As they are currently organized, galleries separate artists from
their public as much as they supposedly connect them.
Today, galleries are set up as a site of display. They consist of a room
or series or rooms where completed work is presented. The audience is
invited to contemplate objects, whose principles of construction are
difficult --if not, for many, impossible-- to apprehend. The audience is
reduced to worshiping idols or fetishes created by a group who
are correspondingly elevated to a kind of elite priesthood, an inner circle
of initiates into the "black arts". Appreciation of the arts is reduced
largely to snobbery and taste.
For the most part, artist-run galleries have not in any way challenged this
relationship. To the extent that do strive to challenge the established
relationship between art and the public, it is usually to draw in previously
excluded groups, presenting the art of these groups in a completely
traditional mode. This approach usually has the effect of undermining the
advanced achievements in the arts and
replacing avant-garde work with a popular (petty-bourgeois) aesthetic.
A genuinely popular art has to be established on the basis of a new
relationship between artists and their public.
Consider Filliou and Brecht and their shop C�dille qui Sourit. Filliou said
"we conceived the C�dille qui Sourit as an international center of permanent
creation, and so it
turned out to be. We played games, invented and disinvented objects,
corresponded with the humble and mighty, drank and talked with our
neighbors, manufactured and sold by correspondence suspense poems and
rebuses, started to compile an anthology of misunderstandings and an
anthology of jokes..."
A center of permanent creation, that is what galleries could be. Less a site
of viewing and more a workshop, a place where artists --both professional
and nonprofessional-- work to create works, where works are apprehended in
construction, where the public can grasp the modus operandi of art and
produce works themselves as a way of apprehending work.
cheers,
George
