A Life In Art
I remember the precise moment it happened. As I walked around the evening’s gallery opening, I thought all these people are fucking awful. Everyone was as cheap as the wine they so eloquently quaffed between their hollow laughter. Their conversation more so. It’s all just show. Everyone is here to be seen, and for their own ends. No-one was looking at the work, everyone was just looking at each other. Who they could talk to. How might it further things for them. Where were we all going afterwards. It was that moment I stopped any aspiration to be an artist, and I felt an enormous weight lifted off me. All these people were exhausting. The game of it all was exhausting. And none of it was actually about getting stuff done. It was all just such bullshit heaped upon bullshit. The work was bullshit. The way it got made was bullshit. Who knew who and why was bullshit. All I felt was a crushing wave of certainty. Of knowing that everything here confirmed what I didn’t want. A wave of catharsis as much as a wave goodbye. I didn’t need any of this, but to observe those who thought they needed it was repulsive.
Eek out a living with the scraps of shitty part-time teaching jobs and the bi-annual unattended group show. Scrape together enough each month to afford the cramped studio space. Kid yourself you have a network of support. Exhaust favors. Eat beans on toast three days a week. Eat shit. Are you happy? You seem so fucking miserable all the time and I don’t mean the tortured artist thing. Your work is getting worse. Weak. Inversely proportional to the amount of time you’re spending kissing awful ass everywhere else. What I did next I didn’t know but I knew it wasn’t this.
I remember the click of them leaving the opening and heading out into the Amsterdam night. On to some oh-so-cool loft perhaps. I just wanted to go for a beer round the corner. Some of them were torn in the limbic space between. Knowing that the benefits of the loft far outweighed whatever was on offer at the pub. It was the last time I ever saw her. And as I took the train back home later that night, listening to the Dutch darkness roll by, I caught myself quietly smiling in the darkness’ reflection. Of course I knew what was coming next. When I got home I wrote all night. I wrote like I was running out of time. I wrote for myself and to others. I got to work.
