63 Wareham Street
Boston, MA O2118
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On his seminal essay Of Other Spaces (Des espaces autres, 1967) French thinker Michel Foucault pointed out that “our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example, between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work.”
There are some spaces where these dichotomies are juxtaposed and may converge, and some even more interesting spaces where these oppositions may be contested or inverted. The art gallery contains a paradoxical mixture of public and private, of proximity and detachment, of work and leisure, of “omnipotence and impotence”. Within the space of the art gallery one retreats into a private place where a personal experience takes place. However, the private, subjective experience elicited by the work of art occurs in public, in the midst of others. The participation of the viewer can be simultaneously alienating and communal.
When I moved back to Boston from New York on 2001, I noticed a vast discrepancy and distance between what I saw in the institutional art spaces and what could be found in the local galleries. It seemed that Boston’s art scene was composed of spaces of cultural confinement and circumscription. Of these spaces, the so-called contemporary art gallery was posed as a problem. Boston and Cambridge prepare and export a substantial number of the great American and international art professionals and audiences of the future in its ivory towers, however, in contemporary art, beyond academia, there appeared to be a limited infrastructure or ecology to keep them interested in staying.
In contrast, the institutional critical discussions seemed predominantly propagated by the curators and directors of the very same institutions, and they were usually far beyond, opting, rather than for or against the local galleries.
The response to a domesticated answer must be an irreducible question. Could an art gallery function as a ‘body without organs’ or desire machine? How could an exhibition or event venue work from the interstices to engage a community and its institutions? What should a 21st century art gallery be? What is an art gallery beyond selling art? To whom is an urban contemporary art gallery addressed? Can a commercial operation be a part of a critical vehicle with theoretical assumptions? Should something be planned without knowing exactly the final result? The panorama seemed like one of opportunity, and there was a personal need to address a nostalgia for autonomy. The Boston gallery was not only a problem, but also could be a solution! The art gallery can function as a node for cultural production by sponsoring, reinforcing and sharing critical attitudes towards the consumption of art, notions of public and private and the viewer and the viewed. Spatial discourses may be employed as rhetorical means to search for insightful connections with the general conditions of aesthetic production, invoke reflection about the status of contemporary art in our community, and stress the importance of meaning on the personal and institutional level.
Gamaliel R. Herrera
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