Detached Dwellings

That there are diffe­rent names for different types of dwel­lings is something I’ve learned since moving to the Nether­lands. For instance: a twee-onder-een-kap­woning (a semi-detached house), or a rijtjes­huis (a terrace house). What seems like forever ago, on October 6th, I was in a building in Aerden­hout—in a house converted into a part-time gallery/colle­ction called April in Paris—to visit an exhibition. I say buil­ding, because I didn’t initially know what to call this particular building. First I called it a villa, but then someone corrected me that it was more of a mansion. Seeing as I know little about names for houses—in Turkey people collo­quially mostly acknow­ledge the exis­tence of two: apart­ment or house—I cannot say with certainty that that’s not an exag­gera­tion.

It was on the corner of a street so wide that it felt for a second like I wasn’t in the Nether­lands. I follo­wed a little stone path­way towards a beauti­ful door and entered the big house. Fit­tingly, the big house had a back­yard so large that if I kicked a ball from its terrace towards its surroun­ding walls, I probably wouldn’t walk all that way to fetch it. From a, you gues­sed it, large kitchen, which I peered at only from a distance, came snacks (small pizza rolls) wine and beer. It wasn’t too atypical an opening event. There was a blue couch that was nearly impos­sible to ignore, in the living room where the works of the exhibi­tion were placed. Some guesses were made about its value in hushed voices. Adjacent, there was a sepa­rate room that had other artworks on the walls—not belong­ing to the exhi­bition I was there to visit, but which I recognized, because I had pre­viously seen them on the gallery’s web­site as part of the owners’ collec­tion. Were these also for sale?

I was there for a few hours. The hosts seemed very friendly. Most people were chipper and indulged in small talk. Direc­tors of respec­table museums and residen­cies arrived. The curator and the artists gave a tour. I overheard someone say that they love the Rijks­aka­demie, they love suppor­ting it, and they are friends with a Brazilian gallery, so did the other person want free tickets to an event at Art Basel Paris? The other person said, no, they already have tickets for every­thing, but let’s meet for brunch?

I caught up with some friends and then drove back to Amster­dam. In the time that passed, I thought about the exhibition. Inspired by a poem by Michael D. Snediker, which also lends the exhibition its title, “Cere­monial Weight” groups together works by three inter­national artists. Notably, all but one were wall works—many paintings, two assem­blages and a sculpture on a curved and rounded table. Verdict? I liked the works, but ulti­mately I thought it was a stretch to group them toge­ther with the convic­tion that propo­sed this poem as its uniting or galva­nizing force, since the con­cepts and affects derived from it—such as domes­ticity and person­hood—seemed tenta­tive and trivia­lizing, especially when placed in this parti­cular context, this big house, which felt rather alien to the delicate curatorial propo­sition of it as host or con­tainer. 

The issue lies not in whether the works were convin­cingly “together”. Rather, I surmised a possible lack of consi­deration, or a simple oversight when it came to the context, the surroun­dings, that ended up over­powering a line of thought—parti­cularly so, when that line of thought was held together by poetic asso­ciation, an inhe­rently tenuous thread (I mean this posi­tively). The inter­relations that were intro­duced strea­med like a river through the press text: the life source is a poem that flows into one of the artist’s work, which then flows into how that parti­cular artist’s work relates to a small detail in one of another artist’s work, so on and so forth. But even as I did my best and started to see a glimpse of “the correspon­dence of scales, both in terms of violence on the world’s stage and bet­ween indi­viduals” reflected back in the works, the house as the con­tainer, as the body of water hugged by its shores, dam­med that.¹ This was not only a money issue; it was not because the house was very lavish, but because its pre­sence was so impos­sible to overlook that it ended up func­tioning like a quasi-artwork in the exhibition, deman­ding attention but failing to ulti­mately sediment.

Louise Lawler has shown me that art lives on after an exhibition and some­times ends up in institu­tional or private collec­tions in the most awk­ward of places.² If you have already asked yourself why I am so obses­sed with where the works are placed (the exhi­bition is up until January 6th, 2025) ... well, one literally couldn’t see two indi­vidual works toge­ther without also seeing a big and expen­sive piece of furni­ture and/or the giant lawn stretch­ing out behind. So, calling it simply a domestic context, “a home for art that emphasizes com­munity, family, and friend­ship” felt mis­placed.³ Because how does it actually do that, besides being a house that people actually reside in? Per­haps the collector context is not so out of place in a metro­polis, but the lack of a high func­tioning commer­cial market in the Nether­lands limits the likeli­hood of us artist- and writer- types ending up at these kinds of mansion-galleries, or simply even inside the homes of collec­tors full stop. However, my bewil­derment was not limited to the novelty of this expe­rience, it was rather that the exhi­bition seemed to hope that I either ignore the space in which it took place, or that I believe that domesti­city functions as some kind of overarching force. While this might be so techni­cally, I was just not totally con­vinced that the domes­ticity men­tioned in the press text as the umbrella relation bet­ween the works, was the same kind of domes­ticity present in the artists’ works, and, by exten­sion, within the house itself. I mean, the works all actually do, more or less, reference a kind of domesti­city—from the Southern United States to Iran by way of depictions of Persian culture to the Chinese workers in high-end fashion fac­tories in Italy—but, the elephant in the room remains the room itself, you know?

I’m not saying every exhibition in this mansion-gallery should be in one way or another about it, but, then again why not? I think didacti­cism gets a bad rep. I thought it was a mistake to turn away from the compli­cated conno­tations hanging heavily in the suburban air: the closed circuit of transaction, of it being a gallery and a collection simul­taneously, of selling and buying, because by negating that, “Cere­monial Weight” indirectly focused on the reaffir­med defi­nition of its transac­tional value. Instead of seeing an exhibition, I could only see whatever the opposite of that might be: a show that was already over and works that were already acquired and already at home, hung on a wall.

I often try to forget that art is for sale in galleries, and that it might end up in places where artists, who have given up owner­ship, are hoping the work will be treated with dignity, by which I mean, let’s say a work about the ecolo­gical deva­station brought on by fracking doesn’t end up donning the walls of Shell B.V. Head­quarters. I’m exag­gerating to make a point, but you get it. Like, imagine if someone bought your pet donkey and ate it. And if I do that, which is naive on my part, admit­tedly, it is because I want to see works that relate to each other considered in the totality of an exhi­bition as a form instead of looking at individual works (with price tags). And not that every art space needs to be neutral (I mean which one is, really), but it felt as if by being shown in this parti­cular house and with seem­ingly little regard to its “unique domes­tic context” and how it molds them, the works surren­dered their ability to create the condi­tions for their reception.

And I know, with the (growing) scarcity of exhi­bition spaces and capital, with our lives gover­ned by the pre­carity of freelan­cing, with the Post-Fordist exploi­tations of our­selves, etc., it is difficult as artists and curators to do justice to site-specifi­city with the little resour­ces we have.⁴ Yet within this, some­thing else should be possible. When a curator visits an artist’s studio to see work, the rest of the studio mess belongs to that context, and so if the artist says “just ignore the pile of materials and the four dif­ferent make-shift ash­trays”, that’s usually done to ease a sense of embar­rass­ment on behalf of the artist, but I would argue, at least tonally, it is noted. And why should one ignore this? I thought context was undeta­chable from content. As I said before, not every work in this house needs to be about this house—just as all the works in the collection of a legal office don’t need to be about justice. Some­times exhi­bitions are a labor of love or odes to con­ceptual or poetic obses­sions that are culti­vated over long periods of time, but if this was that, the grandeur of the space seemed to efface the gesture.

The previous show, called “Conduit House” (also curated by Jennifer Teets), seemed to do a better job at respon­ding to the space and construc­ting itself around the notion of a dwelling. However tenuous some works in that exhi­bition seemed in respon­ding speci­fically to the cura­torial concept, there appeared to be a more direct acknow­ledg­ment of this context. And I get that you cannot keep doing the same show over and over again, but in return, “Cere­­monial Weight” felt like a nego­tiation bet­ween the works and every­thing in bet­ween the walls of its exhi­bition space; it asked its viewers for an attention to poetics so sharp that they should, with some effort, be able focus fully on it within this deli­cate land­scape, all the while igno­ring the strong wind blo­wing through it.

1. The press release of “Ceremonial Weight”, also references Michael D. Snediker’s poem. See: https://www.aprilinparisfinearts.com/projects/ceremonial-weight-y-malik-jalal-behrang-karimi-ruoru-mou/, retrieved October 15, 2024.
2. Lawler established her signature style in the early 1980s, when she began taking pictures of other artists’ works displayed in museums, storage spaces, auction houses and collectors’ homes. With these photo­graphs, she sought to question the value, meaning and use of art. See further: https://www.moma.org/artists/7928.
3. Actually, the press release calls it a “unique domestic context”, and while there is perhaps nothing unique about a mansion by itself—as I believe many mansions probably look alike—it is maybe unique in the Nether­lands to have a collector’s home as a gallery where shows are being put on.
4. Particularly in the Randstad, which includes Amster­dam, The Hague, Utrecht and Rotter­dam, most places such as P/////AKT and BAK are currently under threat of closing their doors. Kuns­tverein in Amster­dam has already closed.