A space to think
Not many people consider November a month of relief. But now that we’ve got through the mayhem of Frieze followed in quick succession by Paris+ par Art Basel, it might feel as though November promises a time to catch one’s breath.
Yet with an energy crisis mounting, this might be easier said than done. Museums always used to be considered places where one could go to contemplate a work of at whatever pace you required. Now they are being hailed in the United Kingdom as ‘warm banks’. But who will warm the warm haven? Museums have bills, too.
This is not a plea, as such, for governments to foot the energy bills of museums. I have no doubt that museums will manage to keep the lights on and the heat pumping – the bill for which will come further down the line, if gas prices stay as high as they are at the time of writing. It is more a plea for the importance of nurturing a space to think.
The South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has written that fiction offers an ‘other way’ of thinking. He is not ‘othering’ literature in the prohibitive sense that the word can be used today, but suggesting a way of considering literature – and by extension a mode of being – that was free. His ideas about literature were shaped by the apartheid era, when the mechanics of the state not only constrained the actions of its people but also restricted how they thought. In novels, he found a way of thinking that was not necessarily a product of the state, or opposition to it. It was its own, other, process.
It is necessarily a function of the visual arts that they too suggest different ways of looking at the world. This difference is not always tied to novelty; to appreciate art requires the old-fashioned qualities of both space and time. Looking at art in this way, engaging in the hard work of appreciating an object or painting on its own terms, is an endangered pursuit. Art is never an antidote to chaos; it can be a challenge to it.
As a chaotic season and a chaotic year come to an end – and uncertainty is still with us – it is time for us to ensure that the space museums should provide, to contemplate works of art, can be found again. That space may be lying on top of your doghouse, as Snoopy does (see feature, pp. 76–81), or it may be found in the contemplation of Cézanne at Tate Modern. It is worth ensuring you can find your own, other, space.