It’s up!
It’s working*
There’s 4 hours until opening, so what better time to reflect than right now.
Since my last post, I’ve had a Skype conversation with Anne Cleary again (of art duo Cleary and Connolly). We chatted about technical issues – I wanted some insight into how they go about getting all the right kit that they need for their installations, not just now that they get commissioned for things, but in the past when they were starting out. It seems that the beg/borrow/loan approach is the way things get done in the beginning and as things progress budgets materialise and equipment gets accumulated.
We also talked about how the piece was going to work in the space, and about compromise. I’ve read Chantall Powell’s blog where her mentor had suggested that she shouldn’t compromise her ideas to realise the work, so I wondered if, when working with such technical constraints if compromise came up in the development of the work. Anne told me how she and Denis are from an architecture background, so they consider things in more of a design way. That by the end they should have something functional as well as an artwork. An interactive piece is no good if it doesn’t do what it intended after all.
I’m going to make a list of the compromises that I’ve had to make in the work, and what I would have to do to remedy them. I think most of them will be the technical challenges associated with installing in unusual spaces. A black box space would present fewer technical compromises, but I think would be a huge compromise in itself as I feel it is important that the work sits in a public space.
We also touched on the authorship question in our discussion, and I considered how design (architecture, graphic, film, game for example) is often done in teams. Why is it that artists, and I refer to only myself, find that a bit more difficult.
Anyway, those questions that can be considered further after the private view is over. It’s nearly glad-rags and wine o’clock.
*(At least at the time of writing it was. Most of the time it works, except on odd occasions when it feels in a mood and during thunderstorms when it gets confused between dark shadows and dark clouds)
