Stealth Backgrounds

What is to be learned from a painting in a hotel lobby.

I confess to having a complicated relationship with hotel art.

It started while doing one of my first jobs, working as art writer for a Spanish-language weekly in Chicago.  I was asked to interview a famous commercial artist.  This artist had become rich by making colorful abstract paintings that made from  Pollock-style accident drippings. He has been making the exact same kinds of paintings for at least 50 years, and to this day they are commercially successful and sought-after. This artist has never been acknowledged by any leading museum, nor does his work belong to any major collection; his work often hangs at airports, restaurants, hotels and embassies. My interview with him (which took place at a fancy hotel where he was staying) was pleasant: he was a warm, fun and affable individual, full of joie de vivre, and passionate about what he did. He did not appear to care that the art world completely ignored his existence.

After the interview, however, I decided that I was unable to write an article about him: my young and inexperienced self simply cringed at the idea of writing favorably about art that felt to me so overtly commercial and outright mediocre, and honestly, I did not want to write something negative about such a nice person. I felt profound guilt. When I told my editor that I could not bring myself to write the piece he was not happy with me (incidentally, experiences like these made me realize that I was not cut out to write art criticism and later abandoned it altogether).

Several years later in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I was part of the curatorial team of the Mercosul biennial. The hotel where I stayed had abstract paintings by local artists. They were a soft modern, decorative kind of art works, made 20 or 30 years before, made by whose name would be hard to track down today. Perhaps they were no longer alive. Or perhaps they were fictional names, created by a single artist who specialized in making easy on the eyes hotel art. On the night of the opening of the biennial— a big celebration and the culmination of months and months of hard work for all of us— I went back to the hotel to change to get ready for the opening party, and when I came out into the hallway, I actually spent a while contemplating those poor paintings. They were outside of history, outside of time, outside of anyone in the professional world paying attention to them. I felt an inexplicable sadness.

I remember once Lawrence Weiner encountering at a set of old works of his that he had not seen in 40 years and which had reemerged in a museum collection. Looking at them in silence for a long time, he finally, movingly, said: “it’s like finding a lost child”.

This set of complex feelings often come back whenever I see art hanging in hotels.  Perhaps what interests me about these decorative abstract paintings in hotels is that they are lost children; orphaned by art history, lost to anyone’s histories. They are there to fulfill a simple role: to decorate. I would like to make a case to my friend Tania Bruguera, who coined the term “Useful Art”, that these works are useful in their own, unloved, Cinderella-kind of way. Like Borges once wrote, “ Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being: the stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger.”  I have always seen art works as memory markers, as points of entry of a particular time and place not only in the life of its maker but into the period when the work was made. They are historical markers, persevering in their own self— and in this case, in their own anonymous ahistoricity.

But perhaps I am wrong in that, I, a creature of the art world, care too much about the importance that art works should have. Works like these are often produced with the specific intent of being ghost-like presences in transient environments; they are the Muzak of lobbies, elevator music, the rain sounds or white noise that you turn on Spotify to concentrate or study.

Which further makes me wonder whether these works can teach us something about our current relationship with the subliminal. In this era where we need to be as loud as possible in order to garner attention, where we have to engage with constant advertising and announcements, making art works that are intentionally made to exist below the threshold of consciousness might seem impossible. Or maybe I am wrong, and these works are indeed being made, and by their very nature we can’t be aware of their presence. If that is true, who will write the art history of them?