STOP-START ART
“So it speaks in the second person.”
“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
It has been a mind-the-gap dance since galleries reopened tentatively amid the ruins of perspex & yellow brick roads. The promo for Aoife Dunne & Gemma Browne at The LAB Dublin (minus an opening) polished your lamp.
Be careful what you wish for.
The jump-the-gap transition from promoting art to booking art is what perturbs you. Art events today open without a softening drink or shoulder for you to lean on. The transition has been hard, angular, sharp, distant, sober, not normal. True, some art spaces are braving the gags & distance in an effort to resurrect the social zombie of art openings. But…
Art openings: The fortress of over eagerness, the thralldom of gags & butt plugs. You miss them, in theory - you being one to avoid them at all psychological costs, always. They had potential, you admit to yourself. That potential rarely materialised however with you straightjacketed by your own self-consciousness or ambition to be yourself, as the self-help books stupidly tell you; or at the very best the self you thought you ought to be everywhere & anywhere never mind the personal or professional or shameful consequences to you. Always you. You always wanted to let you all hang out like you did in the privacy of your studio, your heart, your mind, your bed sheets. To let consequence be. To let catastrophe be. To let it be.
So be it.
Before you viewed art openings the same way you viewed the fashion parade in church. Although the present crisis has not changed your view of church, it has changed your view of art openings.
The few art openings you attended had moments, usually drunken moments, when you vomited up your guts to pool around your feet as you lifted your head by your hair before you face-planted yourself into social oblivion. You kept it all together though, your sloppy love, your particular hate. Back straight, legs jelly, debris from your social misfires trailing down your back as you walked away to curl up in them on the bus ride home.
Art & writing on art allows you to humiliate yourself without you looking on.
Exhibition invitations are now footnoted by rigmarole. You cannot just drop by, drop in, on a whim; you have to commit to a social contract without the social gathering. Other procedures or people just get in your way of art. You do not share art with procedures or people, you share yourself with art, with you. It is all you or nothing. Art is not a sunset.
You are happy that the socially awkward & politically said & unsaid that propagated art openings is over for the time being, but sad that the hope you had of breaking the ice or cracking the shells of the sheltered or self-serving gastropod cannot be ventured for some creative or communitarian gain. Naked like-mindedness - the escargot you want to consume straight, minus the ritual, preparation or apology.
Eat me,
for you.
Maybe you liked the social awkwardness. Maybe you invited it in? Maybe it was all you? It was definitely you!