Viewing Art in a Gallery

I'm in the process of putting together an application for Arts Council England and Wales funding, my second in recent years. Amazingly, the first was successful, so perhaps I am riding the Arts Council cloud train at the moment and I will fall off with a slump. We shall see. As part of the application I find myself seeking out galleries for collaboration and involvement in the grant to exhibit some of the works created through the project. These works will be (well, I think so) fascinating, challenging and visually professional and captivating. Printmaking will be involved in all its wonderful guises in many alternative ways, not just on paper.

print off paper (photo:AB)

So I find myself trawling through and pulling up contacts of various galleries in Hampshire and West Sussex. To be honest it is the most incredibly dull thing to have to do, and this is why I actually ask myself is it entirely necessary? Art Galleries seem not only to inhibit many people, but they also seem to create this sense of me and The Art. The Art being something that is displayed in a sterile environment, in print terms, usually upon a wall, in which the viewer looks at the work, ponders and moves onto the next. They are even displayed too high for children so the very generation who we need to inspire have to be lifted up on the shoulders of adults to the high level of high art to view it. How un-inclusive. And don't touch. DO NOT TOUCH the prints. My goodness, never ever ever touch the prints. They will spontaneously burst into flame. I am of course highlighting the extreme scenarios, and there are some amazing wonderful galleries out there challenging this. In the print world, less so, as it is still weighted in quite a bit of heavy tradition of what printmaking is, and indeed what it should be.

I have just returned from West Dean College, where I taught a 4 day course in Hybrid Printmaking. One student who had had some experience of printmaking, said the hardest thing was, not the huge amount of information and possibilities supplied, but the process of un-learning. That was the challenge. The removal and stripping of the weight of the do's and do-nots of prints, the tradition saying all the things you can not do, the stereotypes that prints should look and be a certain way. Basically the un-learning is the hardest thing, but the most rewarding and creative. And this brought me back to this Arts Council proposal. Why am I actually looking at galleries in the first place? That is tradition saying prints have to be displayed in the gallery setting, they have to be mounted and on a wall. I am in fact hindering myself. I am researching into methods of displaying and working with prints that are weatherproof and can be displayed outside. Perhaps even in the woods. And the challenge comes in retrieving the thoughts that wonder off to the stereotype white wall gallery setting, and bringing them back to see the other possibilities. These stereotypes and ideals are founded upon the ideals of art for centuries, and that it should always be in the gallery. And I find myself seeking these ideals, but then to what extent am I truly being creative and challenging and un-learning? Not much. So I need to re-think basically. I need to not be governed by the ideals that project upon me and tell me that the white gallery wall is the only option for printmaking. It is certainly the easiest and the least challenging, but does it offer the most creative experience for maker and viewer? Probably not. There is more out there for printmaking. Let have some fun.