Julian Oliver wrote:
> to seek 'recognition' for what one makes is an empty project in itself -
> work must first be 'recognised'. if a work is seen to be transformative
> then those that believe so will take care to distribute that value to
> others without need of any government endorsement, promotional capital
> or even a website.
i'm going to have to call you on this one, J. i think you considerably
understate the importance of self-promotion. over the last year and a half
here in Europe i feel i have made enormous headway, and have been very
successful in making the kinds of contacts and relationships that are
necessary to actually pull off a career as an artist. but for the most part
this hasn't happened through the strength of my work, but rather through my
willingness to live a kind of crazy, stressful, confusing, disorientating
life, and put myself into situations where these kinds of meetings have
been possible; as you put it to me once, to get on a plane to another city
with 100 euros in my pocket and not have a clue what's going to happen
next. i haven't lived continuously in one city for more than 2 months, nor
slept in a bed i could reasonably call 'mine', since June 2007.
my point is that it's only once these connections have been made that my
work can start to even get the opportunity to be 'transformative' at
people. i believe i have done some interesting projects, but at the moment
i lack the 'leverage' to be able to put it in front of people. (this is
largely because i kind of arrogantly assumed i could just jump on a plane
to Europe without having built up a reputation and/or a CV for myself back
home first, which i think was a bit of a mistake; but we'll see how it pans
out in the longer term).
> if a Kiwi artist doesn't have a website by now they probably don't
> really want one.. fair enough. perhaps making 'important art' just isn't
or -
well, what really prompted this was thoughts about a particular sculptor i
know. his name is Michael Boon(e?) but he just goes by Boon usually. he's
very much of the punk/anarchist ethic, living in various semi-squatted or
just very cheap and dingy flats, usually leaving behind, in the gardens,
these absolutely incredible metal sculptures made of bits of salvaged scrap
metal, wood, etc.. the last time i saw one was some years ago and i wasn't
really in the frame of mind at that stage to realise the importance of
documentation, so didn't think to photograph these things.
but i can't help but think that, but for a mistake of geography (ie being
born in a '2nd-and-a-half world' country in the middle of nowhere, whose
GDP is ~60% based on exporting dead animals, fresh fruit, and cow juice)
his work would be being exhibited reasonably widely by now - if only
because he himself would care more about it than he seems to.
i have just spent some time in Austria, and i still find it unsettling to
hear regular ('ordinary') young folk, without university education, or at
least without liberal-arts university education, talking about opera and
classical music with respect. one of my earliest experiences with this was
actually in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in rural Spain (Malpartida
de Caceras), where i had been taken in a road-trip by some Portuguese
artist friends who were going there to play some electroacoustic music at
the local Fluxus (!) museum. the attentiveness of the audience, made up
mostly of local villagers and farmers from the surrounding area, and the
strength and length of their applause to the stream of difficult digital
noises coming out the speakers; combined with the glowing warmth of the
hosts over our (lavish, and free) dinner, and their obvious pleasure in
hosting us simply because we were artists and musicians (myself included,
even though i spoke no Spanish and they spoke no English), was quite an
experience, and is something that still holds me when i recall it.
(i learnt later that the Spanish and Portuguese respect for art is a little
unique, since under the Franco and (i forget the Portuguese guy's name)
dictatorships, up until the mid 1970s, artistic expression was of course
forbidden.)
but i think gestures towards artistic communities are important. one of the
most significant things that i think the Labour government of the last 9
years has done, i think, is the PACE scheme; sure it's small and only lasts
two years and has been discontinued but i think it would be hard to
understate the psychological effect it has had on at least some artists
(myself included). no, it's not something that you want to rely on, and i
do believe the idea of government-sponsored art has plenty of problems
(see, for example, 80% of the work of English artists right now).
> nutting out how to put up a basic page yourself) is all very well. i for
> one however would gladly accept donated gigabytes with which to store
> and distribute high-quality documentation and the like..
that's more what i'm getting at. window.scene notwithstanding, i think
anything requiring much management, oversight, or curatorial input is going
to be less successful in the long term than just giving a bunch of people a
whole pile of storage space and bandwidth and saying, here, play. yes,
webhosting is cheap, and reasonably easy to set up for yourself; but having
everything in one place could encourage the organic evolution of a more
centralised storage area for bits and pieces, somewhere where everyone
could see what everyone else was up to; especially when you consider that
it also opens up the possibility of fun things like being able to run
scripts across the entire server space that can seek out every piece of
photographic, audio, and video documentation and automatically make a
friendly, searchable interface for it, connected to each artist by
username... etc etc. i have had comments on my website along these lines -
i have some things with nice html pages but there's a whole bunch of
undocumented stuff under raw automatic apache-generated directory listings
if you go to http://www.frey.co.nz/content , and i've had comments from
people who've dug through this and told me there's some real gems in there
if you're willing to put some effort into the search... (this was as they
were telling me about a project of mine that i didn't even realise i had
uploaded anything for ;-)
--
damian stewart | skype: damiansnz | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz
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