But Can I Touch It? Navigating The Line Between Art & Design
From the gallery to the showroom, how space intentionally shapes our relationship with objects.
Touching Things at Salon 94
On a trip to NYC last year, I led my friends on a Reels-fueled expedition to Salon 94, a contemporary sculpture gallery set in a quintessentially Upper East Side Georgian townhouse.
When we approached the mansion, our collective first thought was “Oh…it’s closed”. No signage or signifier permitted us to open the massive, unmarked wooden door. We stood there, somewhat dumbfounded, until the impressive pivot-hinged thing swung open as a woman was leaving. We launched into action as if invading an apartment building by furtively grabbing the door before it could latch.
Our questioning of what was allowed defined the rest of our experience.
The classically ornate foyer had been made into a forest of striking Klein blue trunks. They obstructed the otherwise assumed straight-ward path, demanding their visitor to delineate their own. With no separation between the art’s space and yours, those delicious blues were all too tempting to touch. On my companion’s advice, I resisted.
We continued through three stories of paintings, ceramics, and large-scale sculpture, as impressed by the setting as we were by the art. On the second floor, a commanding triptych of floor-to-ceiling arched windows presented brass hardware so magnificent that my hand was on it before a thought stopped me. It felt incredible. The curved hand nested perfectly in my palm. It moved with such solidity and grace that every door I’ve ever opened before or since feels like a plastic toy.
My friend, somewhat jokingly, made a jaw-dropped expression at my gall, but was this the art? Not really. Only a lack of necessity separates its touchability from the well-worn railings of the same vintage.
Then the lines got even blurrier.
Several chairs and tables were scattered around the top-floor galleries. One chair, clearly subject to its own inviting plushiness, was signed: “Do not sit”. It was clear in the sign’s implication that none of the chairs were for sitting. The confusing part was a section of chairs positioned on a large rug that matched the colourful and illustrative style of the exhibition. There was our catch-22: if we can’t sit in the chairs, surely we can’t step on the carpet, but not stepping on the carpet bars us from a close viewing of about a third of this gallery’s works. What’s a gallery-goer to do?
The whole experience left me thinking about art and design, the fickle fine line that separates them, and the social and spatial codes that define how we interact with something as seemingly straightforward as a chair.
Coming To You Live From My Chair
I am writing this article from, you guessed it, a chair. It’s a solid oak, classroom chair stamped Henderson, St. Lambert, QC and built sometime in the last mid century. The workmanship is solid and the ergonomics are balanced so I sit comfortably for long periods while remaining appropriately motivated to work.
What separates my chair from Salon 94’s chair is, above all, positioning. I refer to the positioning of both the chair’s physical setting and the status that communicates. My chair is placed in front of a desk in the living room of my house. It was placed there by me after salvaging it from my parents’ basement. It is meant for sitting, writing, answering emails, and staring out the window. It is understood to be a piece of furniture and not a work of art.
Salon 94’s chair is placed in a gallery. It was created by an artist, then selected by a gallerist. It is meant for viewing, contemplation, and to some, for purchase. The codes of its cultural positioning were written by the players of influence (the artist and the gallerist) and communicated through space (the gallery). It is understood to be beyond a piece of furniture and considered a work of art.
The Gallery Speaks
The gallery has always been a form of communication. How it does so depends on who is talking, who is listening, and when. If I asked you to close your eyes and picture a gallery, what do you see? Does it, by chance, have white walls, bright lights, a concrete floor, and a bench in the middle? This is the white cube, a powerful communicator of object positioning since it became the industry standard in the early 20th century.
The white cube developed as an antithesis to its predecessor: the salon. The salon, densely packed and colour-saturated, was rooted in the private collections of the European aristocracy where it functioned to express the character and intellect of its master.
In the 17th and 18th century, private collections slowly began to open themselves to the general public as the western world began to move away from aristocracy and towards modernity. The Louvre became a public art museum in 1793 to display the recently confiscated royal collection following the French Revolution. This newly public domain of the art gallery was displayed salon-style. Though the function of art-viewing had been revolutionized, its form remained a relic of its past. And so in the wake of revolution came Modernism, a force of democratization and cultural transformation.
In Modernism, form follows function. If art-viewing has been revolutionized, so too must its medium: the art gallery. Purified of its past and distilled to its core, the art gallery is a room in which a person views an artwork. With that, the white cube was born: a room free from colour, context, and architectural detail where people view art.
Of course, it was not possible for Modernism to create the vacuum it had intended. White cubes still have colour, context, architectural detail, and most importantly, they still have authority. Power had simply been transferred, not absolved. Instead of the power of the aristocracy, it was the power of the art institution and its custodian, the curator.
Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, is the curator credited with the inception of the white cube. The ideas had been experimented with throughout European and American galleries for several decades, but Barr’s 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art established himself and MoMA as its authority. In it, they established its key characteristics: white walls, even if windows have to be plastered over (later architectural choices better served Barr/MoMA’s vision); bright, even light; artworks spaced out evenly and at eye level; sculpture, artifacts, and art objects on white pedestals, also at eye level; and wall text, a description provided by the curator.
These moves purified its art and artifacts from a viewing weighted with the socio-political context of a salon, but so too prescribes a new reading that is even more controlling. The white cube patron is told where to look, when to look, and even what to think, all while being told that the power is in their hands.
One element of spatial language in Cubism and Abstract Art that has since evolved was the mounted presentation of three chairs. Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair, Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair, and Le Corbusier’s LC1 Sling chair were mounted on the wall as if they were paintings, literally elevating their status from chair to artwork. Design objects had not previously been shown as art, so this served two important functions: it told its viewer to consider these chairs under the curatorial throughline of the exhibition and it protected the objects under the same socio-spatial codes that already protected paintings.
In the near century since Barr’s exhibition, the white cube became the industry standard. Nearly every major art institution, particularly those showing modern or contemporary works, exhibits in a white cube. In its hegemony, the cardinal rule of art-viewing, do not touch, is enforced in its very existence. The free-standing objects — sculpture, objects, chairs — no longer require a pedestal or wall mounted treatment to be protected under its rules. MoMA’s spatial codes have become authoritative enough to protect a glove accidentally dropped by a patron.
The Postmodern cube
If Modernism’s perfect vacuum is actually a mechanism of control, is a Postmodernist cube the key to freedom? Where Modernism denies subjectivity and context, Postmodernism embraces it. Everything is understood through a perspective, a context, and a history.
Though Postmodernism has been prevalent throughout artistic disciplines since as early as the 1960s, the hegemony of the white cube kept the art institution a predominately Modernist realm. We are just starting to see explorations in the possibility of a Postmodern cube. Salon 94 is one example.
While Salon 94 embraces the context of its site, the ingrained framework of the white cube is not so easily shed. The artworks are still dispersed and aligned at eye level, the walls are mostly white, and so the rules still apply. Salon 94 visually plays with the juxtaposition of the white cube and a historical context, but doesn’t quite go the distance to evolve the art and viewer relationship into something new, something Postmodern.
A month after my Salon 94 experience, I went to a Toronto design showroom called Bonne Choice. Their collection is wildly impressive. Some of their museum-quality pieces match the MoMA’s archive exactly, but you’re free to touch, sit, and interact as you please (respectfully, of course). Design is not just a visual medium — texture, ergonomics, and function are all in the designer’s palette. Design is meant to be lived in, and the showroom offers that portal.
Like most showrooms, Bonne Choice is made up of design tableaux: lavish living room settings that buyers (or viewers) can try on for size. They mix influences and vintages to create little design worlds that offer a unique contextual reading of the objects presented. This is the true Postmodern cube. By recontextualizing design in their own perspective, Bonne Choice frees the object from the contexts within which it has been considered before — including the white cube.
This brings the gallery full circle. The contextual salon that the white cube set out to critique, turns around to critique the white cube. The design objects that the white cube deemed untouchable, can be touched again. There is a scandalous thrill in sitting in a chair one is now accustomed to seeing in the MoMA. So if nothing else, we have the white cube to thank for the thrill of asking, “but can I touch it?” And getting a resounding “Yes.”
Thank you to my lover, Nick, who edited and contributed to this essay.