Attitudes to Art…. Just a tad different to ours in Sweden. The first thing we noticed was the entrance fee to SUPERMARKET – 100SEK or 150SEK with a catalogue ( roughly £9.60 / £14.41 ) I know from experience of working in a gallery that people grumble about paying a fiver for even a big name artist here, and yet the fair was packed with people every day – all clutching their catalogues.
It also appeared that children there were taught at a very early age to respect artworks. Sunday, like here, seemed to be a family day. Rather than allowing their children to treat artworks as glorified climbing frames ( again, something I’ve sadly witnessed)… the children ran up to the work and stopped abruptly to look for their parents approval before going any nearer.
This was quite a pleasant surprise as we jumped up to protect Phill Hopkins fragile match stick house or Julie Dodd’s building blocks, expecting the worst. Nothing at all was touched by youngsters. Adults did pick stuff out of curiosity (again, Julie’s blocks) but all very carefully.
There was a children’s workshop running upstairs and as I was busy watching what they were doing, I hadn’t noticed what the two female workshop leaders were wearing, until they stood up. One was in a bra and short skirt, the other in a fish net body stocking – nothing else. I think my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I realised it, but no one else seemed to bat an eyelid. Hmm… would we get away with that when we plan our next series of workshops? Maybe not.
The final thing was sales….. As it wasn’t a selling event, we hadn’t put prices on anything or even thought about what we would do if anyone was interested. Phill’s matchbox house and small box of sand was the first item to attract interest. No… we haven’t got a price for it. No we can’t sell it as we couldn’t contact the artist straight away…. Andrew Crighton’s photograph and Jacqueline Kerr’s drawing were all enquired about. Crazy. You couldn’t flog an artwork in the UK if you sold it for peanuts!
It’s another world out there.
A comment just made on my facebook page brought back the ‘fun’ side of the Stockholm trip. I’d been moaning so much in the last couple of days about being tired and that my back ached, that people were starting to comment that perhaps I hadn’t enjoyed it. It was probably that I just didn’t enjoy being in work to be honest…but today I’m off, the sun is out and I can catch up with a few ‘good’ things, while shutting off the few ‘annoying’ ones.
So I’d written my status on facebook as ‘homeward bound’ a few days ago ( when I was actually travelling home) and Bruce from Basement Arts had written a comment about Simon and Garfunkel and the ‘annoying whistling from the booth next door’.
The Booth next to us at Supermarket – ArtMobile: http://www.artmobile.se/ had a tape recorder in a basket with a wig over it. It had recorded whistling…various tunes. This would have been great if we hadn’t been sat next to it almost constantly for 3 days running…. but anyone who has ever invigilated, will know how annoying something like that can be after a while.
So in the last few days, we have made a few new facebook friends from people we met there – including the owner of the booth. She made a comment about our comments, but hopefully she saw the funny side.
It would be difficult to jot down absolutely everything that happened as it would be just too much to read, never mind write about. The gist of it was though, we met a lot of people, made a lot of new contacts….met old friends ( Jet from Small Projects, where we exhibited last year and got the idea of coming to Stockholm from)….and saw some really amazing art.
The South Africans – BlankProjects: http://www.blankprojects.com/ continued to take the ‘P’ out of us, but we got to understand their humour and saw the funny side.
There is a lot of documentation I need to do for the ACE funding and I’ll make a start on that in the next few days. There are also plans to be made for our next project – our response to Stockholm, but again, that will happen in the next few days.
Images of the trip and our booth can be seen on our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=683985948#!/pages/SCI/170190669682733
It’s a bit like speed dating….. a quote from Debra Eck, one of our SCIBASE artists. That was a good analogy of SUPERMARKET. You get xx amount of minutes to give as much information as you can to the public and to fellow exhibitors, swap cards and then hope that they will like you enough to get in touch again.
I feel a bit shell shocked in work today. My body is aching slightly from lugging a heavy case and my head just feels like I’ve absorbed too much information and can’t unravel. I need to get some thoughts down though…. before another project starts and I forget everything that has happened.
So… where do I start? Checking in at Manchester airport last Wednesday and one of our cases being 28kg? We were given a ticking off and told not to do it again, which is pretty amazing. Landing in Stockholm, we decided to head straight to SUPERMARKET to drop off our artwork so we didn’t have to lug it back in the opposite direction towards the hostel. Thankfully, one of our ‘crew’ was already there so we were able to spread the work out and make a start on hanging it.
It is quite difficult to do this, as you’d normally have the luxury of moving work around, trying different spaces and moving away to think about it for a while. We had 3 hours. 3 hours to make half of it presentable enough for any early visitors the next day, the other half spread over the floor so that it could still be viewed. It wasn’t open to the public until Friday, but Thursday was Press day.
Arriving back at 11am the following day after a pretty restless sleep, we were greeted by the South African group already viewing our work in the booth. ‘Why are you not ready?’ they asked. ‘Because we are tired with travelling’ we responded. Pretty stupid response really when we think of our 2 ½ hr flight in comparison to theirs. They muttered something about us going to the pub and wandered off… hmmmm… not a good first impression. But it left us working flat out to complete our booth before any other comments were thrown our way.
Stockholm
Five days of living the life I would like to live. Just five days. Five days of describing myself as an artist without it sounding weird or pretentious. Five days of sharing ideas and thoughts….of saying ‘Yes – I got funding for doing this because somebody thought I was worth it’. Five days of being just an artist…….
Then tomorrow brings me back to another faceless life of working in a job I don’t really want to do, but the bills have to be paid.
Five days is more than a lot of people get.
Tomorrow we will be there….. though my case is still sprawled on the living room floor waiting to be put into some sort of order – yet again.
We have a lot more artwork than what we took to Norway last year, so it’s been very difficult to fit it all in. One piece is really heavy…and another is so fragile that we are afraid that it will get damaged on the way. It was touch and go whether we took either of them.
Because of the room it all takes up in my case, I’m now having to go through all of my clothes and see what can be worn several times. Looking ‘nice’ just isn’t an option. I can only hope to be warm and comfortable.
I looked on face book before and saw that Bristol Diving School are already there and setting up. Damn! I wish we could have gone early. An extra day off work…or an extra day of paying for meals and accommodation, just couldn’t be done.
Right then…. I shall now sign off and hopefully report from Stockholm for my next post.
