Art and the Home

Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday

Imogen Racz

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857738684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

Our homes contain us, but they are also within us. They can represent places to be ourselves, to recollect childhood memories, or to withdraw into adult spaces of intimacy; they can be sites for developing rituals, family relationships, and acting out cultural expectations. Like the personal, social, and cultural elements out of which they are constructed, homes can be not only comforting, but threatening too. The home is a rich theme running through post-war western art, and it continues to engage contemporary artists today - yet it has been the subject of relatively little critical writing. Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday is the first single-authored, up-to-date book on the subject. Imogen Racz provides a theme-led discussion about how the physical experience of the dwelling space and the psychological complexities of the domestic are manifested in art, focusing mainly on sculpture, installation and object-based practice; discussing the work and ideas of artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Gordon Matta-Clark, George Segal and Cornelia Parker within their artistic and cultural contexts

1

Enclosure

In his autobiographical work ‘A Berlin chronicle’ Walter Benjamin describes the childhood walks that he took around Berlin with his nurse and mother, and frequent visits to his relatives. To get to the apartment where Aunt Lehmann lived, he and his nurse had to climb up dark, steep steps and wait for his aunt’s thin voice to invite them in.¹ The stairs were the transition between the outside world of cafes, parks and zoos and the inside, which sheltered her life and possessions. The essay describes in detail a range of episodes that he had unearthed and given tone to through returning to them repeatedly and mulling them over in his mind ‘like a man digging’, turning over the soil of his memories in search of collectors’ pieces that he could arrange in the ‘prosaic rooms of […] later understanding’.²

This interrelationship between the mind and rooms, and the mental and physical link between the contained spaces of the dwelling and the individual, forms the basis of this chapter. A home develops over time and becomes part of the person, who, even when not physically there, can return mentally to revisit memories located within the walls. On a daily basis one moves around the spaces and knows them so well that conscious directing is not necessary. Homes are places of habits, rituals and movements, and when experiences are translated into installation and sculpture, these also require the audience to move around and measure the work against its own bodily and mental memories. This translation of the everyday into art and the relationship of these works with the spectator will also be an important thread running through this chapter.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE

When Baudelaire wrote ‘The painter of modern life’ in the mid-nineteenth century, he described a particular artist and traveller, whom he called M. G., as a man of the world. In his constant curiosity about the cosmopolitan world where he felt at home in the crowd, M. G. was more than a mere artist who remained in his district, ‘tied to his palette like a serf to the soil’.³ An avid idler and observer, M. G. was part of the throng; he was at home anywhere, and with his independent, intense spirit, he loved life and made ‘the whole world into his family’.⁴

Baudelaire was writing at the time of Baron Haussmann’s destruction and renovation in Paris, where new, broad boulevards were pushed through old neighbourhoods. For the first time the lives of people from different classes and occupations geographically overlapped, and it became common for people to move beyond the immediate warren of their close-knit communities, where all would have known each other and lived intermeshed lives. To be at home in the crowd, therefore, was a modern experience, and Baudelaire’s writing suggested a heroic male who was unfettered by family and domesticity.

Walter Benjamin’s demarcation between inside and outside and Baudelaire’s insistence that the important life happened on the street are reflections of both the cultural and experiential ideas about public and private spaces that have underpinned Western culture since Ancient Greek times, in which men’s ability to mix and argue politics within public arenas, regardless of rank, formed the basis of democracy. The home on the other hand provided shelter and was the area where women cooked and raised families, and while these things enabled public life, they were perceived as being bound to biology rather than culture.⁵

Baudelaire was writing at a time, however, when the middle classes were growing and sought to differentiate themselves from the working classes. The artists who followed Baudelaire’s edict to paint modern life revealed the different classes on the street through occupations, visibility and fashion. The home in everyday life and in art also revealed class and gender roles. The middle classes fostered the ideal of the home as a place of retreat, quiet and family life, into which friends could be invited, rather than one implicated in the business of earning a living. As Griselda Pollock convincingly argued, dining rooms, drawing rooms, bedrooms, balconies and private gardens were the spaces where females were seen to act out notions of bourgeois femininity.⁶ These enclosed spaces were areas of family life and refined leisure.

While this ideal has been manifested in different countries and across social strata in various ways, the notion of the home as the basis of family life, which provides security, warmth, rest and nourishment, still runs deep in Western culture. It is the ‘core of place experience’ and ‘the realm in which we live, from which we move out into the wider world and to which we return.’⁷ As such, the enclosed space, surrounded by walls, and secured by doors and locks, into which personalities, memories and identities are forged and revealed, is precious.

THE HOME AND SELF

The search for a space where the private world can be acted out within an atmosphere of permanence and away from the constraints of the outside world has been an aspiration in north-western European life for centuries, regardless of social and economic circumstances. Writing about Georgian England, Amanda Vickery painted a vivid account of this, saying that the desire for a demarcated area that one could control developed during the early modern period, and by the eighteenth century was firmly entrenched. If economic circumstances meant that there was not even a room one could call one’s own, a lockable box where one could keep a collection of special things and harbour dreams and memories was sought.⁸ All classes of society, even the very poor, have put a great premium on retaining a separate and independent state of habitation even into very old age.⁹

To cross the threshold from the public to the private world is one of the many transitions and rites that we unthinkingly perform every day. This physical movement creates a corresponding mental shift from being in the public arena, where the rules and threats are beyond our control, to being an area with which one is intimate. As a child visiting the homes of his relatives, Benjamin absorbed the nuances and understood the rituals and relationships that were enacted within the walls. It was because he was part of the family that he had access to these private places and understood the relationships between each of the inhabitants and those that they had created with their possessions as no one else could. His grandmother’s home evoked memories of visits, feasts, smells and the sounds of piano music, and was a place where childhood memories were entwined with the material facts of everyday life. Benjamin described the ‘heavy, faded-violet curtain’ in the corner of his parents’ bedroom where his mother’s shawls, dressing gowns and housecoats hung, and the lavender scent of the linen cupboard.¹⁰ The shadows, textures, scents and sounds that made up his experiences were not only a physical backdrop to private everyday life, but also the hooks by which the memories and experiences were felt and relived. Reflecting the fact that this could be both reassuring and stultifying, Benjamin wrote that his grandmother’s home was ‘so cosy by day, and by night [became] the theatre of our most oppressive dreams’.¹¹

The contemporary video artist John Smith has explored the relationship between the self and domestic spaces in some of his films, including Leading Light (1975), Home Suite (1993–4) and Blight (1994–6). Leading Light is a short film that shows a room in which the light from the window illuminates particular things as the beam travels around it during the course of the day. The camera eye captures both fleeting in-between spaces and objects that allow for private moments – the bed, the shadow created by a pot plant, books and a chair.¹² Home Suite is a much longer film, in which Smith accompanies the audience around his home, which is to be demolished, stopping at different points to articulate the memories that are located at particular places. Like the text by Benjamin his memory of relationships and happenings are fused to the material world, so that carpets, the staircase and the texture of a wall trigger different recollections.¹³

In her photographs Mary Maclean has also explored the relationships that we have with particular places. Some images are uneasy, some meditative, but most focus on framing details and the spaces next to furniture and objects: the areas that one only concentrates on when one knows a place well. A group of photographs made for the Jerwood Artists Platform in 2002, like most of her work, suggest a presence within the empty room.¹⁴ These pictures, like the text by Benjamin, create an intimate view, with details of furniture and a gaze towards the window and towards the inconsequential objects that surround everyone but to which meaning is attached.

This private space has widely been described as the place where we are most ourselves, and ‘at home’. As Martin Heidegger has written, humans build homes because we are by nature dwellers. It is these places that we get to know intimately, both mentally and physically, so that we can walk around, anticipating distances and obstacles and reflecting on past experiences. Homes, he writes, are intrinsically interior and exterior.¹⁵ In this he echoed the writings of the phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, who also examined the relationship between consciousness and the material world. For Merleau-Ponty the world was the setting for thoughts and perceptions, and he wrote that, when moving around his flat, he knew where he was and where things were instinctively and without conscious thought.¹⁶ He also discussed how we project thoughts and feelings onto objects, landscapes and people, making our internal mental life integral with the world beyond, which becomes the ‘homeland of our thoughts’.¹⁷

These philosophical ideas about the home have been borne out in studies made by social scientists, architects and anthropologists. In a study about people’s priorities for the home, Juhani Pallasmaa identified three key symbolic elements. He found that the liminal areas of the entrance and hearth have deep unconscious, biological and cultural roots of meaning. Objects that relate to the lives of the inhabitants or are inherited help to anchor memories of events and people. Social symbols that give particular messages to outsiders are also important as they are signs of wealth, education and social identity.¹⁸ By including these ingredients, and gradually working on the dwelling place, over time it becomes a site where one is literally ‘at home’.

In art, the home and dwelling have been rendered in images by artists as diverse as Pieter de Hooch, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Spencer Gore and Richard Billingham. While Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century of the domestic sphere frequently contained moral and metaphorical messages, the paintings and photographs by later artists have tended to depict times of reflection or people attending to private tasks or engaging with family life. Just as in real life, the depicted furniture and decorative choices frame and articulate the circumstances and character of the occupants. This backdrop acts like the scenery in a play or the background details of a novel that are included to set the tone and enable the audience or reader to believe in and enter into th...