No Silver Bullets
One of the things I want to do is show The Killing Sink in places that aren't Australia. To me, this seems like it would be a big step up and allow me to share things that are important to me with people who perhaps have never, and might not ever, think about life over here.
What makes this uniquely challenging is how disconnected and distant I am. If I think about Australia, I have a decent reference point for galleries, festivals, events, opportunities. I can probably ask a friend to introduce me to someone who knows someone, etc, etc, it's not that hard to get around any more. Doesn't guarantee any 'yeses' or anything like that, but at least it feels a bit more productive than it has in the past. I think the LinkedIn crowd call this networking, but really that doesn't quite capture what local knowledge means, to me at least in art that is.
What I'm getting at is that if there's something I want to do here, at least I can think of a decent way to approach that aim.
Anyway, the past month or so I've been exploring a few questions:
1. Can I exhibit this work overseas?
2. How would I do that?
3. Would it actually be worth it?
I've talked to a dozen friends, a few professional peers and one or two gatekeepers. And the answers I've been getting have been a bit frustrating and difficult to live with.
Here's what people have been telling me.
"Can I exhibit the work overseas?" leads to the following answers:
Yes IF you are willing to pay a high price and hire a private space, hang the work yourself, etc (no thanks)
Yes IF you have a lot of funding (government money)
Yes IF you are willing to visit Europe, USA, Latin America in person, meet people in person and show your work in person AND they respond to it AND there's a suitable opportunity to exhibit it in the future
Yes IF you can convince a gallery, festival or event to show the work (this is very, very hard without the local knowledge I mentioned above, and also costs money to enter)
From these answers, you can probably tell that #4 is really the only viable option. Is it possible to convince a gallery, festival or event to show the work? I still don't know. Obnoxiously money seems to be the biggest issue: if the government gave me a grant it would be substantially easier to get an exhibition/spot at a festival, but of course the government won't give me money to sit in my bank account while I shop around. They want to fund specific opportunities (eg, I have this festival agreeing to show my work) not vague hopes.
So there's a catch 22: you need money to get your foot in the door, but the money available only is given to people already on the inside.
The question of money comes up again when trying to answer the next question.
"How would I actually get it exhibited? What would be the first step?"
Self fund a trip to Europe/USA and meet people face-to-face showing them my photos, of course not everyone will want to meet me, not everyone I meet will like the work, and not everyone I meet who likes the work will have an opportunity to show it.
Send people copies of my book for free, maybe they like it and think of me, maybe they don't. Maybe they then think of my work down the track, maybe they don't.
Build an example of an exhibition you want at my own cost, document it beautifully, email it as a PDF, see if anyone likes it (this sounds reasonable until you start to think about: where, who's paying, etc).
Apply to competitions and festival open calls, assuming my work fits the theme (which is usually doesn't), see how I go. Recently I was 'accepted' to a festival's "2nd round". I spent 30 Euros entering and it would cost another 80 Euros to enter the 2nd round, which involves 100 artists showing their work to a festival panel and then 4-5 of those get exhibited. It felt like money down the drain, so I declined.
What I've observed, recently, is a segment of the Melbourne art community who do spend 1-3 months of the year in Europe over summer. Partially on holiday but partially visiting a ton of festivals and having meetings to discuss what they are working on and how it could be exhibited. But I can't take 2 months off work for a holiday with 5 meetings scattered throughout, most of which would lead to nothing. I just don't have the money and my boss would likely just ask me to resign. I guess I'm a bit annoyed that me, someone with (I think) good work and a day job is more or less being advised to fly willy nilly to the most expensive part of the world for the chance to show people what I've made.
You might be wondering 'Matt, can't you just email or video chat some of these people and places?' which is a great question. Unfortunately, even the people who've agreed to talk to me via video will say 'oh we can't really go forward until we meet in person' or 'yeah so the galleries/festival director - they don't really use or check emails'. Which makes me wonder if they'd even agree to meet face to face, would they even see my email saying 'I'm in town let me show you'.
Do these people know how expensive it is to travel across the world and potter about different cities for the sake of a meeting? The Australians that do this, where is their money coming from for them to swan around Italy for a summer and attend 3 meetings? I feel barraged by peers who have done this recently, but it's insane to me. How can I convince my boss to let me take a month off? Would it be worth risking employment? What the actual fresh hell?
I've always heard the art world is closed to people without money, but I have a job, I'm not broke, poor or struggling to make ends meet - but even still it feels this stage is so tenuous and expensive it repels me.
Which leads us to the last question:
"Would it actually be worth it? To take this work overseas?"
Increasingly I'm thinking 'no' - there's so many mazes and games to play and so little certainty for success, and what would that success turn into? The art world is incredibly fickle and people who appear to be succeeding are often not actually making an income or achieving any security. We've all seen one-hit wonders come and go - and where did all that effort and touring get them apart from a small hit in 2011? When they are 40 or 50 what benefit will that have brought? Perhaps less than just staying and playing music in their garage on their own terms.
Truly, you and I can't win playing someone else's game. Trying to enter a small, expensive, restricted, elitist and questionably useful world just feels like there's no point. I'd probably have more fun pasting posters on my garage's wall and talking to my neighbors. Would cost less too.
Usually I'll do something if it interests me - that's enough. But I'm finding this experience incredibly dis-heartening. No one is telling me anything new and it seems to be almost a complete swing and a miss - one or two places have expressed soft interest, but they don't seem to get it: I literally have to come from the other side of the world to work with you, I can't do that on a whim - this needs to feel concrete and purposeful. I does seem like I'll do some work in the UK next year but the spaces I've talked to have been polite and distant, even in saying 'oh yes we'd love to work together'.
I've heard for years that the art world is like this, I guess I was hoping if I did something good enough and worked politely and professionally some of these processes wouldn't get in my way. Which is definitely proving to be wrong.
Anyway, I think that's a wrap on this week's newsletter. I'm not quite ready to give up on trying to find a way to show my work somewhere new and fresh. I think it is important for some of my medium and long term aspirations and I think it would be rewarding. However, the process to get there is definitely a bad one, and I'm really not willing to spend thousands of dollars on small chances, so perhaps I won't quite get what I'd hoped for. We'll see.
A more fun newsletter will come next week - I promise!