Ring my bell! Are commercial art galleries really that terrifying?

A quick glance at the button box, and there at the bottom: The Artist Room. I pressed and waited. Nothing happened. I bent over and pushed my cheek to the wall, my ear now at speaker level in case somebody was whispering from the other side of the intercom. Just as I was pondering the uncanny resemblance to the building that’s home to Plaster HQ, the door suddenly opened. I looked up to see a man bend over to pick up the day’s post and I thought to myself, “Maybe they haven’t had many visitors today … maybe the postman has just been?” and said something entirely different: “Hi, is the exhibition open?”

It’s a ritual familiar to every gallery-goer – ringing near-anonymous doorbells to ask for access into a hallowed art space. Even though I have been working in the art world for 15 years – and visiting shows for much longer – it can still bring a sense of anxiety. “Is this place for me?” “Will they let me in?” “Is this really a gallery? I can’t see any signage…”

A gallery’s visual presence on the street can tell you a lot about whether they’re the kind of place anybody is welcome to swing on into or if it’s a space reserved only for those in the know. The threshold from street to interior is a critical part of a gallery’s welcome (or unwelcome) routine, but it does end at the bell and door. Once you’re through, you’re likely to find gallery-deckers relentlessly tapping away on laptops (working on what exactly will remain a mystery), the visible and invisible levels of security, and an often vacant gallery interior, only adding to a sense of “am I supposed to be here?” The Artist Room was the final stop on a crawl around central London galleries. Sure, I saw a lot of art, but I was a critic on a different mission, to explore these thresholds.

In fact, for an article we decided to call ‘Ring my bell’ it turned out that there are very few bells left to ring in London’s art circuit. Perhaps it suggests that galleries now want to be seen more as welcoming and open spaces for middle-class culture-shopping than secluded rooms containing magical objects of aura and lustre. Perhaps it’s that there are simply more and more galleries, more competition, and therefore less time to waste with a performative access routine. Or, perhaps it’s that on streets filled with high fashion, fine foods and expensive tat, galleries are simply keeping up with the luxury-Joneses, presenting more like retail boutiques than the Gentleman’s clubs of days gone by.

Next, a relatively new kid on the block, Frieze No.9 on Cork Street, gets it. Their door is unlocked, without a burly security guard, and looks like any other shop. This one has two deskers who deliver synchronous smiles. This was the easiest threshold so far, 10/10. The same for Waddington Custot where I effortlessly transitioned from pavement to surrealism with barely a barrier. At White Cube Mason’s Yard, I went in one door, paced a quick loop of Danica Lundy’s grotesque bodies, and exited the other door in record time. (Incidentally, it’s great that White Cube let their invigilators read a book, but why not let them have a chair? The poor sods have to pace up and down watching me watch the art). On Saville Row, the older of the two Pilar Corrias spaces was even more chill – I simply rocked in from the street, looked around, and not a single person had to let me in or even acknowledge my presence. If I hadn’t spotted a diligently tapping desker within a secret room to one side, I might have been emboldened to walk off with one of Sofia Mitsola’s large canvases of female godlike figures.

Some galleries want to present both a glowing openness but also a sense of precious reserve. Ordovas Gallery is a classic of this genre. With large floor-to-ceiling windows, I would have been able to see the entire contents of the single room from the other side of Saville Row had it not been for a parked van and a gratuitously fugly Rolls Royce blocking my view. The windows invite a lustful gaze towards the art inside – currently 132 drawings by José Antonio Suárez Londoño –but a muscled black-suited security guard at the door reinforces the threshold. The guard may be a genuine crime deterrent, but more likely it’s performative, reinforcing the sense of art as a highly valuable, rarefied commodity. This is not just any art, it’s art that must be protected.

Ordovas had no bell to ring (that I could see), but the smart guard also acts as a human-automated door. Once I stepped near to it he briskly pulled it open so I could seamlessly move from street to gallery – the noises alerting a desker secreted out of sight, who came rushing from their privacy and generously offered me the exhibition blurb.

You need to go to Thomas Dane’s 11 Duke Street space for the real old-school vibe. Here, a visitor already needs to know they can step off the street and into a wood-panelled porch before then pressing an unnamed brass plaque containing a single button and starring video lens. I press it, put a little force against the door and wait for it to give way – it clicks open. Then there’s a staircase which, to the uninitiated might be a threshold too far – no signage or reassurance, just the need of blind trust that at the end of this winding ascent there will be some art – which, courtesy of some 1970s Lynda Benglis paintings and sculptures, there is!

Sprüth Magers playfully throws a spanner into the works. With six steps to navigate before getting to the door (thresholds for gallerygoers with disabilities demand a much deeper and less pithy study…) the visitor is faced with a conundrum before they get to any John Baldessari goodness inside – the doorbell panel has two identical buttons saying Sprüth Magers. It’s 50/50 I think, as my finger presses into the bottom one. It worked, I won! The door triggers unlocked and as I step inside I tell the desker about my quandary over which bell to press. She looked at me like I was a lunatic, which is fair.

At Holtermann Fine Art a ring of the bell resulted in a man running down a short flight of steps to usher me inside to enjoy Neil Galls’s uncanny objects, while at Goodman there isn’t even a bell or any other visible mode of opening the door. Here, the desker looked out and noticing my confusion pressed her own personal button. Like a fine art Moses, I glid through the sliding glass doors and entered the bright joy of Atta Kwami’s constructions. Hauser & Wirth wins the award for the heaviest door – though in retrospect, despite my single job being to look for and press buttons, I may have missed theirs and tried to manually force open a door that would have automatically sailed open as smoothly as Holtermann’s if I wasn’t an idiot.

At the outset of this mission, being the critical cynic I am, I was expecting many more unanswered buzzers, awkward intercom conversations and repeated feelings of nervousness each time I stepped into the sacred gallery space and got watched like a hawk. But maybe this says more about my presumptions, because for the most part, doors were automatic or opened by a host, front desk staff were chatty and smiling, and there was little of the arrogance or threshold-blocking reputations of smug-gallery days gone by. The thresholds are indications of how a gallery presents itself to the world; for the visitor, it’s the moment they transition from pedestrian to art-enjoyer. It’s a small step packed with meaning-codified mannerisms – observed from every angle.