The Museum of Tomorrow: On Art in the Home and Art in the Gallery.

Featured in Storehouse, Norwich University of the Arts student-led magazine, 2023 @storehouseonline

As the year enters December and the feeling of time passing starts to gain a heavy clarity, I find myself walking into Norwich Castle Museum and landing in front of John Crome’s painting, Norwich River : Afternoon, 1819. It is so completely devoid of any sense of urgency that the air around it somehow becomes more still by association. The painting depicts a small group of people in a rowing boat on the river Wensum, behind a few houses and trees. The sun is setting slowly, casting a soft and delicate light into a sky almost free of clouds. There are no animals or birds and, apart from a few figures on the bank (who are easily missable at a glance), chimney smoke and an open window, there are no other signs of life. The rowing boat party are simultaneously set apart from their surroundings and completely immersed in them, brought together by the fingertips of a boy leaning over the boat’s lip, caught in his broken reflection. 

It is so rare to have a true connection with a piece of art, and it is arguably rarer still, to have such an experience in a gallery. Unless you are the particular kind of fortunate individual who is unfettered by bustling crowds and overheated airless rooms, the gallery space can be an uncomfortable one. Beyond the physical experience — with their white-washed walls and complicated social and cultural histories — galleries can be impersonal, detached or even hostile environments depending on the class and sensitivity of the person visiting. The distance between viewer and artwork, though not always literal, is ever-present; through a variable array of signals, galleries often convey a sense of hierarchy that puts emotional barriers between the  art and those there to engage in it. Which is why it feels so profound when, despite all the odds, we feel truly moved by an artwork.

In contrast, art in the home has a life entirely comprised of the intimate. Being in close proximity to us, it takes on a different role; perhaps of comfort, of assurance, of memory. A painting you hang in your bedroom for example, now being seen every day, takes on a camouflaged existence. In its first morning on your wall, you may wake up with groggy eyes and think, ‘that painting is so lovely, I’m so glad I bought it’, but soon, you will stop seeing it altogether. It will become part of the furniture, another tread in the tapestry of your home. Even though you are not sitting with it as you might in a gallery, looking intently, by being in your space, it lives with you, and the inevitable changes within ourselves affect changes in the artwork. Over time new things appear, for although your eyes have glanced over the painting perhaps a hundred times since that first day, for some unknown reason it speaks to you again. 

Art in a gallery space catches us in that very specific moment, destined to live almost entirely in the past; it quickly evolves from something we’re seeing, to something we have seen. That moment where it beats so fervently in our present is so brief in the scheme of time, and if everything is properly aligned, it can be so acute in its poignancy that we are moved, maybe even changed by it. The likelihood of this happening — for you to have had the experiences, memories and feelings to be captured in that exact place and that exact time — is so slim, so fragile, that it shares a gravitas similar to the concept of ‘love at first sight’. 

And yet regardless of all this profundity, art of the gallery is destined to live in the past, as a memory. Although not given the platform of power that gallery art clings to, art of the home will always have a future. Its relevance to our lives moves with the tides of our unpredictable nature. The cumulative impact of seeing something everyday, where it can be a comfort, a frustration, a solace or an unsolved mystery, can raise the significance of a poster to that of a Picasso when we consider the individual’s experience of it. How much does time with an artwork change the importance of that work? Can art exist in a time of its own, without a viewer? Perhaps the way we can ensure the future of art, is by changing our proximity to it.

Over the next week I return to Norwich River : Afternoon, several times. I sit with it, waiting for it to speak to me the way it did that first day. Trying to blur the lines between the impersonal and intimate by adding more time. As expected, I notice more the longer I look — though not necessarily in the way I anticipated. At some point visual details stop revealing themselves to me and instead I notice that, of all the figures, I connect most with the boy trailing his fingers in the water. I notice that I long to see some sign of an animal because I find, the focus on people in the picture becomes slightly oppressive after a while. I start to think about my own escapades under soft summer skies and wonder, who does not have a precious memory of such an evening? The painting has become a window, through which my past lives alongside people I have never met. 

The rowing boat party are perfectly anchored, forever observing the ebb and flow of the same breath, before the light has a chance to fade, taking this moment with it. 

Images by Rosemary Issitt: watercolour on paper

John Crome's 'Norwich River: Afternoon' (1812-1819) is held at Norwich Castle Museum. You can view Crome's painting online at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/norwich-river-afternoon-1473