2/27/2024 0 Comments Discipline at montage music hallHere is the EXIT with the red alarm situated under it for emergencies only and the large glass-fronted cabinet for the firehose set into the wall opposite. It’s a still, un-centred or off-centre painting with some sense of alarm(s) contained in its space. This is Joanne Tod’s painting, Semaphore, 2014, an oil on canvas measuring 72 by 54 inches at six by four and one-half feet it is commensurate with a measurement of the hallway which is its subject. Someone is taking care of this immaculate space but no one is anywhere present. There is no intimation of rubber heels squeaking just out of earshot or a door clicking shut on a meeting about to begin. The hall narrows to a doorway at the end almost equal in width to the hallway itself. Solidly framed doorways are cut into the wall on the right and here too, the angle of our perspective allows no entry. On the left is a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, the light making them appear more opaque than transparent. It could be the surface of a light-dappled pond at Monet’s beloved Giverny. There is another immaculate long hallway in an institutional building and its floor too has been polished to reflective perfection. This is a photograph of clinical stillness by Lynn Cohen, titled Untitled, 2010. It is so precise, airless and apparently uninflected by human presence that it appears never to have been traversed. While that hallway leads to and from some place, no one is using it. The length of the hall narrows perspectively and ends in a doorway which is almost the width of the hall. On one unit a row of white lab coats or robes hangs evenly. On either side of it, mounted mid height, are two long shelves with coat hooks-all white. The angle of the view is such that the doorway offers no clues. On the right, the wall is interrupted by one well-defined door frame. On the left is a bank of uniformly sized windows through which no view is given-a wall of windows, in effect. The floor is polished so highly it seems to be its own light source. We see an immaculate long hall in an institutional building.
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