I really couldn’t understand it. They would just stand and stare at the canvas as if there was something enthralling being played out before them – like watching the telly. There wasn’t anything moving though. And, most of the time, there was barely even an attempt to make things look interesting. Over in the corner hung a picture of a fairground, but nobody was looking at that one. Most people were rooted, gazing at the paintings of nothingness. Huge expanses of colour; perhaps a few brushstrokes thrown around; perhaps some shaded squares.
They all stood in the same way too. You know the sort of thing. Hands clasped behind their backs; tilted a little forwards or back (depending on the particular moment of contemplation); a small smile of knowing. It was infuriating. I think on the surface it was the smugness I objected to, but on a deeper level, it was the way this gallery culture seemed to breed an elite circle of understanding. If you walked past a painting without gazing into it for minutes at a time, trying to reach that point of artistic enlightenment, you were, quite clearly, the inadequate outsider. If you visited a gallery so you could race through to the excellent shop at the end which sold the most beautiful postcards, you were, without doubt, a fraud.
Unreasonably irritated at this apparent arrogance which infiltrated every gallery, my mum and I once decided to submerge ourselves into it. Of course, we did it to mock, to try and regain a little of our pride, but perhaps also to see if we could get it. At random, we chose paintings to stand in front of. We would stare at them for an uncomfortable amount of time, plaster our faces with a look of wisdom and, after a while, start coming out with inspired statements to really prove our status as the art critic. “There is such a disjuncture between the composition and the palette here – very contemporary for its time.” I doubt that anybody around us bought it – we were, after all, being consciously melodramatic. It brought a lightness and a humour to a trip which can so often be laden with sincerity. But in the process, as I stood with my hands pretentiously poised behind me, I think I began to see something I hadn’t done before. I am not for a minute claiming that I received a sudden vision into the artistic mindset, an emotional connection with a streak of paint, but by forcing yourself to stare at something you are also forced to notice. It might be that you simply notice the details of a work, and the time in labour which that represents. You might notice the way colours connect, the way shapes emerge which you didn’t initially see, or the way it reminds you of the view from your bedroom window.
A few years ago, at a Harold Gilman exhibition in Nottingham, such a way of seeing felt clear. A Post-Impressionist, his work still resembles a recognisable world, but his use of colours, the slightly blurred vision, and the way he captures postures and gazes which are so human, forces you to pause a little. Somehow, the unity of all these elements produced paintings which held, for me, some kind of emotion – a meaning beyond the simple representation of a door or a face. It made me, in a way I never thought possible, want to stop and look. The postcards and keyrings waiting for me at the end, there, became secondary.
I love art and I do, now, spend more time dwelling on individual pieces in an exhibition. I am never quite sure what I am looking for, and I don’t think most people ever are, but I try to look a little beyond what I am first confronted with on the canvas. A gallery gives you reason to slow down and observe in a way that modern life so rarely allows you to do. You can use the time and the calm and the work before you to just think, and while that is perhaps not the intention of an exhibition, it is perhaps part of the intention of art. It is a mode which gives you licence to look inwards – to think and to dream. All those figures who stare eternally at a painting in a gallery, who you thought knew so much more than you did, simply become figures staring more closely at themselves. That got a little deep and philosophical, but the point remains: being in a gallery is time for yourself, and the art can be a way to think about that, or maybe just to enjoy the pretty colours all around you.
Though it so often seems it, especially in the setting of a gallery, art is not meant to be exclusive or hard to understand. Maybe it is meant to inspire or to provoke, but it is also so often meant for play. When the artist has daubed their last mark, they are leaving their work in your hands, to become whatever you want it to be. That might mean you stand staring at it for hours; it might mean you sit laughing at it; or it might mean you appreciate it from a sidelong view as you race to the gallery shop because, let’s be honest, that’s really the bit we are all waiting for.
For those of you who also race to the souvenirs, and for those of you who pretend you don’t, here is a bonus list, to enforce my appreciation of art, of all the top five gallery shops I have visited, so that you too can become the ultimate art critic.
1. V&A
2. Ashmolean
3. Saatchi Gallery
4. Tate
5. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park