On friday evening I used my dear old laptop at the studio to write a post but due to the computer’s age I could not upload it … now it is Monday and here it is …
It was great to catch up with Michael and Roberto last night at the terribly glamorous opening of their pop-up exhibition here. It’s Stockholm Art Week and Michael’s book The Art of Not Making is being promoted with a show featuring selected artists from it. I was very impressed that they (and “former gallerist” Jonas Kleerup) collaborated with the Bukowskis auction house to put on the show.
Art week has arrived with spring, and with me realising that I am getting stressed about all the things that I want to be doing. Teaching the artistic research course is really interesting and requires a great deal of time which, of course, has had a curious knock on effect; a desire to get to the studio and get on with things, and at the same time considerably less time to do it. This I need to resolve!
Teaching the course is also waking my own desire to develop my own approaches to artistic research. My days in the workshops at Mejan present a stark contrast. As I wrote that sentence I began to wonder if perhaps this contrast is not so pronounced … how might it be if I consider my time in the workshops as research and in the classroom as practice?
It is less than two months until the spring show at Mejan. I am determined to show something but am rather uncertain about what and how! I am starting to hear that as the show (of project and guest students) is at the same time but in a different location to the main degree shows it attracts a considerably smaller crowd. Part of me wants to take up the challenge of putting ‘our’ show on the map, while another part feels that I could end up spending time and energy on doing that rather than producing the work itself (this would be less of an issue if I was interested in curating, however I am not). It is too easy for me to slip in to an administrative role and then … well to be honest, to resent it. I need to be smarter than that! Maybe, and this sounds dangerously selfish, I need to think about putting my work on the map. I do not mean it selfishly, I am attempting to express my genuine desire for making a good show (for everyone) and/by making a good part of it (my own piece in it). If I had been at the initial planning meeting I would have suggested that we offer a ‘finissage’ there than a competing vernissage – unfortunately I was in Manchester when the meeting took place.
My motivation for the trip to Manchester was purely personal – a good friend lives there and we have not managed to get together the last few times I have been in the UK. We had a great time, I made my first visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – mainly to see Roger Hiorns’ Seizure installation that I foolishly missed in London – and re-visited Manchester Art Gallery and saw Joana Vasconcelos’ Time Machine exhibition. Both of these made me think about scale of ambition. Do I think too small? I had something of an echo of this last night …
