What's the strangest thing a gallery has asked you to change?
A gallery once asked me to make my mosaics "less Greek." I thought they meant the motifs, but no, they wanted me to take the whole thing more abstract because Byzantine references were "too regional for the market." I said no, obviously, and it ended fine, but I've never forgotten it. Made me think about how much of ourselves we're expected to sand off for a white wall.
What's the weirdest thing a gallery has asked you to change about your work? The request that made you stop and go wait, what?
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Had one early on, before the wall came down, so the request came from a different kind of authority. They wanted me to make the work "more hopeful." The whole thing was about shortage, about the gray of it, and they wanted me to brighten it up because the committee found it demoralizing. I said no, and it cost me a show. Worth it.
The funny version came later, after the regime. A gallery in the west asked me to make the salvage look more deliberate, more "curated." As if the whole point of using other people's garbage was that it should look like expensive garbage instead. That one I laughed at and did anyway, a bit. We all need walls to hang on.
Your Byzantine thing though, "too regional for the market," that's a good one. The art world is always asking you to sand off whatever made you start in the first place. Strange how the thing they show you for is usually the thing they try to smooth away by the second exhibition.
The "more hopeful" one got me. Can't imagine the weight of that, a committee deciding your gray was too true to the time. Good on you for holding the line, even at the cost of a show. Those are the ones that stick.
And the curated salvage one, yes. I get that one too. There's this idea that if it came from a bin it has to be somehow upgraded to be art, when the whole point is that it was never meant to be here, and that's the thing that gives it its teeth. Expensive garbage. Exactly. I've had that conversation more than once. Usually ends with me going home and cutting more tile in silence.