I still have this bastard of a flu and now I’m sitting around and doing nothing in my pyjamas and a trenchcoat. I can’t go to sleep because I have a headache but I don’t want to get up and do anything.
In the meantime I read Lisa Kelly’s 2002 essay, Servile Youth (which you can download as a handy PDF). Like a good yarn it starts off gloomy and turns right at the end, to finish on an optimistic note. However, this anti-establishment philosophy can be cold comfort (or is it just my fever?) to any artist stuck in a miserable wage job, scrimping and saving for art materials and the rental fee on an exhibition in one of Sydney’s ARIs.
In any case, it may be a case in point that the ARI world is run on the same economy of prestige and capitalist value, just on a vastly reduced scale, as the commercial art-world. I set-up Workshop Showroom with friends, to create a genuinely not-profit, artspace. Artist can use the space as they please, without needing to pay rent or taking commission for the work. The space is largely empty other than the one-night shows we put on. It seems my utopian vision of a creative space that exists outside a commercial structure has backfired. Maybe it’s money and marketing and not art and energy that sustains the art world. When I respond with “There’s no charge.” to artists who ask about using the space, I notice a clear drop of interest in their once-eager faces. So we don’t provide some of the services that an established ARI may, for example, gallery minding (although I don’t know who does) or print invites but we are more than happy to help out anyway we can, I slave over the website on my unfortunately short week-ends and we beg, borrow or steal some wheels to transport the work to and fro. In any case, it seems we are all to conditioned to appreciate value only if it can be equated in dollars and cents. Time, enthusiasm and energy cannot be quantified to a decimal point so its not worth anything (Although the Australian Government have priced it at $12.50 an hour?). In any case, after reading Kelly’s article and pondering on art on this cold, hail-pelted morning, I have come to the conclusion that it’s money that makes art tick.