Spectatorship & Desire: Love

Showcasing paintings from the Frye’s Founding Collection, Spectatorship and Desire, an evolving three-part exhibition, explores the relationship between viewers as spectators and art as a desirable object. It employs innovative strategies to investigate the complex relationships between consuming, collecting, memory, language, and interpretation.

Spectatorship and Desire: Lust imagined the viewing habits of Charles and Emma Frye, who established the Frye Art Museum. We presented our vision of the Fryes’ domestic sphere, where a mix of pedagogical value, personal eccentricity, and early twentieth-century conventions of art display influenced how they lived with their private paintings collection long before donating it to the Seattle public.

Spectatorship and Desire: Loss examined the relationship of contemporary viewers to the founding collection. Since the Frye Art Museum opened its doors in 1952, certain paintings have become beloved by Seattle viewers, who return to experience these works again and again. In Loss we removed some of the most popular paintings from the galleries in a dramatic rehanging of the Charles and Emma Frye Collection. We then invited visitors to put in writing memories of their favorite missing works.

Spectatorship and Desire: Love asks, “What does it mean to love a painting and just what is the painting one loves?” Even if two of us love the same painting, such as the perennial favorite, Alexander Max Koester’s Ducks (c. 1900), do we experience the same work of art? Love explores the idea that the painting one loves is as much a construction of memory and desire as it is a response to the direct encounter between the viewer and the art object. In this final installation of Spectatorship and Desire, we juxtapose written viewer remembrances from Loss with favorite paintings from the Founding Collection.

Throughout Loss, viewers were invited to write responses to the exhibition and their favorite paintings, now missing. Loss motivated strong responses by many, running a gamut of emotions. Some visitors expressed notions of ownership of “their” paintings, citing a relationship to past Frye experiences (often from childhood) as the source of their love for a specific work of art. Others missed their favorites, but in their absence selected new ones, appreciating an opportunity to focus on Frye collection paintings they had previously overlooked. Some were highly distressed at the absence of iconic Frye paintings, while others felt uneasy at the voids left by the missing works of art. Below is a sampling of responses:

“I miss the Koenigssee lake painting. The lake water somehow tells you just by its clarity how cold it is. My son wrote a beautiful short story based on this painting. In the tiny boat someone is firing a pistol—you can barely see a puff of smoke. Apparently people actually did this because the echo effect was so astounding.”
— Anonymous

“The ducks! I came here just to see ‘my’ ducks. When I see them I can leave feeling that at least something isn’t changing. Please bring them back. They bespeak a joy and innocence and stability that we need in our lives. And the blue of the Alpine Lake…oh please do bring it back. I found myself inclined to try to decide on other ‘favorites,’ but with a hollow feeling in my heart.”
—Jerry