Three weeks ago, I took down my exhibition, Myth. Nothing sold. I tell myself that I don't care, but I would like the money in exchange for my work. Money, ultimately, is a form of recognition. I created the work without the expectation of money. But it still hurts, a ~~little bit~~ actually quite a lot financially.
I've often questioned how much more, or less joy I would have had if I just invested the money instead of buying creative tools and chasing the stories that swirl in my mind.
In fact, this exhibition, Myth cost me quite a lot to put on. Opportunity cost -From buying photographic gear, lighting, to conceptual mind time, organising people, transport, printing, framing, marketing, more transport, and countless hours of talking to people about it. Hundreds of hours, if not thousands, over a period of six years.
For months, for years, to the very moment I type this, it is the single greatest, and single most vulnerable thing I've ever done in my art practice - I can't help but think how little it meant to others, while it meant everything to me. The gulf between the importance to me, and the importance to others is something I struggle to articulate.
I can never be in their shoes, and they, never in mine. My anatomical feet are too big. My professional feet wear shoes far too large for the occasion, not finding the edges, the toe box, or the heel. Perhaps I am wearing clown shoes in a professional photographic and artistic context.
Yet here I am again, tapping my thoughts out.
My images tell stories that I myself struggle to read. Complicated, hidden symbolism layered in colour theory, composition and delicately posed hands. My stories use words that I sometimes struggle to write. There's a lack of confidence in the act, and a certain suspicion which arises when along comes praise. Yet, that is ultimately what I want from work. Praise.
But praise isn't always about money, it isn't a simple "good job buddy" or "your work is amazing". Praise is a conversation about the work. Praise is giving me sources for further reading, images to observe, or stories and influences to explore in more depth. Of discussing esoteric things like evocation (but not in a magical, mystical sense) of thought.
The pictures may have hung on the walls of a public space, but alongside them, and all around them unseen, lingered my calls for conversation and education about the chain of influence, consequence and inspiration that cascaded into the image over years as they unfurled. This was not the only stench around the work. There was also a desire for monetary recognition of the work.
I can, and will continue to bemoan the fact that creatives do not get paid a living wage. Lots of professions do not, but the median artist is a lot less well off than the median person who works a shift at the local fast food factory, or scoots about doing menial tasks for someone else. In fact, they're often the same person.
And even when you aggregate those things together - it isn't enough - because art, artists, and creators are not given the time or the spaces to engage more broadly with their work, the work of others, and the community.
As we enter a new era where people will likely soon have robotic assistants in their houses doing their menial tasks for them, paying a corporation a subscription fee for the pleasure of extra time, traded, most likely for increased competition at a job with fewer hours, as that home-assistant robot will no doubt be ubiquitous in the workforce - what the fuck are we going to do with our selves, with our time, with increased competition for a decreased slice of the capital pie?
We are approaching a rapid phase of economic development and destruction. In order to develop something, you must first destroy whatever was there before.
Will we see the Neo-Luddites?
Will a robot want to buy my Art? Will a robot come to your concert and listen to your song? Perhaps as creatives we need to get our recognition from robotic appreciators who appreciate on behalf of their monstrous, mortal custodians.
No. In that direction, madness lies, lurking and sinister, dehumanising and lacking authenticity.
That is not what an Art exhibition that now sits back in the very boxes to which it was returned, and from which it once emerged, needs. Art only flourishes when it is seen. Photography, in particular, only has meaning when it is observed.
Mine sits in boxes, waiting for the chance to be lied to again. A price placed by its side, a hook in its back, a label on the frame. It waits to be transmuted to money, and all I want from it is a conversation. To eavesdrop on the discussion, be it formal, and informed, or unsophisticated and crude.
The one feedback that I got about the work was "They would look amazing larger." Yes they would, but almost certainly, then - with the decreasing amount of wall space in people's homes, and the decreasing amount of wall space in venues, galleries and public spaces that isn't plastered with a moving montage of advertising, they also wouldn't sell.
People don't make a place or a space for Art. People don't open their wallets for Art. But in times of distress, uncertainty or discomfort, Art is the first place they often visit, be it a song, cinema, visual, literary, or the mere architecture of an asylum's hallway.
My art is my own locked asylum, and I don't know where the keys are.
