Back to the future? :Through darkest America. Mark Bradford @ White Cube, Bermondsey. Opening the Shutters. Group show @ Malletts

by wonderer1

This week I have been pondering how art is displayed for the purpose of sale. So commercial galleries not museum galleries. Two extremes.

First the cathedral meets laboratory, the clinical white, polished concrete floors of the White Cube. The current standard contemporary art gallery format from here to istanbul to new york and round the world.  The White Cube in bermondsey is the acme of this particular style because of its vastness and strict adherence to the ascetic.

This very clinical way of viewing art works because it deletes all distractions. There is nothing to get between you and the art. It is art up close and personal. You and it.

But is it how many of us, any of us, live?  Is it even how the sort of people with enough money to buy Bradford’s vast canvases live? Maybe I just don’t know enough oligarchs and hedge funders. Or maybe this art is not actually intended for anyone’s house, but made purely for the corporate space or museum gallery.

Second, the group show of contemporary photography (Tabrizian, Martins, Marlowe, Roversi, Brotherus, Zanon-Larcher , Hassink) at Mallets which is a high end antique dealers  in a stunning georgian house in Mayfair.

The photographs are displayed in rooms furnished with the antiques also for sale. It is more of a salon hang. There’s plenty getting between you and the art. Plenty in theory to distract. It doesn’t. I may not live in such style but it is how most of us look at the art we buy. Intermingled, hugger mugger, with our furniture, our belongings, our lives. Life and art mashed up.

You can see this sort of approach at the Hoffman Sammlung in Berlin; although admittedly this is not a commercial gallery.

I’m not suggesting that a return to the salon hanging style is the way forwards or that art for sale should always be displayed with furniture. I just wonder whether the day of the antiseptic box gallery is over? I went to the Belleville Sassoon couture show across the road from the White Cube and left feeling that both were of their time, that the Belleville Sassoon era has passed and maybe that of the antisepic box gallery is passing too.

SMdA