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Beyond The Fringe

I recently had some positive experiences where artists exhibited under circumstances where there was no gate keeping by institutional 'art experts', who are as often as not, not artists.

-I was in a group exhibition of printmakers that was not juried. Any regional printmaker could enter and there were over 70 artists, most who submitted more than one piece. No one was denied entry and the quality of the work overall was superb and a testament to the visual activity of printmaking in general and on Vancouver Island specifically. There were pieces that didn't appeal overly to me of course, or were pretty amateur, but overall the show was visually gregarious, interesting and showed a wide variety of techniques and artistic facility. It was certainly as good or better than curated exhibitions I have visited. Now, although there was no gate keeping, printmaking is a fairly technical visual activity that involves a degree of commitment and effort, as well as the confidence to enter a show. So perhaps this fact acted as a kind of gate-keeping, performing a similar function to a jury, or an arts association which requires application for membership. Print itself has an unusual quality of 'detaching' itself aesthetically from the hands-on experience of the artist, I often notice that I look at my own prints more favorably than my own drawings or paintings; the prints look 'detached', as though someone else did them and generally I am easier in my judgement criticism of others than I am of myself. Regardless of how pre-loaded with aesthetic interest any print comes charged with, whether it's a good or bad print, the regional print show was an astonishing example of how you don't need institutional art experts in the exhibition equation to get a good show. Artists themselves are quite capable of pulling it off.  

-I noticed a nearby community public art gallery offered a small gallery/space for rent, no jurying, curating or gate-keeping of any kind. Eighty dollars a day. It occurred to me I could do a pop up show there. I 'promoted' it on social media for a month or so, showed up on the day, put stuff on the walls, sold some things, took it down and exited through the former gift shop. Another group of printmakers did the same thing some weeks later. Both our shows exhibited a wide variety and large quantities of work. You could spend an hour or two as easily as 20 minutes at both exhibits, whereas in a formal curated and vetted shows exhibited images or objects are stretched pretty thin and I'm often done looking in significantly less time.

-In my own community there is an artist and therapist who has opened her space as a rentable gallery. She also has invitational exhibitions. On some occasions, when scheduling allows, she will book single day 'pop up[ exhibitions of the sort that I mentioned above. In the five years of her galleries existence she has probably exhibited a hundred local and regional artists in an area where opportunities to exhibit are slim. Although she selects artists for her invitationals, her gallery model also provides for artists organizing shows for themselves and the quality of exhibitions has been as good as anywhere in this region. Her gallery model has a fringe element.

All of the above arrangements could be thought of as 'alternative' or 'indy' or 'fringe' gallery models that allow art workers...artists...to side step arts 'management' and 'bosses' and the constraints, controls and even suppression that 'management' imposes on the visual arts. In the case of of the person offering her space to artists, no government funding is received for the proprietors efforts or for the artists. Meanwhile generously funded public galleries that conform to government mandates, whatever they might be, receive relatively massive injections of cash on an annual basis, most  of which goes to operating fees and a throng of employees. Artists fees make up a tiniest fraction of expenditures.

A quick search of Fringe Festivals will now find them all over the world. There are even some 'fringe' visual arts festivals. Some festivals and galleries are obviously schemes to fleece artists in much the same way as what we used to call 'vanity galleries' used to do. Some public gallery organized festivals charge artists to raise funds for the very institutions that the artists would in all probability never be permitted to show their work in. This is the case with The Moss Street Paint-in in Victoria, where artists pay a substantial fee to 'rent' a strip of dirty sod at the edge of a road. At their best, fringe opportunities should be free or require only nominal entry fee because, in general, the economic viability of artists in Canada is dire. The original Fringe Festival in Edinburgh was a response to the Edinburgh International Festival, a high brow arts festival initiated in the wake of WW2 with the high minded intent to help heal the wounds of war through the languages and forms of art, particularly music and theatre. Performances were obviously well considered and carefully selected to provide for the organizers notions of high quality. But gate-keeping, by arts elites, inevitably keeps most performers or artists 'out', at bay, away, shut down. So from the very beginning of the Edinburgh Festival 'The Fringe' arrived in and around the city with uninvited troupes of performers arriving and taking over smaller venues to tempt and perform to the assembled consumers of the official theatre. Again, I like to frame this response to gate keeping as arts-workers taking the arts into their own hands and not behaving complacently in the face of arts management bosses. The key to most Fringe festivals is no jurying for entry. The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh was so successful that the main arts Festival itself created a late night revue to compete called Beyond The Fringe, which became the well known comedy stage review with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. I've taken the title of this post from this comedy review, with a mind to getting beyond fringe festivals to the notion of fringe galleries and fringe art exhibitions; scenarios with no gate-keeping and jurying.

Around 2023-4 I'll be damned if I could get exhibitions for my fairly prolific production of printed images in public or commercial galleries. I live on Vancouver Island. Commercial galleries want stuff they can sell and here it seems to be lots of pretty pictures, from non representational arrangements of brush strokes and textures, views through birch trees, pears, koi fish, landscapes of beaches and forests usually done in pleasing pastels using whites and primary and secondary colours or vivid hallucinogenic primaries, eagles, bears, and whales. In the public government funded galleries alleged to have strict and narrow 'mandates' (so I am repeatedly told) the primary consideration is social engineering involving progressive ideological notions and exhibiting images and artifacts that can be explained and provided with written interpretations. The exhibitions often consist of 'installations', where the art such as it is exists for the duration of the exhibit within the gallery space as something assembled, projected or quite literally transcribed onto the gallery walls, all to be dismantled or annihilated at the end of the show, essentially devaluing the product of artists labour to ephemeral non-commodities. The function of the art, such as it might be, is adding value to the gallery space, the curators discretion and the institutional and technocratic nature of the exhibition.

A key talking point of contemporary public galleries is 'engaging the public'. But public galleries are like temples and the highly curated contents presumed to be excellent. The public dare not be too engaged or too not engaged. The whole system begs the public to leave judgement to the experts who justify the show, which is less like a back and forth engagement but rather a kind of infusion and indoctrination by the institution and it's experts. It's not unlike attending church. A church service doesn't make it easy for those in the pews to quibble with the sermon or service. It's not very often someone stands up and interrupts the official doctrines being broadcast. Public institutional galleries inevitably talk down to their public, who they like to suggest they are 'challenging' if ever a discouraging word comes from the visitors; in any disagreement about value the visitor is assumed wrong. Engagement is one way, didactic, essentially autocratic. However in an un-curated fringe show the public would be fed no positive preconceptions that the work is necessarily 'good'. The public would be required to make up their own mind. Required to consider and not dutifully accept. They would need to do the work of discernment. They can clap, talk back, laugh, gag, argue, throw rotten fruit, boo, turn on their heels...situationally a fringe gallery seems orders of magnitude more engaging than an official institutional event.

The fear of humiliation is real for anyone who takes themselves their visual art seriously enough to organize a solo exhibition or participate in a group show. It takes confidence and probably a lot of hard work to accumulate work to hang on a wall for even one day (I had over a hundred discrete images hanging on the walls of my pop up show in the rental space and hundreds more in folders representing years of full time effort). Of course, there will be the odd deluded megalomaniac who will exhibit in a fringe space. But they and every exhibitor will risk humiliation, something all artists have to face. The hard work required and the risk of humiliation and failure should act as a kind of gatekeeping.

As mentioned, I've already witnessed some fringe visual arts venues locally. So what would a fringe gallery look like and how might it operate at a publicly funded institution? 

There would be little to fuss with if there was a fringe space in a public institution. The public gallery would simply provide one of it's rooms, empty, painted white, one day a week to any artist who might pay a nominal fee to rent it for a day for a pop up show. Say a Saturday. The artist would arrive and hang the work, install the work, and an arts event would take place over the course of the day when the gallery is open. Obviously I'm thinking of hanging visual on the walls, but it could be dance, installation, a comedy routine, music, or poetry. The gallery bureaucrats would have little to do with exhibitions at the fringe. The fringe space could be used by the establishment during the week when it isn't active. When active the culture of community artists would authentically emerge and occupy the provided space. Culture being pushed down from 'above' by institutions and their civil servants is colonial; culture seeping up from 'below' is authentic and indigenous. Artists are quite good at creating their art, but it's time consuming, and doesn't leave them much time to promote it or find venues and space; space and the opportunity to fill it is the most important thing that institutional arts should be providing both artists and the community.