Do you bring your own hooks and tell them how to hang it? Or hand it over and hope?
Small thing but it changes everything for me.
My work is heavy. It's not canvas, it's stone and glass set into a panel, and if it hangs wrong it either pulls off the wall or reads flat and dead. So when a gallery takes me on, I hand over a sheet: weight, where the anchors go, what light it can and can't take, the exact height it should sit. I've had curators thank me for it and one who acted like I was insulting her by telling her her job.
So I'm curious. Do you send gallery-specific instructions with the work, or do you let them hang it their way and keep your mouth shut?
My rule now: I bring the hardware, I write the sheet, and I stand there while it goes up if they'll let me. Cost me one show to learn it.
Anyone else do this, or am I being fussy?
4
6commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The interesting part for me is that you have to send instructions because of the material. Stone and glass don't forgive. But I work in print, where the whole point is that the thing can be reproduced, so the "original" is already a multiple. Which makes the hanging question strange. A print can be rehung badly and it's still the same print. Your panel rehung badly becomes a different object.
So maybe the sheet is not about control. It's about the work having one correct state, and you are simply the only person who knows what that state is. The curator who felt insulted was probably reading it as a claim about her competence, when it's actually a claim about your piece's fragility. Different thing.
I do send a short note now, mostly about light, because paper is not forgiving either, just more quietly. I keep it to one page and I never phrase it as instruction, even when it is one. Cowardly, maybe, but it works.
Out of curiosity, when you travel for the install, do you hang it yourself or do you stand there and watch someone else do it? The second one sounds worse to me.
Mm, I hear you, but I don't know as I'd say a print has no one correct state. I make quilts, and Lord knows I've made the same pattern twice. Ask me which one is "the" quilt and I'll tell you it's the one that's on the wall right now, hanging the way it wants to hang, because a quilt that's bunched or sagging is a different thing than the one I finished. Maybe that's not reproduction so much as it's the same truth: cloth and paper both got a way they need to sit, and a body who knows it has to say so.
Only thing I'd push back on is that it's one correct state for you and not for him. Seems to me it's one for both of you, you just get to decide yours and he has to be told his. 🙂
Ha, "hanging the way it wants to hang" is a much better way of saying it than my sheet of numbers. And you're right, that's the part I got wrong. I said one correct state like it's a law of physics, but it's one correct state for the material. Stone and glass, the panel has to sit dead flat or the whole image dies. Your quilt, it has some give in it. Same principle, different amount of forgiveness.
The thing I keep turning over is that I can write the height and the anchor points on paper, but I can't write down the moment you look at a finished thing and know it's sitting wrong. That part lives in the hands, not the sheet. So maybe the sheet is only there to keep somebody from hanging it at eye level over a radiator while they wait to feel it.
Anyway. Two of the same quilt and only one of them the real one. That's a better sentence than anything I've written this week.
That's a good distinction and I'll take it. One correct state, not one correct owner. I can tell you where the anchors go and how high it sits, but I can't tell a curator how the room should feel, and if I try, that's where it goes wrong.
What I didn't expect is that the same sheet gets used differently depending on the person. Some hang it exactly to the millimetre, some read it and then do something better than I'd have thought of. Both fine. The one who got insulted read it as me saying she didn't know her job, which was never the point. I don't know her walls or her light or what's next to it. I know my panel.
So yes, the sheet is about the object having a state, and me being the only one who knows it. But it's information, not instruction. That's the line I've been trying to hold and not always managing.