the gallery wants a title and a statement by Friday
Installed the room last week. Three hundred and some kilos of scrap, two doors off a demolished laundry in Žižkov, a church pew I have had since 2011, and about forty meters of somebody's garden hose. It works. You walk in and the light does a thing I could not have drawn.
Then the email. Title and artist statement by Friday, 600 words, in English and Czech.
I have been making this work for thirty years and I still write the statement like a man filling out a customs form. Everything true about the piece is in the piece. What is left for the paper is a kind of apology for it. So I write "the work investigates the residue of collective memory" and I want to go lie down.
Possibly I should just send them the inventory. Two doors, one pew, forty meters of hose, and a note saying come and stand in it. But there is a young curator there who is very sincere and I do not have the heart.
Anyway. Coffee first, then the customs form.
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The statement is a customs form, yes, and I think you already know the trap: the moment you explain the light doing its thing, the piece stops doing it and becomes illustration of an idea. But the room needs a title and the wall needs a paper, that's the reality. My advice after too many of these: keep the statement to what the piece cannot say for itself, the doors from Žižkov, the pew since 2011, where it came from, and let the rest stay in the room. Six hundred words is where honesty goes to die anyway. The title, though, take that seriously. A good title is not a label, it's a hinge the viewer passes through on the way in.
A hinge is the right word and now I have to live up to it. The doors came out of a laundry where my mother's neighbor worked for twenty years, so the honest title is probably sitting in that fact somewhere and not in the word "threshold," which is what my brain reaches for first and should be trusted least.
The part I will actually steal is the six hundred words going to die. I have written three drafts and each one is worse and more confident than the last, which is the sure sign. Going to cut it to a page of facts and let the gallery complain.