Just as important as doing the work is funding it and, ultimately, selling it. That's how artists strive to make a living. It's also, how a friend put it, the necessary way to maintain living space. Long ago I worked on an NEA-funded project with a writer about forgotten Queens burial grounds. The documentary took a long time to complete and was long in getting exhibited. Eventually, the prints made it into the Municipal Art Society of New York, a truly altruistic organization once around the corner from St. Patrick's Cathedral, now on 57th Street and Sixth Avenue.
The exhibition was up to great success; I had very little to do with it and remember feeling a left out of the process, yet a little guilty. The remark that still sticks, after all this time, was the writer's poignant question: "OK, whose apartment does this get stored in?"
Something to consider. This is New York City after all, where the rent on a parking space could cover the mortgage on an apartment anywhere but Moscow.
An artist friend who's vanished in the wilds of Berlin also commented that one of the deciding reasons he'd stopped doing physical art works was the improbability of not selling them and not having the means to store them. Exciting concept pieces like one shown in Madison Square which, through ocular displacement, makes the Flat Iron Building disappear, was among his exhibited works.
Despite these and other professional successes, the life of a conceptual artist, no matter how brilliant the work, is financially disastrous. Our little town devoured him and he left. Before going, he gave away pieces; since logically, he couldn't destroy his work. I have one of his smaller ones, as do some of my friends.
What to do with nine--count 'em, nine!--4 x 5-foot [126 x 154 cm] panels of SIS? While the pain is agonizing, some options exist. Mana Contemporary, an art handling and storage facility reported by the WSJ a few years ago, offers its services to represented artists. Once a safe and convenient place in NJ to store pieces and show them informally to collectors and gallery owners alike, it now offers "gallery"-type exhibition space, framing, crating and transportation--underscoring that there just isn't enough room in NYC for its art community, one of the proudest feathers in our cap.
The exhibition was up to great success; I had very little to do with it and remember feeling a left out of the process, yet a little guilty. The remark that still sticks, after all this time, was the writer's poignant question: "OK, whose apartment does this get stored in?"
Something to consider. This is New York City after all, where the rent on a parking space could cover the mortgage on an apartment anywhere but Moscow.
An artist friend who's vanished in the wilds of Berlin also commented that one of the deciding reasons he'd stopped doing physical art works was the improbability of not selling them and not having the means to store them. Exciting concept pieces like one shown in Madison Square which, through ocular displacement, makes the Flat Iron Building disappear, was among his exhibited works.
Despite these and other professional successes, the life of a conceptual artist, no matter how brilliant the work, is financially disastrous. Our little town devoured him and he left. Before going, he gave away pieces; since logically, he couldn't destroy his work. I have one of his smaller ones, as do some of my friends.
I like your works, time , place , silence can there.
ReplyDeleteJoão