So – you made a piece. It took long enough as it was, and now you’re faced with the task of having to be a one person marketing department to try and find an appropriate venue to show it. And (as one gallery owner wearily informed me) – ‘there are so many artists wanting to show their work, there just aren’t the spaces to show them’. Well, though I may agree with the actuality of that statement, it has to be said such considerations rarely phase the compulsive creative types who wander this earth.
I did consider hiring a van and touring the piece around in the back of it… perhaps parking outside a few major galleries. Well I’m probably not the first person to think of that one…
There was interest, but nothing really came to fruition – and the piece is quite big – four large prints 5 foot high and 15 foot long… so it was never going to fit into the local library annex.
Originally this piece was to have a video tower in the middle of it – showing four related videos. Some kind people at the Gate cinema in Newcastle offered me a space in their complex…it was kinda nice… bit of a building site, but that suited me quite well. Trouble was , it would have required me to be on site 24/7… and that wasn’t really feasible being that I have to work to support this eccentric artistic other life.
Then came the Specials Laboratory. They liked the piece, even wanted to site it in their head office.. but that fell through. However, out of that, came a commission which I charted on this site, and that was eventually featured in AN magazine.
It was a good opportunity… but when it was finished I was still left with Gestalt… and I had worked on it too hard to just let it drop – so I re-newed my efforts in the direction of promotion.
Subject for discussion… is it art if no-one ever sees it? Some work can easily be justified as R&D… as it gets you to other interesting places you would otherwise have not passed through… but I had a feeling this piece really deserved to be seen by more than me and my friend the cat.
