Meghan Gordon

“Silent Places with Polished Floors, Filled with Polished, Silent Furniture Standing in Polite but Aristocratic Aloofness”

A Thesis by Meghan Gordon

I have been called bourgeois before. My parents live in The Future, a high-rise apartment building in midtown Manhattan. When I visit, the doormen greet me, “welcome back to The Future.” It’s as if they sense that I might take myself too seriously, although more likely that I am slightly intimidated. I thank whoever pushed the revolving door, allowing me to enter without actually touching it, and proceed to the elevators with the decorative linked chain interiors. Later, as the dinner conversation shifts to talk of real estate and how somebody’s brother will not stop raving about the quality of life in the Park Avenue Trump Tower, The Future seems like a transitional stage.

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According to the Winterthur Portfolio, A Journal of American Material Culture, the “concept of the period room as a display technique…[attempts] to present works of art in a context that would show them to [a] greater effect and would give them more meaning for the viewer.”  The Portfolio is a triannual publication “committed to fostering knowledge of the American past by publishing articles on the arts in America and the historical context within which they developed.”  The Winterthur Museum, which sponsors the Portfolio and is the estate-cum-repository of Henry Francis du Pont, features his collection of American “antique” furniture and craft objects. The Portfolio compares the Museum to a “habitat group in a natural history museum” and argues that its partial purpose is to assess the “validity of the relationship of the objects” in each room.  The Museum continues to collect objects on H.F. du Pont’s behalf and has become the outstanding example of the American use of period rooms.
The notion of the period room has traditionally relied upon the context of a museum to bestow authenticity as sanctioned by an institution.  Within a museum, viewing the arrangement of these rooms is compared to viewing a painting; one is allowed to peer through the fourth invisible wall and observe something that would normally be out of reach. Particular to the Winterthur Museum, the rooms have certain idealistic undertones that also parallel painting; the rooms have “evolved, anticipating the discovery of new information or the availability of the perfect piece which would contribute to...the ‘picture’ in a period room.”  In other words, the aesthetic of display used in period rooms has a direct relationship to painting through the structure of the illusionistic window and in the curatorial decisions to place a specific item from such a time, made in such a location. The “picture” of the room highlights the strange imposition of personal preference and taste, including any preconceived or even cliché ideas of what the room would have looked like during said period.

 

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The Future is not that great. It does not have a Sitting Room or a Great Room. It is lavish with two houses worth of stuff and when I visit I have to sleep on the couch that once occupied what I like to refer to as the Bombay Room. It could have been the Sun Room because of its large windows, but it was curiously proclaimed by my parents to be the Breakfast Room. I continue to argue that the furniture appears to have fallen out of an exoticized mail order catalogue. The couch I sleep on has a bamboo plant pattern and a wooden base carved and stained to look like splotchy bamboo. There was no eating in the Breakfast Room because this couch might have been sullied. In my opinion, it looked really great installed over the elephant patterned rug, flanked by Filipino straw vessels originally made to haul fish, a Japanese hand-carved wooden table depicting a marketplace scene and an enormous potted tree, all neatly accompanied by the framed scenery of a wooded area visible through the windows of the Room.
I painted and drew my parents’ furniture because as aesthetic objects I found them to be beautiful and seemingly specific. When decorating, the gamut of styles is enormous and without a system of selection or at least some personal aesthetic guidelines, the final product could be disastrous. My parents’ decorator lent his expertise to this challenge each time my family moved to a larger house (in the time pre-Future). He helped build a collection including Poiret inspired artwork with some art deco accents, oriental stylings sourced from non-specific Asian origins and indistinct but tasteful white furniture. Everything looks like a version of something that represents the idea of luxury.
I once catalogued the origin, current location and personal significance of the different objects used for sitting that my parents have owned, accompanied by a drawing of each from memory. My project, I have since realized, does not have nostalgic intentions. I began depicting the familiar as a means of exploring my relationship to painting. This was furniture that was both comforting, where I nested watching the IFC, and alienating, where I was placed to pose in my Christmas outfit during a family photograph. Most of the furniture was not very functional, covered with delicately beaded pillows, and upholstered in white. It was a presentation of value and desire, but it was also the first aesthetic that I learned. It was a means to examine my identity by examining the things around me; the objects took on a figurative quality that replaced the need to display a representation of myself. The specificity of these objects helped to ground my practice in the realm of the real – something that I had actually sat in and knew the texture of. As I continued to explore these ideas, my attachments to these objects prevented me from approaching themes outside of my personal identity. I was stuck in the role of the docent, a game I used to play as a child; I gave walking tours to dinner guests. I am still preoccupied by my attempts to confront and/or deny my identity through depicting familiar objects, but more interested in how the familiar informs the arrangement of furniture in somebody’s Living Room.

 

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When describing period rooms not in the Winterthur Museum, a member of the Walpole Society once stated, “they were all rooms – museum rooms, silent places with polished floors, filled with polished, silent furniture standing in polite but aristocratic aloofness. Study and admiration they invite, intimacy is impossible…”  This highlights a difference between the personal, such as the narrative of the Winterthur estate, and the representation of an idea distilled through a display aesthetic, such as in the period rooms at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s Pendleton House. The distinction is fuzzy, though; there is a difference in the historicism of either type of period room, either a remembered microcosmic history or a glossy and generalized one. The differences come into consideration for the benefit of the audience: supposedly the Winterthur example allows the context of the living spaces to influence their arrangement while museum period rooms retain the quality of a composition against a background.

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My paintings have been called bourgeois before. It’s the kind of comment that elicits an eye roll from me, but haunts my studio time. Since no one else is from The Future, would they care about these inquiries? It seems as if the art-purchasing bourgeois class might like my bourgeois paintings, but they are part of my subject matter, not my audience. The comment remains interesting because of the compression of my identity and my subject matter into one word. By removing the attachments to personal narrative, I thought I was stepping away from the Winterthur goal of preserving an authentic example of an American living space. According to the Portfolio,

This comment seems a bit naive. It is also a point of question that contradicts my analogy between painting and period rooms because my paintings clearly do not perpetuate this tradition of obsessive owning in order to preserve history. My paintings are not meant to function like the period room, but rather to talk about the placement of furniture, curation and methods of display. The Portfolio, Walpole Society, du Pont and other period room enthusiasts/historians seem to be more interested in buying new antique pieces to shuffle around each room, and rightly so since that is what they have set out to do. The period room is both a portrayal of a historical period and a curatorial project of the best arrangements of furniture in a room. Design historian Jeremy Aynsley in his essay “The modern period room – a contradiction in terms?” states that to “locate the interior in time, [and] to animate it through the lives lived... goes against the abstracted, disinterested gaze associated with...museum and gallery visiting,” but I think they are connected.  The period room thrives off of the “abstracted, disinterested gaze” of museum-goers, just as the “picture” of a room suggests, except of course that period room patrons prefer Georgian sofas to Goya. So I sit in my parents’ art deco chair sixteen stories up in The Future, criticizing, but mostly admiring Mr. H.F. du Pont and his vision of preservation. I guess I am more interested in what it means to be bourgeois that I originally thought, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am.