Hang It

Inside the white cube of my home

If you are a close reader of these posts you’ll notice that I’ve switched to a new cadence of writing every other week. I don’t think anyone will mind. If you are like me, you subscribe to many newsletters and read even more so it’s hard to keep up. I notice that if I get to reading a few days after a post has released I am already “behind” in commenting and reposting. So to those of you whom I read regularly I apologize that I’m not a good re-poster. I’m not fast enough. I do try to respond to all my favorite posts eventually.

a typical white wall in my home

Today I have a problem to address, which I’ve avoided for months now. I moved back into my house in September. The ground floor was renovated over the last year and a half, but almost everything we owned shifted places; as we moved furniture and boxes we took our art down from the walls to protect it. Now almost all our walls are bare.

The White Cube

In 1976 art critic Brian O’Doherty¹ wrote an influential series of essays in ArtForum called “Inside the White Cube” that became an even more influential book. He argued that the white walls of the art gallery were part of a modernist objective to take artworks out of their original context (like an altar or home decor) and display them as status objects in and of themselves. The emptiness of the modern (in the sense of twentieth century) art gallery, with its stark interiors and hushed reverence, countered the overstimulation of Victorian art exhibits, where paintings filled the wall from floor to ceiling in hierarchical order above and below “the line” ( at eye level). To have your work “skied,” where no one could see it, was an affront.

Earle Olsen, painting of yellow flowers (1998), stored in my basement. Does this belong in my dining room?

The Dancer and the Dance

O’Doherty writes, “the 19th-century mind was taxonomic, and the 19th-century eye recognized hierarchies of genre and the authority of the frame.” I have a Victorian mind; I classify. And my father was a picture framer.² How, then, to insert him and his work into the hierarchical spaces of my home-as-gallery, with its public and private spaces? I used to have one of my father’s abstract paintings from 1960 hanging in my bedroom at his house; I moved it to my house and re-hung it my bedroom here, but it’s down again now. Where does it belong? When our architect grabbed some of my father’s paintings from a stack and walked around the first floor, trying them in different places, she spoke of them casually—“this yellow brightens up the room!”— while I hyperventilated. Could I hang that dusty framed painting of sunflowers in the dining room?? That was prime real estate for public view. I would be implying that that was a great painting. Was it? To hang my father’s work in the public rooms felt “nervy,” to use our family word for bragging. The painting was cheery, but was it any good? How could I possibly disentangle these works and this artist?

Earle Olsen, abstract painting on plexiglas, hung in my hallway The overlapping reflections of the room itself seem symbolic of my overthinking.

Gallery Anxiety

As usual, I’m overthinking this. I can imagine any of you saying, with the kindest of intentions, “just hang whatever you like!” After all, these stakes are low. I worry about the holes I will make in my new walls, the pictures that may be askew or that I may tire of, but all that can be fixed. O’Doherty declares that in the modern gallery

“art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of ‘period’ (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there.”

My home is not a gallery, but somehow I am again confronting my father’s death, and his legacy, in hanging his work, just as I do in writing about it. Is the bare wall a blank page? Doesn’t making a mark—any mark—feel irrevocable? That mark will be me, my handiwork expressed as another physical trace in the world, as much as my father’s. At the heart of my art-hanging anxiety are my doubts about my own taste, which I imagine should be based on some objective standards, versus my feelings about my father, which are inevitably complicated and subjective.

Another white wall in my home

The Blank Page

By the end of his article, O’Doherty considers the implications of hanging art: “The way pictures are hung make assumptions about what is offered. Hanging editorializes on matters of interpretation and value, and is unconsciously influenced by taste and fashion.” Works on a wall jostle for dominance and relevance, he says, with almost territorial literalness. But in circling back to that article I also realize that my hanging of my father’s art is not the same as the modern gallerist hanging precious objects on a white wall to sell them. I am not de-contextualizing my father’s art, but re-contextualizing it, within a house full of other personal objects, and within my family. That, as they say, may make all the difference.

I think I’ve figured something out here, on the blank page/bare wall. Maybe I do need those sunflowers in my dining room, where they may sometimes speak to or contrast with real living and dying flowers on my table…. maybe I’ll hang it after all.

Thank you to both new and familiar readers! How do you decide what to hang where in your homes? Do you have a guiding principle? I’d love to hear from you.

1. A BTW: in 1962 O’Doherty wrote a negative review in The New York Times of my father’s last exhibit in New York City. See here. If “Inside the White Cube” were written recently it would definitely consider whiteness as a racial construct too, but that was then.

2. See also

Eliza Anderson

’s moving post about our fathers’ overlapping careers at Kulicke Frames and their different physical and psychic wounds.