Inside Out: Works owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Glimpsed as I was walking north on 10th Street, the small-framed piece, hanging on the yellow brick wall at the school’s entrance, appeared as an icon, making me think of Maria Goretti, the youngest canonized saint, who had been raped and murdered by a boy in her small Italian town. Approaching the piece, I imagine Maria’s welcoming but admonishing gaze for entering students, reminding them that violence isn’t tolerated and no means no.

Of course, inside the frame is not an icon but the reproduction of Renior’s painting, and I am surprised from my reverie. More surprising is the light emanating from the reproduction; not divine light but common daylight — the light into which painters feel compelled to drag paintings in order to photograph them. Even in the drab gray light of this Philadelphia morning, the reproduction’s colors resonate.

That daylight forces me to view this reproduction as the robust other of an original that will never see the sun and whose exposure to the public is strictly regulated; it is a surrogate for an original more precious than a sickly child. As such, the original Girl in the Red Ruff becomes unreachable to a public who does not have access to or familiarity with attending museums.

The uniqueness of the object

Seeing this stand-in on 10th street, I wonder if paintings can ever have as much accessibility to a non-museumgoing public as, perhaps, a movie.

Why are paintings less accessible than film? The simple answer is that paintings require a specific single home. The physicality of paintings demands space that, in turns, gives definition and value to the painting. Hanging a work in a coffee shop doesn’t give it the same value as hanging it in a museum. There is a symbiotic relationship of value between painting and place.

In contrast, I can as easily watch a film in the bathtub as in a dark theater. Without a singular original object, place does not define film’s value or contribute to its mystique, although some may argue dark theaters are better than the tub.

This ontological dimension of space upon art is, implicitly, the question I pose when I donate my paintings to high-security prisons: How are my paintings defined and given value when they exist in a prison, where economic power is denied and the audience is devalued? Can I undermine art’s dependency upon these elements? Moreover, can I undermine place as a contributing factor in the value of art?

Freeing the chains of control

Walter Benjamin, in a 1936 essay, addresses the mass reproduction of art. As a Marxist, he was in favor of eliminating the structure of capitalism that wedded art to a capitalist elite; he argued that this link can be dismantled by mass reproduction. Through reproduction, art’s aura — the sense that art possesses special presentation of being original and authentic, a sense supported by tradition and ritual — is diminished. When it exists in a massive number of multiples, art is no longer dependent upon museum, gallery, church, or wealthy home. In its wanderlust to exist anywhere — even on the streets of Philadelphia — it becomes free of tradition and the class that controls it.

Or so it seemed from a Marxist’s perspective in 1936. But can art, such as paintings, become egalitarian through mass reproduction?

The nature of reproduction

No artwork, including bronzes and etchings, is mechanically reproducible — this is the fundamental difference between them and film, for which a print is not essentially different from a master. A reproduction of an artwork, such as the offset copy of the Girl in the Red Ruff, produces something physically different from the painting. This suggests art’s aura is not entirely dependent upon the concept of original, but upon its materials and processes: the singularity of materials that is created through the singularity of process.

Each etching pulled by the artist has singularity. Likewise, bronze casting, which is sometimes understood as a method of reproduction, is not, since the bronze is not separate from the process but totally integrated into it. The sculptor anticipates metal while modeling clay, knowing that the work seeks fruition in the cast material; the etcher feels paper while cutting into metal. Do painters feel the offset copy while manipulating pigments onto the canvas?

Why here? Why now?

But why are framed reproductions from the museum’s collection exhibited on the streets of Philadelphia? Does the collection become more accessible to a public that does not go to museums? Or does the exhibition suggest that a reproduction is not a copy of the real, but becomes a truth in its own right, what Baudrillard calls hyperreality?

Or are the reproductions themselves not important at all? By shifting importance from the object seen to the event of its presentation, I can write an essay on an exhibition without addressing specific pieces.

If the what of the reproductions creates questions, then the where of their locations creates more.

I notice on the exhibition’s maps that the reproductions are placed in neighborhoods economically opposite to those with public murals: Whereas public murals favor poorer neighborhoods, the reproductions are placed in more affluent neighborhoods, such as Chestnut Hill, Ambler, Haddonfield, and the gentrified neighborhood of Fishtown.

Why are no poor neighborhoods included in this exhibition?

Why is the painting of the Girl in the Red Ruff at the entrance of a private Catholic school instead of, say, Martin Luther King High School, where 100 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged?

Is there a connection between hanging Rauschenberg on the outside wall of a restaurant displaying a Zagat sign on a street Food and Wine magazine listed as one of the top 10 places for food in America?

Does it affirm that art, in all its manifestations, has been and will always be defined by an association to valued audiences and economic power controlled through placement?

Above right: Robert Rauschenberg, Estate, 1963, on Passyunk Avenue.