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GOOD NEIGHBOURS, A MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS Ashraf Jamal
‘This world is but a canvas to our imagination,’ remarked the great solitary, Henry David Thoreau. We forget the infinite pleasure that ‘this world’ affords us when we assign value to art in a restrictive compass – a white cube, say, or a fetish object in a bespoke private home. In their conclusion to Art as Therapy, John Armstrong and Alain de Botton declare that ‘The true purpose of art is to create a world where art is less necessary, and less exceptional; a world where the values currently found, celebrated in concentrated doses in the cloistered halls of museums are scattered more promiscuously across the earth.’ It is this promiscuity, in which the world becomes a canvas, that allows for a greater imagination, insight, and understanding of the value of art. An art fair is a brokerage, a gallery a dealership, the home where art congregates a sedentary fetish. Art’s promiscuous scattering is an entirely different matter. What concerns Armstrong and De Botton is the need for a more democratic grasp of art’s value and purpose. Sceptical of the ‘patronage, ideology, money and education’ that underpins the economy and culture of art, they state with staggering simplicity that ’the main point of engaging with art is to help us lead better lives – to access better versions of ourselves.’ This view is one that Thoreau would enshrine – ‘It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ It is also central to the curatorial vision for Good Neighbours, which opened at NIROX Sculpture Park on 7 May and runs until 31 August. Visiting NIROX, a rolling green amphitheatre for art, it is this more promiscuous, unbidden, surprising interaction – the kind one
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experiences in the world – that conjures a more wholesome exchange and understanding of what art is, and its place and function in our individual lives. Barring the Cool Room (a studio space usually occupied by artists-inresidence) and the Screening Room, there is no four-walled structure in which art is exhibited at NIROX. Rather, every sanctum opens outward, onto, and into the world. After Andre Malraux, one could declare NIROX ‘a museum without walls’ – though there is a three-walled sheltered structure, titled the ‘Covered Space,’ that is made of rammed earth and raw pine. My point, however, is that
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