![\"Gertrude](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/stein_salon.gif\" "\\"stein_salon\\"")
<\/a>Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris.<\/p><\/div>\n
One of the more telling lessons of the nature and behavior of art can be found by studying photographs of the apartment shared by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris. The two were compulsive collectors with great taste, and some of the most important paintings of Modernism started their careers hanging on the Steins\u2019 walls, as seen in those fuzzy, black-and-white photos. It\u2019s instructive to compare those images with the ones provided by the museums where these undisputed masterworks now hang . . . or better still, to compare the actual paintings in important collections in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and beyond. One thing that quickly becomes apparent is the difference between a painting, even a future historical monument, hung in a dense array the way one might display family snapshots or a private art collection on a wall or table, and the sterile isolation and iconic lighting that, like Pavlov\u2019s bell, alerts museum crowds that an object is no longer quite of this world.<\/p>\n
The goal of \u201cThe Beginning of Now,\u201d a pop-up exhibition and book release continuing at the Westgate Lofts, was initially to present an experience as close as possible to touring\u00a0 Jimmie\u2019s<\/em>, the home, studio, and gallery that comprise a single, total environmental artwork and self-portrait of Jim Williams. At least that\u2019s what Williams envisioned, and he had hoped to build accurately-scaled residential rooms, walls covered in life-sized photos that would recreate what some have called their gothic architectural presence, then place actual, portable parts of his ensemble in front of those backgrounds.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t entirely come off. There are places in the Loft\u2019s ground floor gallery space that approach the surround-sight immersion and deeply layered experienced of Jimmie\u2019s, where generations of building and adaptation of the structure have been revealed by stripping off old paint, wallpaper, and patches. The rough concrete of the gallery create a sympathetic feeling, but one we know too well from our own lives, while the large space and reasonable material limits require viewers to unplug themselves at the edges of one tableau in order to move on to the next. It\u2019s as if the gallery aesthetic, with abundant room for each object to stand on its own, has generated not only expectations in viewers, but an architecture conducive to what it does best: presenting objects apart from their environments.<\/p>\n