Entumecida: Numb
"Jump" - Video Still
May 2007
Maybe it's because I have been watching The Family Guy Series IX back to back that I have this feeling of numbness, the show even made fun of Six Feet Under - my holy ground. Is there nothing sacred?!! "Meaning" has lost its "mean" and I’m left with "ing", which if you left long enough, could be the continuous buzz that sounds in your head when you hear nothing at all.
I don't know whether it has been too much stimulation and change, but I've struggled more than a little since I came to this part of the world in terms of finding meaning in what I do. The clamour of voices is just deafening out here beyond Aotearoa. As a result, every colour turns to mud, every road is empty and my every thought is negated before it gets to my already defunct canvas. Needless to say, questioning the point of it all has made contacting dealers or creating opportunities to show my work more than a little slow.
Like many of us, for the most part of my art practice, I have worked in isolation, outside art and cultural institutions, outside artist collectives and so, my professional networks are few, here overseas, even less so. At art school I was never one for really getting involved in art school life and only gained confidence in my final year. I left and went on to make next to nothing, for just long enough to lose the few networks I had. A few years ago, to try to rectify this and perhaps in some way to re-earn my art badge, I looked into going back to art school to continue my, by that stage, almost irrelevant post graduate work. In the end, it came down to money. I just wasn't in a financial position to do it.
It frustrates me that the "art life" often doesn't make room for others to whom artists may be responsible. I can't expect my partner to live the life of a starving artist because I want to.
Given my painfully slow networking practice and gift for chasing my own tail, I know one of the most important things I can do for myself is to maintain contact with home, showing work and participating however and whenever I can. However, in a freak moment of resolve some months ago, I sent an email to the gallery that represents my work in Auckland. What I appreciate about this gallery is its consistent encouragement and perspective. It has artists contributing from overseas and the gallery itself puts time into going abroad to expand its audience and networks. Having a gallery like this in my world has been crucial and a good gallery should provide this kind of support. During one of their instances abroad, they came to know a London-based gallery directed by an ex-pat Australian. After a period of emails, a meeting was set up and I booked a flight to London to go and see them.
Dressing defensively in dark colours, having planned an after meeting beer with a mate and trying not to look down, we discussed how representation functioned through introducing my work to clients with art fairs and opportunities to participate in group shows. A very select and established few actually have individual shows. What struck me about being represented by a gallery here was the spread of audience that an artist could gain not only in Britain. The gallery spends a large part of the year in Art Fairs throughout Europe and North America, fifteen fairs to be exact, while continuing an exhibition programme at home. The area they cover physically causes them to ask for exclusivity in Great Britain and they are contemplating extending that to Europe.
Back on the peninsular, attempts to contact galleries in Spain had been a wasted effort. I had no foot-hold and an inconsequential nationality in an intimidating art scene that wouldn't even reply to my emails. It also seems that without winning competitions, it's hard to be noticed here. Being that there are tax incentives for banks and companies who organise them, there are a lot of competitions. In what is practically a full time artistic occupation, many artists make work exclusively with competitions in mind.
Recently, an article was published in El Pais discussing how a country's art market reflected its economic confidence. Purchasing art pieces is only just moving away from being the pass-time of the elite upper crust and spreading into the middle classes. However, it's a slow process and my one artist friend here, who has maintained his family exclusively on his art for fifteen years, says that dealer galleries have played a minimal part in his economic well being. Despite this, he suggested I try in a small local gallery on the coast. After emailing the gallery with this artist's recommendation, I had a reply the next day offering a meeting time which is what I'm now nervously preparing for. I just have to work out how to get my bee stung tongue around discussing my work in Spanish. ¡Dios!
It was Karl Chittham who reminded me that great things have been achieved inside a restricted arts practice. I wonder what my practice really is and what its restrictions are– to struggle to believe in what I do while simultaneously pressing on? Forever floating or speeding through a world so over stimulated it's become numb? Lately in an attempt to focus, without expectations, and for the shear hell of it, I set in motion a project to install some work in the patio of a listed building here in Seville. Sometimes when the numbness threatens to take away your very breath, you've just got to put a stake in the ground and say to yourself "Enough. Now, get on with it".
