MET

As we passed under the big red banner, proclaiming the collection of a woman with probably the longest name I've ever seen, and walked into the big square room, I couldn't help but notice how this gallery of abstract expressionism was set up. Before I could even begin to look at the paintings on the surrounding walls, my eyes shot straight for the Jackson Pollack piece, hung on the big square pillar in the center of the room. Staring down this piece for several moments and understanding the magnitude of its worth, I began to glance around the room at the other paintings. I looked from the right wall, back to the center pillar, then to the left, and back to the center pillar. I wondered about all the reasons why the curators of this collection decided to place Pollack's piece smack dab in the center of this art movement. For physical reasons alone, the Pollack piece is huge and does fit the entire wall of the center pillar nicely. But as I looked around the room once more, I noticed that there were several pieces just as large and that could have fit this space just as well. So why put the Pollack piece here? I would like to make the argument that the curators of the collection were making a bigger statement than just "this piece is large and looks nice here" when they decided to place Pollack's piece in the center. Besides how famous and well known his paintings became after his death, Pollack was in fact one of the central artists making large strides within the abstract expressionism movement. Thus his position in the MET gallery, an artist in the center of his art community, was clearly thought out.

I thought this detail was interesting as I thought about how the confines and designs of specific spaces influence your ideas of what the space means to you and of what kinds of feelings you take away from the space. What if Pollack's piece was on a left or right wall, and another piece hung in its place in the center? Would the image of Pollack's piece still be burning in my mind as strongly? Would I have unconsciously diminished the magnitude of impact Pollack had on this specific art movement if his piece had not been in the center?

I would like to switch the position of Pollack's piece with another piece done by an artist of lesser magnitude and do a study on how people view Pollack versus how they view the other artist in such a set up. Then switch the pieces back and do the study once more, with different subjects. In this study, we could see just how much space and the design of that space affects our ideas and feelings.