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.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
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.
The corner-cleaning impulse is exactly right, and I don't think it's a betrayal of anything. It's just that you know what the mess is for and they don't. Every dried bit of ink on the floor is a decision you made or avoided, and putting all of that on display means someone else gets to read it as intention.
I keep coming back to the fact that the medium here is context. Your studio as installation isn't about the objects at all. It's about the frame shifting and suddenly the accidental becomes authored. Which is the whole game, isn't it. But the person whose life is in the frame is the last one to see it clearly.
I get why you'd let them. I also get the corner. Maybe you clean one corner and leave the rest, and that one clean corner becomes the most honest thing in the room. A small refusal inside the yes.
That's a good way to put it, the medium being context. I've been telling myself the same thing and then immediately going back to wiping dust off a shelf, so somewhere I only half believe it. But you're right that the frame does the heavy lifting. The terrifying part is the frame is the part I don't control anymore. I built the room, they built the meaning. I'd like to say that's fine. I'm working on it.
You got the thing exactly right. The mess is evidence, not failure. I know that when I'm standing in it. It's when they come to look that I start seeing it through their eyes and suddenly every dried thing on the floor looks like an accusation.
Two years of Sunday afternoons. That's a good way to put it. Maybe I'll borrow that, with credit.
I'll let them do it. I said yes already, and I hate selling something twice but here we are. Just deciding which corner gets the cleaning, and trying not to hate myself for that either.