Oregon Humanities

Irreverence in the Whitechapel

I saw them leaving the gallery with oranges. She was holding hers, smiling and picking at the produce sticker. He was tossing his in the air, laughing out loud. They seemed to be absolutely enthralled by their produce. “Huh,” I thought to myself and continued to make my way across the small grassy park to the entrance of the gallery.

The Whitechapel Gallery in east London is a very modern space with white walls, wood floors, and lots of right angles: more or less your typical art space. It was clean, quiet, and sporting the occasional guard to keep an eye on how close your feet and hands got to the artwork. I was familiar with spaces like this—I grew up outside Washington, D.C., and spent a majority of my childhood weekends and summer breaks inside the museums that skirted the Capitol Mall. The buildings were stunning to my impressionable eyes. Some, like the National Gallery of Art, were grandiose and marble-clad, with hallways that stretched the length of a football field. Others, like the Phillips Collection, were timeless mansions that screamed old money and fine tastes. And then there were buildings like the Hirshhorn Museum—the giant donut of modern art—that enveloped me in a shroud of white walls and glass windows.

What these spaces had in common—and by extension, the artwork in them— was reverence. When I was young, I always felt as if I were at church when I visited a museum or gallery. There was something much bigger than me in these spaces and I wanted to figure it out, to be closer to it. Why would we hang these paintings and display these sculptures if the artists didn’t know something that we didn’t? But for as much as I revered the art object, being in museums also made me very uncomfortable. I could look but not touch, think but not speak. It always felt like something was missing. But the religion of the Masters had me in its grip and I continued to pray devoutly, well into my twenties.

There weren’t many other people in the Whitechapel gallery that afternoon. The woman who greeted me pleasantly at the front desk handed me a brochure and told me to enjoy myself. As I thanked her and began walking into the gallery, I noticed an orange on her desk, perched high on a pile of gallery books, almost on display.

The show was about British conceptual art of the 1960s. I walked through the first few rooms, taking in the videos, word art, and ready-made sculptures. I was struck by the absurdity of the exhibition, especially the small case containing bottles of the digested remains of Clement Greenberg’s classic tome, Art and Culture, a book I had long considered part of the canon of Modern Art. I laughed out loud and then quickly covered my mouth, looking around to see if I was making a scene.

I finally made my way into one of the last rooms in the exhibition. Pyramid (Soul City), by South African artist Roelof Louw, took up a huge space on the gallery floor. It had once been a perfect pyramid of oranges, but there were some missing and the pyramid was falling apart. There wasn’t a line telling me to stand back from the sculpture. There weren’t any signs posted telling me not to touch the artwork. The gallery guard looked at me looking at the oranges and then aimed his nonchalant gaze elsewhere.

I had never touched an object of art in a gallery or museum before. I was hesitant to touch the oranges. But Mr. Louw wanted me to take his oranges; the piece was a reevaluation of the consumption of the art object. For me, it was an absolute blow to everything I had ever experienced in the art world. Mr. Louw chucked me out of church and razed the building all in one go. He asked me not only to touch the artwork, but also to take it home with me and eat it as an afternoon snack. It was utterly irreverent, and I liked it. It felt more exciting than any other visit to an art space had ever been. From that moment on, I knew I had found my new religion. I took not one but two oranges and skipped out of the gallery, tossing one in the air as I made my way to the Tube station.

About Annie Dubinsky

Annie Dubinsky is program and development coordinator—as well as jack-of-all-trades, efficiency pro, and adventurer—for Oregon Humanities.

10 November 2009 | Posted by Annie Dubinsky in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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