gallery chats

I feel sorry for gallery owners, they are so lonely most of the time. When there isn’t a opening, one can enter a gallery and be alone with the work, the owner behind a desk either on the phone or staring blankly into a computer.

Being that starved for human interaction they are willing and wanting to chat.

A marl through the two gallery districts to see work that I hadn’t had a chance to see due, I was looking at perfectly competent work that followed the checklist for contemporary photography to-day – cinema sized, attention drawn to the framing, colour, images that can be understood in a microsecond.

The gallery owner said hi. His mistake. I kept looking that the work, talked about the weather and realising that I was seen the way that women are seen when they enter Central Camera, pretended to be an art instructor asking questions in behalf of my students addressing certain concerns about the gallery world. Mentioned how impressive the work was, found a few other things to talk about – as I said the work was good, a bit obvious but good – then mentioned the size and wondered who buys something this big.

- Oh no-one.
-What about museums?
I was told yes but how often does a museum buy work? Worse when this show is over it goes back to the artist that there was no place to store the work in the gallery which means that the chance of selling this later in the year was practically nil.

Asked why then was the work accepted if there was no chance of it selling or why the director didn’t tell this to the artist. She was told but the artist is influenced by what she sees and this is what photography looks like thus this is what was wanted. The time slot was determined over a year ago but not the work.

Mentioned that while I make work –assuring the gallery owner that I wasn’t going to bring it over – and feel very out of place as I can make entire portfolios with the material made in one image, that it would be lost on the wall and looks so dated due to size – among other things – that I don’t really bother anymore. He sort of agreed that the market is run the way that one buys a lottery ticket, even though one almost is never really successful, one sees that someone has been so the formula is followed.

It was then discussed that it seems the work is big also because the artists feel that people would miss the subtleties if it were smaller. The irony is the complete lack of subtlety. Everything done led the viewer immediately to the main point of the image so much so that they were poster-like in the time it took to see the work. there were no counter points in the image no place really to look other than the “subject”. Those parts that would usually be used as a method of enhancing or questioning the “subject” were diminished by the usual contemporary method – the swings and tilts of the large format camera to limit what was in focus.

The gallery owner - now really happy to vent - also mentioned that the idea of varying sizes has disappeared also so that a potential buyer who didn’t live in an aeroplane hanger could actually buy the work and not have to go to a storage facility to see it. Sales – and thus fame – were being lost because the artist wouldn’t consider offering the images in different sizes as the perceived size of the work is really determined by where the work will be and how much space is around it.

Left not knowing what to think, except my datedness as even the large images being made for JB>PC this summer are still wallet sized in what I just saw.

Joãozão, however, had no doubts, once out in the streets again making snaps heading to the next gallery the shutter froze.