An Intimate History of Walls (and Art)

Ever since humans have sheltered within solid walls - at least, since they got past straw houses, twig houses and the wicked wolf - they've applied art to them. From those lucky prehistoric souls who found cave networks to daub on, there remains the evidence of arguably some of the most beautiful - certainly among the most moving and inspiring - marks on walls ever made (well, they do it to me every time). Once walls got solid and human-made then there was no stopping their adornment with murals, mosaics, tapestries and finally - the form which has become globally ubiquitous and the Representative-in-Chief of art - the painting.

Ask anyone to picture a work of art, the chances are extremely high that they will see in their mind a painting - maybe even a specific one by a specific artist. Probe a little further and they'll no doubt be able to think of other forms - sculpture, of course - maybe something controversial like Tracey Emin's My Bed, or Damien Hirst's shark (aka The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living). But for most people - and possibly for most art galleries - the dominant form is a rectangle on a wall with marks on it. If you are schooled in the arts, or are professionally involved or are simply a gallery or museum-goer, then you'll be aware that modern art is a broad Kirk in which any made or existing form or medium can be the basis of a new work. And yet, given the complexity of modern experience and the almost limitless creative possibilities afforded by technology, painting endures. Why should this be so?

One thing is certain, paintings make good commodities; they're easily portable, durable and have a long lineage. But let's sweep that commercial argument aside (at least for the time being). Here’s a personal little theory in answer to the question - and the answer, for me, seems to have something to do with our intimate relationship with interior spaces.

Several years ago I began teaching on the Interior Design course at London Guildhall University (a former polytechnic, now amalgamated into London Metropolitan University). I had no interior design experience, but the head of the department reckoned my theatre and TV set-design experience and my art-school background would fit in well. I don’t know if it did but I had a great time in those early years, always coming away with more ideas than I’d put in (don’t get me started on the state of higher education today – suffice to say, I no longer teach at that level). One thing that struck me while I was there was that many students seemed to sleepwalk their way through the built environment – took so many of it’s forms for granted. So, together with the head of the department, I devised a workshop which required students to build spaces from simple scenic flats and then record the experience of moving through these shapes and the changes they felt when these were lit or punctuated with gaps, doorways or window spaces. The workshops went down well, and I backed them up with a kind of drawing board seminar to expand on the ideas of things we were doing or looking at. One idea which seemed really important to me was to try to strip away the urban landscape everyone thought they knew (and this was a surprisingly homogenous point of view for a group of students from diverse international origins), and think about the essential elements that the built environment must address.

When I asked students what is the common experience everyone on the planet shares - once you’ve taken away all the buildings – they would quite quickly suggest sunlight. The world over, the sun comes up – goes down. The other one was usually a bit slower coming because of its invisibility, but for me it was no less important - almost more important – gravity. These two elements rule every aspect of what we experience on our planet, and in combination they set the agenda for the built environment: we need protection from our sun-driven climate, yet also require access to light; anything we build must withstand gravity. Today buildings seem to defy gravity, and glass walls allow light into vast spaces. But step back a bit. Every built environment has two major elements and a number of minor ones.

The major: all cultures have built spaces with vertical walls and horizontal floors. Seems obvious, but we take it hugely for granted. Gravity sets this – things fall vertically, liquid settles horizontally. To walk on a level requires less energy than an incline. This perpendicular axis is a defining aspect of the human-made environment. It is so defining, so much in line with an inescapable natural phenomenon, that we take it completely for granted. This came to light very clearly with my students when we set up spaces with walls which were a tiny bit off vertical, or floors which raked upwards slightly – maybe by only a few degrees in each case. Gravity and a sense of balance is hard-wired into us, and when something deviates from a balanced vertical or horizontal the effect is surprisingly strong - disconcerting. Yet when you return the plane to plumb, it becomes an anonymous form.

The minor: once a space is built two things are needed. The first is access: a door. The second is light: principally, a window.

These major and minor elements are universal to almost every permanent, built environment. And while it’s tempting to dwell on them, the really important one in the context here, is the last one – the window. Apart from allowing light in to an interior space, a window also allows the occupant to look out.

Allows light in – let’s us look out.

That could almost be a metaphor for art itself – all art, not just painting.

But painting fits perfectly because a painting on a wall most resembles the frame of a window. And it’s maybe in that word frame, that the real clue lies.

The frame of a window reduces what is visible in the outside world. Human visual processing uses a staggering 25% of brain activity. In other words looking uses a quarter of our brain. We refresh that view up to 90 times per second. The human field of vision extends beyond 180º around us. That’s a lot of vision. Think of the difference in size of a picture or video file on a computer and a word document (which is not say that one contains more ideas than the other) - the image will always contain more data. Survival mechanisms dictate that we are constantly scanning this field of view for information, dangers, advantage. So it must come as something of a relief when that vision is curtailed a bit – feels restful to have that data reduced for us by the device of a frame.

We’d all want a room facing the sea, given a choice – even though the fact and meaning of the sea is still there for the occupants of other rooms, just out of sight. And therefore out of mind? There is something about the reduction of our full field of view to a small rectangular aperture which presents us with a ready edited image; easier to contemplate than the whole view; there when we want to look at, but not dominating our field of vision. Yet, when we do choose to look through it, that vertical and horizontal frame maintains its anonymity: we don’t see it, we see the view. So with painting.

Early art had nothing to do with photographic reality as we understand it, because what was being squashed into the frame was more to do with message and emotion, maybe even devotion. But as optical reality became understood through perspective (and don't forget that perspective is not a force of nature, it's a mathematical method), so the images of art aped a space beyond the frame; message, meaning and devotion were encoded within a more complex and complicated notion of what the world was. With abstract art paintings still played with volumes, depth even. But this is straying into a wider, debatable history.

The point is, the whole thing - the context of art - remained bounded by the horizontal and the vertical: the frame – the wall – the room.

So, the case I’m putting here is not that painting is superior or more expressive – but simply that painting has endured and continues to because it fits most comfortably and seamlessly into the spaces we have surrounded ourselves with.

And since the revolutions in painting in the 20th Century that anonymous boundary of painting has served as a window – the most transparent window, perhaps – not onto some view, or composition, but onto the artist themself.

GJ
JAN.09