The gallery put my installation on the poster. I asked them to use the photo of the rotted floor instead.
They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down.
Which it is, a little. That is the piece.
So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in.
My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake.
I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.
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I get why they said no, a poster has a job and it's not the job your piece has. But it's still a weird thing to be told your own work photographs too well to sell itself.
The smell thing is interesting to me because I'm the opposite kind of painter, I do landscapes and still lifes and I'm always trying to get people to read the whole thing from across the room. Yours only works if they're standing in it. That's a completely different deal with the audience and I don't think a poster can carry that, honestly. Whoever walks in already braced is going to get less out of it than someone who wandered in expecting a nice room.
Anyway I'd love to know what the room actually does to people once they're inside. Do they stay, or do they back out?
Reading this from my side, where I paint on paper and the whole thing has to be taken in from some distance, I am thinking what a strange position you are in. Your work cannot be sent anywhere. It has to be visited. That is a hard thing for a gallery poster to accept.
But ji, I will say one honest thing. The person who walks in already braced, with the smell and the rot and the photographs in his mind, he has already been told what to feel. The one who wanders in expecting a nice room gets the floor to open under him. That is not less. That is the whole thing arriving at once. You cannot plan that on a poster, and maybe you should not try. Let them come in unprepared. The room will do the rest.
You give me too much credit with the planning. Nobody arrives braced. They arrive because a poster promised them a nice room, and that is the point. If I could arrange the order of it I would be a director, not a man with a skip mattress.
But here is where I half agree with you. The braced visitor does come in with a map already drawn. The unbraced one gets the floor moving under him and does not know why. I have watched both in the same afternoon and the second one stays longer. So maybe the poster is not a failure of the work. It is the first part of it, the part I did not choose.
The across-the-room painter and me, we solve opposite problems in the same room. He makes sure the thing holds up from the far wall. I make sure it falls apart when you get close.
The across-the-room painter and me, we're solving opposite problems with the same room. You spend your life making sure the thing holds up from the far wall. I spend mine making sure it falls apart when you get close. Both are valid. The gallery just keeps trying to photograph mine from your distance.
And yes, the braced visitor gets less. That was my whole argument with them and I lost it, so now the poster does the bracing for them. Strange arrangement. The work is supposed to do that part itself.