The Contemporary Room
The spaces in which art is displayed and the ways we experience it, are in
a state of constant flux. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the
type of display influenced by the Victorian drawing room, with its damask
walls, copious information, recognisable images and comfortable seating, gave
way to the ‘white cube’, with its plain walls, no seating, ‘difficult’, often
abstract imagery and lack of information – the art ‘spoke for itself’.
In the latter part of the 20th century, a new range of possibilities for displaying
art evolved, and a new kind of viewer was born – one who brings his or her
life experiences to the work and interacts with it. The contemporary practice
known as Installation Art demands interactive ‘looking’. It is a form of art
that explores the relationship between a series of objects and the space they
occupy. The two installations by Tony Charles here in Preston Hall, have as
their locations a maid’s bedroom and an anteroom, suggesting ways in which
the viewer might read the work. Preston Hall has transformed over the years,
form the home of a wealthy industrialist to a museum, but there are many echoes
of its past in evidence, and viewers are encouraged to make connections between
the history of the location and contemporary issues.
Preston Hall was built in 1825, and was eventually bought by shipbuilder Robert
Ropner. Typical of the home of a wealthy Victorian industrialist, it was a
signifier of the female domain, the counterbalance to the masculine world
of work happening elsewhere, in the shipyards and ironworks of the North East.
The design of the house also signifies the considerable class divisions of
Victorian England, the middle class family sandwiched between the ‘downstairs’
of kitchens, stables and tradesmen’s entrances, and the attics where the servants
slept.
Tony Charles’ own life has echoes of class and gender divisions, and in making
these installations he has drawn on his own experience. He worked in the steel
industry for many years, but made a conscious decision to change his life
and study art. The world of house work was something he had previously observed
rather than participated in, but he became both a student and a house husband
and since graduating has exhibited nationwide. He is thus a typical product
of the post industrial era of cultural hybridity, an era in which class and
gender divisions are being both eroded and refashioned.
The Contemporary Room
The installation sited in what was formerly a maids room, clearly displays
the collision between industry and domesticity. For example we could think
of Robert Ropner’s shipbuilding industry that funded his lavish domestic arrangements,
or Tony Charles’ own roles as a steel fabricator and house worker. Tassels
made of steel cable, a mat made of 8mm steel, a video of a fire created by
burning steel wool, signify a duality of home and work, and the way one impacted
on the other.
Anachronism
The installation in the anteroom is a reflection on the act of looking itself,
encouraging an active and investigative contemplation on the relationship
between past and present. A video in an adjacent doorway of Victorians looking
at a display case containing a rusted tassel –‘Early Twenty First Century
Artefact’- plus the reality of us modern spectators looking at the same object
in a different room, make a powerful comment on how we view history; the ways
in which a multitude of objects with living functions become still and dead
museum specimens; for example the redundant tools of the shipbuilding and
steel industries.
Conclusion
In conclusion we might think about museum display itself. The purpose of museums
and galleries is educative, but often they offer a rosy view of the past.
In so doing they may paper over its harshness. Could the materials used in
these installations act as a metaphor for the hardness and difficulties of
those that serviced the Ropner family, or even the harshness of Robert Ropner’s
early life? A stowaway, he entered the country as an illegal immigrant, but
his shipbuilding and business skills brought vast wealth and work to the North
East. This suggests a more positive way of thinking about immigration, a counterbalance
to current attitudes.
Whatever the artist’s intentions, it is you, the viewer, who creates meanings
for these installations. Use the above text as a starting point only, a way
into the works. Bring your own life experience, your own history to them,
and make your own connections. Enjoy the experience of interacting with the
art.
Josie Bland, Writer in History and Theory of Art.
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