be a carefully considered message. Much of the time, the best things on someone’s wall have nothing to do with art at all. They can be sentimental, or decorative, or mood-inducing, or anything you want, really. And overwhelmingly, these don’t belong in a gallery, because they’re not really artworks.
Sometimes, there is a crossover between these two categories, works that were designed for a gallery, but are attractive enough (in any sense) to be hung in your home. And this is where my aversion to hang my own work in my house, and my snobbery, come back in. I’m quite attached to my own paintings, I think they work well on a conceptual level, but I don’t think they’re pretty enough to look at every day. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, so I’ll constantly be disappointed with the minute details I don’t like. It’s just too frustrating, so I don’t often do it.
I don’t like paintings of pretty stuff just for the sake of being pretty. I understand that a lot of pictures that get sold at markets and homewares shops might take a lot of technical skill, but that’s all it is. I’ll concede that other people think it’s art, but only just. If you’re on holiday and you buy a painting that will remind you of that time, go bananas! If the oversized Buddha head print from Target will look great with your couch, do it! Just don’t call it art in the same way you would an Andy Warhol painting or a Donald Judd object. It may be artistic, or technically well-produced, but it hasn’t actually been created with the purpose of being ‘gallery’ art (nor does it make the creator of the picture an artist… there’s a whole other can of worms…). It’s kinda like meeting an Olympic marathon competitor and introducing yourself as a fellow runner because you ran to the shops last week for a bottle of milk and a Chiko Roll. I guess it’s true, but it’s a massive stretch of the truth. I don’t like to call that kind of painting art, and I don’t really want to hang it in my home.
So, I’m snobby. I’m not going to apologise about that. But what I will say is this, the most important thing to think about when choosing something to hang in your home is, “will I be happy to look at it every single day?”. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s art or not, it only needs to make you happy. If you get half of the enjoyment that Grant and Colin have given me, then you’re doing something right.
Grant Stevens is represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis
www.gbk.com.au
[1] Art Gallery of Ballarat. 2010. Queen - The Unseen Archive. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.balgal.com/. [Accessed 04 August 12].
