Budgeted 40 000 CZK for a gallery room. Materials came in at 118 000 and nobody has asked me a single question.
The room is for a mid-size Kunsthalle, opens in November. I gave them a budget in the spring: 40 000 CZK for materials. That is the number they wrote down and that is the number everyone has been repeating in meetings for four months, so it has become true in the way these numbers do.
Actual materials bill so far is 118 000. That is before I pay anyone to help me weld the frame, and the frame is not welded.
Where it goes: 9 000 for the cable and turnbuckles, 14 000 for the plywood I had to buy new because the salvage stuff warped in the studio over winter like a wet book, about 22 000 so far in screws, bolts and a specific matte black paint I have grown to resent. The rest is transport, because the pieces come from a demolition yard in Kladno and a yard in Kladno is not a yard in Prague. Each trip is a van and a person and a day.
So the 118 000 is coming out of my fee, which was already the fee of a man who is bad at this. Nobody at the institution has asked me a question. Not the curator, not the director, not the woman who does the contracts. I think they assume I know what I am doing. I am 58 and I still do this, so I suppose the assumption is reasonable and completely wrong.
The funniest part, if you want it funny: I have done this exact thing before. Probably four times. Each time I tell myself the budget is the budget and each time the room gets bigger than the budget because a room that is too small looks cheap and a room that is too big looks like a decision. I have never once gone back and said the number was wrong. I do not know what that conversation sounds like. I am going to have it this month, I think, and I am not looking forward to learning the language.
If you have ever successfully said "the number I gave you was fiction," I would like to hear how you opened the sentence.
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the salvage warping is the part that gets me. I've had that happen, bought a stack off a demo site, kept it in a cold studio all winter, and by spring it was a pile of potato chips. nobody budgeting for materials ever accounts for the fact that the cheap option sometimes just becomes a second purchase.
118 against 40 is not a rounding error, that's a different project. the part I'd push on is that they've been repeating the 40 like it's a fact for four months, so the longer you wait the more it looks like you overspent rather than that the number was never real. have you said anything yet or is it still in the "surely someone will notice" stage
The potato chips. I have a pile of warped plywood behind my drying rack that I keep meaning to throw out and never do, so it just sits there being a lesson.
But I half disagree with you on one thing. The 40 was never a fact, yes. Still, four months of everyone saying it out loud does something. It stops being a number they forgot and becomes a number they were given. I think the honest move is to say it early and plainly, but also to say it as the first number was wrong, not as the bill is high. Those are two different confessions and only one of them is true.
"The first number was wrong" and "the bill is high" are indeed two different confessions, and you have put the finger on the one I have been avoiding. The second one is an apology. The first one is just a correction. You are right that I owe them the correction.
Where I will push back a little: after four months the number stopped belonging to me. It belongs to the institution now. They have probably written it into a grant application. So when I correct it, I am not correcting my mistake, I am correcting theirs, and that is a different conversation with a different temperature. I still have to have it. I would just rather have it in September than in October when the welder is standing there.
The tarp in the corner for two years, that is the real one. Mine is only behind the rack because there is nowhere else to put it. Give it one more winter and maybe it becomes the piece.
The warped plywood behind the drying rack is the honest version of the story. Mine ended up under a tarp in the corner of the workshop for two years because I kept thinking I would cut it into something small. I did not.
You are right about the four months, and it is exactly why I have not said anything. Every week of silence makes the 118 look like a failure of mine instead of what it is, which is the price of the project we are actually building. I told the curator, once, in June, in the corridor. That does not count. It has to go in writing to the director, and then I have to live with being the difficult foreigner who cannot stay inside a number.
So no, I have not said anything. That is my answer. I am aware it is not a good one.