Chelsea Gallery Prompt

I don't want to be that person that goes off on a potentially unrelated tangent, but I'm going to do it anyway-- try to see it as me thinking outside the box.

The only art exhibitions that I'd ever visited were at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia which is pretty pathetic considering I'm a visual arts major, but in my defense, having everything just a click away makes it easy to forget to go out and see the art in person and up close. Regardless, this past Thursday was my first time going on a gallery tour in Chelsea (and in general for that matter). 

We began our gallery walk at the Petzel Gallery. The first piece that I noticed was a sculpture by Walead Beshty titled Performances Under Working Conditions.

Walead Beshty

Performances Under Working Conditions

Installation view 20

2014

The press release states that Beshty "continues to explore the ways in which objects accrue and produce meaning through their placement and circulation in the world" (Petzel). Originally, these "Copper Surrogates" were tables and desks that gallery staff utilized in their normal everyday work activities. The marks on the polished copper table tops are indexes of the gallery staff's presence through traces of oil from their arms, hands and fingers or rings of condensation from beverages once consumed.

Walead Beshty

Detail from Reception 2

2014

polished copper table top and powder-coated steel

31 x 81.875 x 1.5 inches

Now, straying from the exhibit itself but hopefully still staying somewhat relevant, there were three free, white gallery benches near "541 W 22nd St" (according to what I scribbled down on one of the press releases)--three very simple white benches with a sign made out of notebook paper that labeled them as "FREE" were out on the sidewalk. Being not only artists, but college students as well, a few of my classmates along with myself thought to remove the sign and place them up against a gallery wall so that they would blend in with the scene and not be taken by other wandering artists looking to furnish their studios.

When I returned to the location to retrieve one of the benches, there were people sitting on them. They talked to each other, checked their cell phones-- someone even forgot a scarf on one of the benches. I felt as if I had just set up an impromptu, site-specific performance piece. The perceived status of the benches shifted from a discarded object to public seating just by a slight shift in presentation.

The same happened to these readymade copper table tops, but in this case, they went from an everyday commodity to a piece of art as a result of the artist's authority and their presentation in a gallery. Maybe if I was famous those benches would have turned into a work of art...