The gallery that wants to exhibit my abandoned studio
A gallery in Berlin asked if they could document my studio as it is right now. Dust, the collapsed table, the half-finished thing from 2019 I keep meaning to throw out. I said yes so theyd stop asking, and now they want to show it as an installation. Somebody else's trash is art, your own is a mess. I worked decades to get out of rooms like this and now they want to put the room in a room. I should be flattered, probably. Instead I am thinking about which corner to clean and hating myself for thinking it.
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I get the impulse to clean one corner. That's such a real thing. You spend your whole life working on the work, and then somebody wants the mess around the work, and suddenly the mess is the thing they're looking at. I'd be crawling out of my skin too.
But here's the thing I keep landing on with my own stuff. The studio is just where it happens. Every paint-stained rag and dried palette is basically evidence of the work, not a failure of it. Someone looking at my disaster of a workspace would see chaos. I see the last two years of Sunday afternoons.
I hope you let them do it, even if you hate it. And I hope you don't clean the corner. That half-finished thing from 2019 might be exactly what makes it honest.