Three times this week I have been asked if I can use the help of a gallery volunteer.
Sorry. No, I can’t.
I know it’s not your fault, dear sweet gallery volunteer, you’re just trying to get your foot in the door, get some experience…
If you are a volunteer at a gallery that has enough money to pay executives, board members or any other iteration of those managerial types but will gladly take your free time, energy, creativity and enthusiasm then stop. Stop now.
Take all of the above things you are freely giving away and set up a space somewhere cheap. If you cant find a space or can’t afford one clear your front room of furniture and use that. Email some Artists you like and ask them politely if you can show their work, tell them the situation that you are in and that you can transport their work safely to and from their studio, invite some friends, take some photos of the exhibition and repeat the process, again and again and again. Make it better every time you do it.
Do this and I will come and volunteer for you…
Spent a week away working in an abandoned mill building a gargantuan wall to be projected onto.
Another self-involved Artist who simply doesn’t seem to care about and/ or is mostly oblivious to, the time, energy, skill & dedication put into making their work happen.
Stick em on the list; it’s getting longer and longer.
Made myself ill by sucking up Victorian ceiling dust.
I usually start by making a list.
The list then spiders out into an unhappy cloud of things that need doing.
Somethings have been reappearing in this sad sky for years – make a radio program that dissects the state of critical engagement within this scene (new addition: stop using the word ‘scene’ it’s hideous), use the random pile of ‘lovely’ wood that you have been carrying around with you for a sculpture about the suicide of Kurdt Kobain, order a subscription to Art Monthly (I mean, fuck, just read Art Monthly, just once, cover to cover), update my website that something that isn’t piss taking nonsense.
I didn’t do that today, not totally deliberately I must admit, I just sat and drew and drank coffee after coffee til I felt incredibly blinky eyed and weird. I listened to Delia Derbyshire and Townes Van Zandt on headphones and wrote some odd cut up sentences about their song titles. I went through all the ink in a freshly opened Pocsa marker.
Behind me there was some sort of business conference taking place over the shoulder height wall of work desks that have been set up as the demarcation line of the studio. It was hard to make out what they were saying. Surprisingly, approaching it in a mixture of boredom and contempt and having headphones in wasn’t the best way to understand it, so I have no revelations about that. It did just make me worry more about this annex of a back room of a night club that I am working in. But no more than a slight worry as I was busy running out the ink and not making lists.
