Contexts: Examples & Models


Salon: Usually held in a large Reception Hall, a salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, a meeting place to discuss science, culture and politics. The salon was an Italian invention of the 16th century which flourished in France throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

Salon Hang: Term used to describe the positioning of work on the wall, where the work is hung from floor to ceiling.

The First Papers of Surrealism exhibition was held at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan from October 14, 1942. Several hundred feet of twine, hung by Marcel Duchamp, festooned the primary exhibition space. Duchamp himself never provided any explicit interpretation of his twine. Instead, he tended to stress it's functional value rather than its symbolic meaning.


Allan Kaprow wrote a manifesto on bringing art into everyday life. With the 1959 work 18 Happenings in 6 parts, a series of seemingly random but carefully choreographed activities executed with such friends as composer John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg, he embarked upon a career of intellectually rigorous site-specific, impermanent works that defied commoditization and ultimately gave birth to performance and installation art. Kaprow created installations outside the exhibition space including Yard in 1961, in which he filled the outdoor courtyard of the then Martha Jackson Gallery with tires, a gesture whose documentation has become iconic.


Guy Debord a Situationist and Marxist theorist, wrote The Society of the Spectacle, a work of philosophy and critical theory in 1967. As a Situationist, Debord was interested in using the city and urban environment as a form of artistic expression. Debord did not believe that art needed to be in a gallery but that it could be a social commentary. "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

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