Junk

71

In Paris, when Yaarit returned from her visit to the gallery, Yaarit was furious. She tossed the roll of canvases to the floor and began to cut that gallery with some choice words. In short, they did not want to work with her. They took time to look at the works, which had strained her nerves to the max. I asked her to see the works. She unrolled them on the floor. As always, she was good. She ‘d also been good when she was a student at the academy. She could paint. Not only the canvases spoke individually to the viewer, they were something you would want to live with in your home, to look at every day anew. "They didn't want them," she said, more sad and much less energetic than the mood she was’d been in when she returned. "What's wrong with that?" she said and held one of the canvases with both hands in front of me. And when I said something positive, she said, “Yeah but you've always loved my work, it's nothing new." And what was new and came from someone else, she didn't want to hear.

I don't know how the story ended with the galleries, if she finally signed with the gallery in Sweden for another period or she eventually moved to another gallery, if she’d found one, and where. Yaarit was killed in a hospital after they brought her in, unconscious from a car accident and gave her the wrong medication. Her husband, Ilan, was a doctor at another hospital, and no one called him until after she passed away. Ilan and Yaarit had just moved to a new house, which they bought after the city of Paris decided to destroy the entire area in which they had their first house, with a studio they’d built inside an old bakery. Yaarit had told me they received a lot of money as compensation when I talked to her on the phone. I never got to see the new house, for when I stood in front of the door, only Ilan's name was on the front. He’d started working overtime to forget. He also didn't answer the phone anymore. "I think of her every day," he told me when I finally managed to find him answering the phone late at night and heard what had happened.

Just like the place where Yaarit had started working as an artist was destroyed, many old areas of the city of Amsterdam were being destroyed. But Amsterdam is a city that tries every possible trick to avoid paying any compensation to anyone. The city of Paris paid quite generously, or else I didn't hear about the corruption inside the bureaucracy of Paris, which undoubtedly also exists. European cities are always in conflict with time. They are old cities that were not built for cars and extra infrastructure and for the population growth to today's sizes. These cities need to find a balance between the benefits that come from the past that gives the city its soul, and the future of developments. They are cities that are being destroyed in stages, and the population does not recover from the changes that begin with the first step of demolishing the area and the houses that generations of their families grew up and lived in. People, as a result, find themselves isolated as if they were the only ones who were going to be moved from the place where they grew up and lived their whole lives, to another place. Municipalities especially wanted to get rid of old tenants. It was this problematic population for them, as they were paying the rental prices of the past while all the other costs have gone up. By moving them to other areas, they are forcing them to accept higher rents, and so they end up with a population of renters in new buildings that doesn't know any different.

Yaarit went through the same events as me. The difference was that she was the owner of the property while I was just renting. I also learned from her that galleries keep the artists under control, and it can be harmful to the artists. And as Ap told me about music businesses, "If they see that there is another band with a style quite similar to the style of the band they already have a contract with, they sign a contract with them as well and just don’t let them produce anything, keeping the exclusivity of only one band to promote with that particular style." Maybe between artists and galleries, it works a little differently, but the motivation is pretty much the same and Yaarit felt that she didn't get what she should from the gallery she worked with.

It was when we returned from doing the show at the Avant-Garde Festival that I thought to take some time to look at galleries as a display option. And I decided to judge them in the same way as Yaarit did. She started from the point of whether it is suitable for her work or not. It doesn't matter to me what the results will be because after all, I am not a painter. I took the list of galleries and divided the city into sections, and every week I checked in one of the sections. I found that a recurring part of the set-up in most places was a bored partner of someone with too much money, starting a gallery. Not exactly with a purpose to sell or to promote the artists. They’re the kind who see the opening of an exhibition as something that gives value to their lives. They suddenly become important. All the guests stand around them, and they can talk about the artist and their dog in the same sentence. The invitees are usually the husband's colleagues. He is the friend with whom they live for the income they also put into the business.

In the places where the gallery owners are also serious about selling, there are usually one more extra workers who do most of the work. They are of a particular standard type, they look the same, the hair is cut very straight, black or blond, always in the extreme. The black tends to a cold blue, and the blond to almost white. The lipstick is cadmium red, and the clothing is totally black or dark gray. It doesn’t only show sterility. It is standing in front of a block of ice that should tell you how many lines there are on the canvas that hangs on the wall, without a frame because it is the fashion at the moment. The art of today, to hang it in your house, means you have good taste, just like the kitchen you bought for the design and forgot to check if you can cook in it at all.

In one of the galleries, I was especially amused. The gallery owner had the version of the black hair and clothes. I could see how uncomfortable she was, walking on the tiny heels. She knew at first glance I'm not a client, it meant I was a waste of time. She tried to tell me that they're not exactly open to the public, but I didn't give her the option of putting me in front of a closed door. "You own the gallery, don't you?” I asked, stepping into the main room, there were four huge, rusted squarish fuel tanks. I asked her, "What is this?" She had thought of an original title, “Containers,” she said in all seriousness. Continuing innocently, "The patina of the rust is totally original, he (meaning the artist) chose them very carefully, one by one. It's quite difficult to know how it will look in the gallery." I had no doubt at that moment that she was quite happy to open the door for me. She finally had someone to talk to, and she didn't have to sell me this rusty junk.

Then we went into the other room. The light was weaker for some reason. I asked her about the light. "No need to increase the illumination. I prefer to keep the light low. It's quieter if you don't mind to see the works in this light," she said half apologetically. She really didn't want to turn on all the lights. I could see it as I could see that there wasn't much to see in what she had. In each drawing, exactly one horizontal line was made without a real beginning and without a real end, just a line. And there was another drawing of just a line and another drawing of just a line and a few more of them. "Is this the only thing this artist does?" I asked, and again, in all seriousness, she said, "Oh yes." She quickly added, "He is an Italian artist. It was very difficult to convince him to present his works in Amsterdam. But he agreed. His prices are relatively high, but he is really one of the best in the minimalist style."

When I was at the start of being artist, I had the choice of two ways to develop with my work: a minimalistic direction that I decided would be too boring for me and multi-media which I decided to do, and which meant not to align myself with any media. I was just at the beginning of the road, and I had to research and analyse quite a lot before I could carry out the ideas I wanted to realise. So I started all kinds of experiments to learn what people actually see when I put something in a space in a particular way. Statistically, most people didn't know what bothered them as they were drawn into the arranged space. Every time I did an experiment, I let my friends visit, and I looked at the result of their reactions, I asked them when I showed them a black and white drawing of a woman's figure what colour shawl she was wearing, and everyone said light blue. I asked about a sound, what color they see, and I put them in situations to make them react spontaneously. They had to tell me the association they felt. I surveyed how the effects of sound, compositions, elements, light textures, and all the aspects of built works affect the viewer before I even started to realise one project. But I knew that one thing I would not do is to draw just one line on the paper with a price tag. Those who don't bring anyone any happiness, not even to her, the gallery owner who accommodates it. She has to hold them in a dim light to safeguard the space of the room itself, and not to emphasise the displayed works. How long will she last with this hypocrisy?

I also found quite a lot of hypocrisy in the galleries of the self-presenting artists. If a gallery owner who worked hard could tell stories about some rusty pieces of junk, the artists who really made something had a lot more words to dress up the story of the work. The banal and mediocre were sometimes worse for me than the minimalists because they didn't say anything at all. They were just boring. And a lot of galleries showed a kind of compositions filled with color, just like the single line, without a beginning and without an end, without any reason and without any thought behind it. Sometimes I thought that it was a group of imbeciles who are unable to do any other work. That's why they draw because anyone can take a brush and put a line on the canvas. It was quite easy to see the knowledge of the technique through the layers. But not in every gallery, I found just works that said nothing. There were a few that had one artist under their wing that they kept for years, which was good. They were the ones who weren't boring.

Only in two galleries did I feel that there was the right atmosphere for me, and they were not the galleries Yaarit had picked for her work. One belonged to a Canadian, and the other to an American. There was no pretence, neither in the space of the gallery nor in the clothing of the gallery owners, nor in the works they put on the walls. And the light was right, the distances between the works were right. There was a feeling of activity and excitement, and this is what I wanted to see from a gallery, but what was clear at the stage they were in, they wouldn't take video as an art form.

Chapter 72