ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES MAY 2013

NEW ART MAGAZINE

Unpaid, submission is FREE!!!

Irrelevant, ugly new art magazine/art and lifestyle blog seeking submissions of 3,000-5,000 word articles for its next issue. Please submit your text, plus a CV and two examples of your previous professional writing from a major publisher or magazine we’d really prefer to be working for. All entries must be sent in a format that suits us because we’re really lazy but is incredibly inconvenient and aggravating to you, such as a single PDF compiled from various documents of different sizes, shapes and file types. Please also fill in our application form (download hidden in a cryptic sidebar somewhere on our site) even though it has numerous inexcusable spelling mistakes and totally screwed up formatting so you have to basically type the whole thing out from scratch just so anybody stands a chance of being able to read or understand it.

Your published work will be read by literally ten people, only one of whom even slightly cares about it, and we won’t think to give you a free copy of the magazine or invite you to the party we’re having to launch it. Deadline: tomorrow, 8.30 am.

UPDATE: due to absolutely no interest, deadline extended to the day after tomorrow, 7.30am!

DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS’ GALLERY, LONDON, 18TH APRIL-30TH JUNE 2013

The first thing I noticed, and the reason I went back to The Photographers’ Gallery after boycotting it in disgust last year, is that they seem to have quietly reverted to not charging entry fees for their exhibitions. Victory is mine. When they’re publicly funded and sponsored for exhibitions by the Deutsche Börse and The Telegraph, then it bloody well should be free. They knew I was right, obviously. It’s good to be the king. I wonder what Mr and Mrs Telegraph (retired) think of Mishka Henner scouring Google Street View for itinerant rural prostitutes, though? I suspect they would take a dim view of the whole venture, even if the prostitutes are primly referred to as “sex workers” at the gallery, and described in an even more absurdly PC and “let’s not judge, mmkay?” manner on the web site as “isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments.” Or maybe Mr Telegraph would be well into it and he might even like to get URLs and grid refs so the dirty Tory pig can check out some of the “isolated women” first hand.

It’s not nice to think that women have to sit in plastic garden chairs by a motorway so some nasty scumbag can come along and buy blow jobs, but get real… it isn’t in any way inaccurate or out of line to call them prostitutes.

Mishka Henner, SS98, Cerignola Foggia, Italy, 2012.

I’d seen Henner’s work before, and I really like the eerie, desolate, and profoundly un-erotic world he’s created with this series of pictures. It reminded me somewhat of David Lynch’s mild obsession with uncanny hookers in odd places, as seen in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Inland Empire, etc.

It’s also very interesting that half the nominees (Henner and Christina De Middel) are showing work that’s completely outside the tiny comfort zone of anybody who still worries that photography is not quite art. Henner’s obviously working with a database of found material in a way that definitely stands on its own feet as art, and De Middel’s work is from a self-published book. It’s a huge step forward to see self-publishing and digital practice acknowledged in this way, even though I also love veteran old school photographer Chris Killip’s monochrome, classically photographer-y, authoritative and didactic pictures of decaying communities in the north of England in the 70s and 80s, as Thatcherism set about destroying what was left of them.

Although– or possibly because– they’re beautifully staged, shot and finished, I have some reservations about De Middel’s work. I doubt she’s being deliberately colonial, but her African astronauts (or “Afronauts“: see what she did there?) look a bit too much like they could be some kind of wilfully quirky and borderline racist fashion shoot for a stupid magazine like Wallpaper*. Quirky and racist. “Quiracist”. To get a bit pompous and sociologist-like in the mode that I mocked in the first paragraph, there’s something a bit othering and hegemonic about the way this body of work seems to be suggesting that the idea of Africans in space is inherently odd, funny or inconceivable, even if The Afronauts is partially based on Zambia’s real and fairly inept attempts at space flight.

In the real world I passed on quickly from Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2, and I’ll do the same here. Brecht, war is hell, pasting over somebody else’s work, incredibly ugly artist’s book, Google, something, something. Basic art school stuff: very dated, very dull (or “dullted”). What’s it doing here?

SOUZOU: OUTSIDER ART FROM JAPAN

The Wellcome Trust, London, 28th March–30th June 2013

Shoichi Koga, Seitenmodoki (Ganesha (Nandikeshvara)-oid), 2006.

Having seen this great exhibition of so-called Outsider Art– i.e. art by untrained people in care– I’m more convinced than ever that there’s either an absolutely massive number of respected contemporary artists running around with serious but undiagnosed mental illnesses and learning disabilities… or going to art school, having an MA or a PhD, knowing the right people in the art world, being shown in the “right” [sic] galleries, and being spoken of and approved of in high level critical discourses around contemporary art all signify absolutely bugger all about an artist’s talent or ability in most cases. Because there’s basically no difference between much of the work in Souzou and much of the work to be seen in contemporary art galleries and art fairs all over the developed world. Except possibly there’s a slight difference in the sense that some of the Outsider Art is much better because it completely lacks the cynicism, arid conceptualism, dated Modernist concerns, condescension and sneering pretensions of the Frieze brigade.

Some of the artists in Souzou don’t know, don’t care or perhaps even can’t comprehend how their work is received and understood outside of its original and intensely personal therapeutic context. It doesn’t effect in the slightest their ability to make art that connects with people; art that it beautiful, art that is well-crafted, art that in some way says something to us about our own lives, feelings and thoughts, art that expresses something of the artist’s soul for other people to share, art that is special and desirable enough for somebody to want it on their wall.

SHOW ( ME THE MONEY ) ARTISTS

The filename of this image is “coolsm”, which I presume refers to the copy… but S&M is also cool. In this narrative I think the artists who submit work are the masochists which must make Show Artists the doms. THEY WANT TO SEE “IT” AND THEY’LL SHOW YOU, OH YES. The safe phrase is “get lost”.

Hello everybody, my name is DJ Artistair and when I’m not DJing at the coolest Chilean clubs (I specialise in Monkstep, but you won’t have heard of it yet because I’m cooler than you), or testing out new men’s hair products, or having laser eye surgery or posing for generic stock photography, I Exhibit & Sell [sic] my art, which consists of TV test cards and small obsolete racing cars. Because “cards” and “cars” sound almost the same, so my work is interrogating the po(li/e)tics of homonymy.

Not really. Actually I’m much more handsome than this and I haven’t worn a waistcoat since before the Second World War. What really happened is that Show Artists took it upon themselves to spam me with their spamming stick, so I thought I’d give them some of the publicity they crave. I think the appropriate cliché is “be careful what you wish for.” Sorry guys, I may have suffered every indignity as an artist except popularity but I’m not a moron and unfortunately for you I have considerably more sense than money. Not the first one of these I’ve been subjected to, but it’s as stupid as any of them.

THE OTHER ART FAIR: ANOTHER CORRECTION

When Ryan Stanier of The Other Art Fair wrote to me begging that I delete my posts about it because I was damaging his business, and later importuned me in person in the same regard, I said that I would not do that but I would correct any factually incorrect information I had provided. Unfortunately in my first article I’d understated the cost to artists of exhibiting in this show. Now a little bird has told me that the OAF’s prices have gone up again. See drop menu near bottom of the linked page, after all the artist statement and CV smokescreen stuff. Yeah, as if they accept or reject people solely on their artistic merit and charging them is an afterthought… 3m of wall space and “two spotlights” (woo!) now costs £745+VAT (Value Added Tax of 20% which is charged on most commercial products or services in the UK). It costs £1610+VAT for 7m of wall and four spotlights. For this kind of money those spotlights had better be some kind of King Kong searchlight bastards.

Perhaps, some might say, the upfront costs don’t matter so much and it’s a good investment if the artist gets to sell their work. Well, these artist-milking businesses actually rely on aspiring artists having this kind of woolly quasi-capitalist mindset and yet being too desperate– or frankly, sometimes, just too dim– to do the maths. They have their profit margins nicely worked out, of that I can assure you. If you’re an artist, do yourself a favour and start being realistic about your own costs, investments and profits too.  You can see my calculations on the previous post if you’re interested, but it suffices here to say that Stanier himself claims that the “average artist” (ha ha, you said it Ryan) at the OAF makes £1200 over two fairs. Unfortunately (even leaving aside transportation, subsistence, plus the labour and materials involved in making the work to begin with) the stand costs alone leave an artist who makes sales of £1200 over two fairs still clearly at a significant financial loss. And another very pissed off little insider bird who feels rather foolish now tells me that they coughed up the money to exhibit at the OAF and they didn’t sell a single thing.

If you’re determined to work for nothing and show your work for nothing, then for the love of Baby Warhol and the Twelve YBAs, please, please at least stop lining the pockets of these shysters while you do so. Even in deep austerity Britain there are low-cost or no-cost alternatives, artist unions, studio groups and artist networks who will advise and support you without any kind of exploitative, cynical agenda. Invest your money in yourself. Help yourself and other artists by starting your own artist collective or gallery instead, and help to put the OAFs of this world out of business.