Back in November, Eric's girlfriend Pei Pei met me for the first time at the Guy Fawkes bonfire event. Somehow she got the idea that I was a Photographer,¹ and invited me to appear in her art show that she was planning. I readily agreed to this because the show wasn't going to happen for several months, and no date more than a couple weeks in the future really registers with me as a thing that will actually happen.

I must have been going through a creative phase at the time, because it was only a week earlier that Kacirek's then-girlfriend Christine met me for the first time, and immediately decided that I needed to meet her then-single friend Megan who is Creative and a Writer and works for the Theatre-spelled-with-an-RE. (Christine is now engaged to Kacirek and Megan now has a boyfriend.)

So despite my skepticism, March 2008 came around, and it was time to worry about what Mikey the Photographer was going to exhibit in the Art Show. I didn't want to take it too seriously, but I didn't want to take it not seriously enough, either, since I could see that Pei Pei was working really hard on it. She printed a program, made little museum-like name plates for each person, and so on. So I put some real effort into my project as well. I was just going to post the product, but I think the process is the more interesting part.

Here was an odd thing. I had not been featured in an Art Show since high school, and since that's all I had to go on, I went and got foam board and spray-mount glue like we did back then. I had Pei Pei's theme to help pick the photographs, which was "Expulsion from the Garden." I got a colorimeter to calibrate my new display to try to get control of the color of the prints, which I haven't bothered with before.

I got this stuff at the Aaron Brothers store near my house, which is just a whitey suburban strip-mall chain, of course. There was only one other customer there; a woman who wandered around looking at the paints and feeling the brushes and so on, until she sheepishly explained to one of the employees that she was "just getting started" at painting and didn't really know what she needed. I was doing exactly the same thing, of course, a couple aisles away with the various spray adhesives and mat cutters and such.

Good for her, I decided, and I hope she does paint something, even if it sucks. So what if she is never going to have a fancy gallery opening where smug trendy people will drink precious little espressos. So what if she never hangs a picture outside of her own house. If she makes anything at all, she is participating in the creative scene, and that matters.²

This fits directly into an ongoing conversation with Megan, who has been concerned about the questionable future of The Theatre. My assertion is that High Art as found in SFMOMA or National Geographic or Berkeley Repertory Theatre will not survive without legions of active participants, however amateurish they may be. That's because you can't sell any of these things as purely passive entertainment, because they can't compete with TV. Look at the audience at any of Megan's shows—anybody under 70 is connected to the theater in some way. So any Serious Artist that might turn up his nose at today's strip-mall art store does so at his peril, because its customers are the people–possibly the only people–that might buy a ticket to his highbrow exhibit tomorrow.

Anyway, the point of that argument was: hooray for Pei Pei, for encouraging a bunch of random people to draw and paint and sing and act. She did more for the Future of Art than the next twelve hand-wringing articles in the San Francisco Chronicle.

So, having gone to some trouble to convince you that it doesn't matter, here is what I actually produced. I mounted each of these 10x10 squares on a white 12x14 board, so that they were framed kind of like a Polaroid, not that that had any particular artistic significance. The little explanatory notes I printed out and mounted on a board of their own. And let's don't talk about how long I just spent trying to recreate that effect in CSS.

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The four pictures I have printed do not have much of a unifying theme, but rather represent four different interpretations of Peipei's theme, "Expulsion from the Garden."

¹ This is apparently an entry with Reckless Capitalization.

² This is all projection again of course. What I mean is that I will never have a fancy gallery opening full of smug trendy people, and I may never hang a picture anywhere outside my own house, but that doesn't mean that making them is a waste of time.

07 Apr 2008 03:06 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments