Reviews in brief

Contemporary art and the home. Edited by Colin Painter. Oxford: Berg. 2002. 320
pp. 55 cloth; 16.99 paper. ISBN: 1 85973 656 4 cloth; 1 85973 661 0 paper.

As all avid TV viewers of Changing rooms and its progeny know, the home is a space
where our identity is expressed. We are all designers now. Moreover, tellys experts
encourage ordinary participants to make a piece of art to go with their decor, usually
in a contemporary style. Figuratively, in its abstraction, and literally, in the absence of
the trained artists conception, the resulting art is devoid of content. Thus the result is
not art, but its opposite: decoration.
This book was inspired by Colin Painters work on the 1999 At home with art project,
which commissioned sculptors to produce artefacts to be sold by the British DIY chain
Homebase. Its 13 contributors investigate the relationship between art and the home, as
artists, art and design historians, curators, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural
analysts. Concentrating on the consumption of artefacts, they investigate how
homemakers acquire and display artefacts, investing them with multiple meanings that
change over time. Artefacts, we learn, are rarely chosen for their aesthetic qualities
(indeed, they are often gifts and a source of profound ambivalence and even hatred).
They can be repositories of memory and sites of conflict.
It seems, then, that we are all curators now. Yet, despite the trend in interiors
magazines for minimal, gallery-like domestic spaces, the popular ideal home echoes
Victorian notions of comfort. Interestingly, there is a recent vogue in the commercial art
world for the home/gallery. These dual spaces, often presided over by former artists
turned curator/dealers, are self-consciously domestic. They invite prospective purchasers
to be at home with art.
Modernist critics like Clement Greenberg have been profoundly hostile to the idea of
art as decoration. Yet artists, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, moved freely between what we now think of separately as fine art, applied art,
craft and design. This invites a reconsideration of how artists, especially women,
negotiated modernity in the domestic sphere. Furthermore, art, we learn in this volume,
includes the reproduction and the mass-produced. Art is in the eye of the consumer.
This book offers some insightful analyses into the construction of identity through
artefacts and domestic space. Furthermore, as contributors note, there has been a turn
to the domestic and everyday as subject matter in contemporary art in recent years.
Indeed, some of it has perhaps been inspired by the exposure of students to writers
included in his volume, such as the anthropologist Daniel Miller.

School of Art and Design, University of Ulster at Belfast DEBORAH S. RYAN

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