I got scolded a lot during the early years of Coagula Art Journal. Scolded by artists and collectors and art dealers and just random people at galleries with no specific status. They wagged their fingers in my face. They threw drinks in my face. They stared me straight in the face. They would say they were angry. They would say they were disappointed. Some would tell me they were only thinking of my best interests.
They were all upset about one thing. My disrespect for the community.
You see, there is an art community. There is no neighborhood to move in to be part of it. There are no membership fees or initiations. You show up and supposedly you are part of it, right?
Wrong. The “community” of which everyone spoke was an individual illusion to each person.
COMMUNITY was the hallucination by a heavy drinking bat in her early sixties who had bought five works of art in her entire life insisting that she was a top collector.
COMMUNITY was the hallucination by an MFA graduate who had never had a solo show five years after graduation asserting that he was a peer of Robert Rauschenberg’s.
COMMUNITY was the carrot the MFA diploma mill dangled at hungry applicants that implied everyone you ever met on their campus would be working on behalf of the art careers of those applicants for the next forty years.
COMMUNITY was what the lonely painter in his studio longed for without ever really envisioning it specifically to call it that but there was something that made him set down his brush, take a shower, stay sober in the afternoon and head over to someone else’s art opening.
COMMUNITY was what the woman who dated guys she met at museum opening nights really wanted and it was the reason she never slept with any of them and she never quite put her finger on the fact that she pursued something else instead of the thing she sought because she never visualized what she wanted.
And plenty more people had their own notions of what it was and never quite landed there. Of course, the most evil motherfuckers in the game used COMMUNITY like a worm on a hook to reel in the most earnest suckers – you can get endless free labor from people thinking they are building something bigger than themselves from which they will benefit. I’ve seen people give up a year of their lives and lots of their money to get one postage-stamp-sized drawing on a wall of a massive group show because some bastard was pulling the strings that spelled out the pledge that a community was being formed.
Do I sound cynical? WELL… here is why I am cynical. The dumbshits and a hundred others would blame my writing for poisoning the community. The one that only existed in their minds. Not their collective minds, that would have been beautiful and maybe changed the world a little. No, each person’s individual navigational visions of what the art world was and what he or she could get out of it if only a lot of people would work on giving it to them. So I wouldn’t foster the party line of discourse or dialogue or whatever grease was making the gears in the machine turn faster that week. And therefore, my writing was an attack on the community. And my writing was not that. It was an attack on the structures in place that impeded community, structures these motherfuckers wanted to climb on and climb up and look down on everyone else from before they spit down or talked about spitting down and laughed about the concept of spit. Those structures are all still there, but I wrote enough to assist some people to see what I saw.
There are moments of accomplishment that can only be attributed to group effort. There are synchronicities that unite disparate agendas to push change into the universe. There are commonalities among people that allow them to more easily cooperate on collaborations that make impacts. There are moments when the roaring approval of the many change the way art is seen. But there is no ART COMMUNITY and in art, the word COMMUNITY doesn’t mean shit.