Put Me In A Corner
This image is taken from the web site for the Royal Academy for the Arts summer exhibition 2017. The summer exhibition has been taking place every year since 1769. It is always hung in this way, covering every available square inch of space. The paintings form relationships with each other, forming harmonies and discords between them and suggesting possible narratives. This style of hanging excites the imagination.
This is an image of an exhibition at the White Cube. Nowadays it is the more usual way of presenting art but it seems sterile and uninviting.
This is a photograph of one of the first exhibitions of work by the German photographer Wolgang Tillmans at the Buchholz gallery in Cologne in 1993. I got this image from the Frieze website which included in the blurb these words;
“One of the more remarkable things about the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is the way he chooses to display his work.[…[his unusual, non-hierarchical hanging style, where simple magazine spreads are sometimes taped up next to high-quality prints”
This image is of an exhibition in Boston of work by the American artist Barry McGee.
I have recently been reading about The Snapshot Aesthetic, which is primarily a photographic style started by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank in the nineteen fifties. Since the fifties it has grown and now, particularly, with the rise in popularity of mobile phones and social media it is easily the dominant style.
Snapshots were originally photographs taken by amateurs on cheap cameras. They were not necessarily very well composed or exposed but tended to have a look all of their own.it was this look that Robert Frank was trying to emulate. It is amusing to think of Frank spending many hours working on his prints in order to give them the appearance of not having been worked on at all.
Many painters use photographic material as a source for their work. If the photographs are “snapshot” photographs then it seems to me that the paintings are snapshot paintings.
The best way to view snapshots is, in my mind, in large numbers. You look at one and then another and another. The best way to hang snapshot paintings is, therefore, in large numbers in order to allow the eye the opportunity to roam and, by hanging them in a corner, for the viewer to be immersed in the images.
