GALLERY THOUGHTS #3

We continue our series of pieces written by our writers while they're 'minding' the gallery with this piece from Robert Eldon, prompted by a visitor's comments.

What looks like a Community Notice Board sits above Ros’ “Conversations / Seed Trays” piece, back to back with Margaret’s “Allotment Diaries”.

And the visitor said that ‘it shouldn’t be there’, it ‘brings the gallery down’. It ‘makes it look like a Branch Library’ (for those who can remember such places) and it ‘detracts from the art’.

And I think this betrays a very elitist view of what a gallery is, an exclusivist view of what art is and who it’s for. It’s a view that ‘art is for some (vague and unspecified) art elite, (other artists?) that’s the group we should be addressing. Anything that might affect their verdict must be erased.

Yet neo:gallery27 is in a shopping centre. The vast majority of the people walking past aren’t artists or from some elite group. 

 And that viewpoint also holds that the work on display must be work that is aimed at the tastes and preferences of that narrow target group (the term ‘accessible’ suddenly becomes a term of disdain.) Anything else is ‘amateur’ or ‘community art’.

Allotted is not about “community art, it’s about promoting professional art into the community and that surely is what a gallery in a shopping centre needs to do.

It’s about creating and interacting with different audiences. It’s about making the wider public of Bolton aware that the gallery in the Market Place (and the artists who exhibit in it) exist. It’s about getting the public interested in the subject of the exhibition, it’s about getting them to want to see the works, and finally about getting them to actually enter the gallery.

 Such an audience is not to the exclusion of other audiences, there must remain a place for the ‘intellectual’ exhibitions, but surely over the programme exhibitions need to be inclusive.

In my own field, there’s a form of writing which is aimed at and seeks the approval of other writers. It’s called the ‘literary novel’. And as one American writer wrote recently – ‘the term ‘literary novel’ is industry shorthand for ‘disappointing book sales.’ So, if for no other reason than the economic survival of the artist group, the more people and the wider the cross-section of the public that enter the gallery, the more catalogues will be sold and the greater the possibility of selling work.  And surely it should be by selling work that the ‘true’ artist becomes viable.

Robert Eldon

07/07/2016