Standing in front of closed doors

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The project that Ap asked subsidy for, he didn’t get it. Instead, he received a standard letter with the standard text, befitting a bureaucratic system. It stated, "We are sorry to tell you that we received so many requests for subsidies this year and the level was so high that the committee had real problems deciding. Unfortunately, you were not selected, but good luck next year.”

I don't think the text was necessary for any artist. To hear that your project was not seen as fit for subsidy, by a committee who favoured projects of much lower quality. I mean in general, when you see the results of the committees and the selection of the curators, one question always arises with the public: do you have to pay for all this garbage? With the Dutch BKR system, the number of works that the artists had to supply in return for receiving the funds resulted in overloaded warehouses, and substantial costs to keep them in good condition. They were offered to grace the walls of public buildings, but nobody wanted them. They finally started to put them in places they called Artotheque. The works were presented to the public, who could rent them for a period of time, and change them when they got tired of them, or buy them, if they really wanted to keep the work for themselves. This idea should have been in place when they started with subsidies for artists, but they didn't anticipate how many warehouses they would fill after so many years. The aspect had completely escaped them when they created the BKR system, let alone that they would foresee this serious problem.

The problem is always the same for every government, what to do with the money intended for art, how should the money be used so that the public benefits most. This is one of the reasons for the formation of all the committees and curators who are supposed to know what to choose. However, they can only judge according to the knowledge they have, and not according to the knowledge they don't have. It starts with choosing the people for the positions as when they are the benefitting most, the public interest may not be best served.

The exhibition spaces in the Tanks and KickArts were more like galleries than exhibition places. The artist paid for the exhibition and could sell their works. They did not work with the sale of tickets at the entrance because they did not want to reveal the lack of money for non-subsidised artists to the audience. There is a difference between the artists who are subsidised and those who are not. If a place sells tickets to the exhibition of an unknown artist there is a registration of how many visitors were interested in seeing the works of that artist, where the commission failed to see their value, raising questions about their ability to judge effectively. After all they had sent the artist the rejection letter that now evidences their inability. They were against unsubsidised artists like us trying to subsidise themselves in this way, and so they blocked the possibility of financially enabling the project in the only way we could, which is by selling tickets. They didn’t allow us to charge for the exhibition.

We also tried to establish contact with the declining Queensland art scene. They had a small office that was supposed to serve the artists. We made an appointment with one of the employees, who was originally a ceramicist who lost interest in making ceramics and got a job as a photographer for other artists. It was clear from the conversation with her that she had no education in art, and had no ability in or knowledge of photography. She of course gave us the papers that we had already received in the mail, and she had nothing further to tell.

She didn't apologise for not being at her office for our appointment. We stood in front of a closed door. She didn't even bother to hang up a piece of paper to say ‘back in 20 minutes’. What was going on? We waited by her office’s door for a while, then we asked in the places next to it, if they had seen her, and we heard that she kept the office closed most of the time. She somehow gets paid for work she is supposed to do and no one checks if she’s actually doing anything at all.

But we did book the tank to do our project for a week, during which there was going be a solar eclipse that we knew about, and which would bring a lot of people to the city. When they found out, the Tanks management wanted us to share the space for a joint venture with another project, and not at a discounted price, no they doubled it. So while we had thought about putting money of our own into the project, we decided not only to cancel the Tanks for doing this project, but to cancel the Tanks for any project in the future, and also as a place for a performance.

After attending a concert, it became evident that the technicians of the Tanks, whom the artist must hire for their service even if he can do a better job of it himself, did not understand anything about sound. The bass was so loud that we had to use earplugs, and even that wasn’t sufficient to be able to stand loud, unbalanced sound.

Seven years after we’d had to decide not to do our visual projections project in the Tanks, visual projection became very popular, as it was more accessible, and cheaper with the advancement of powerful projectors. Projections were made on every building in the city for the effect, not for the content. The visual concepts of "Here is a butterfly" or "This is a house" were now projected without any thought behind them, making the whole effort pointless. Projections have been popular since the 70s, especially in discotheques, where film projections were also made on people themselves for effect.

Any effect can be used in art, but it’s used without any reason, like just projecting images, it remains just an effect.