Okay, How to start? A couple of weeks ago I attended the European Convention of Visual Artist 2008 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I had to deliver one of my mirror pieces to a client in Paris anyway so I thought “why not?” Living in a France teaches if nothing else a certain humility about the limits of your language skills. Somehow just knowing how poorly you conjugate the verb opens the mind up accept to faultiness of understanding in an enchanting non-ego threatening way. Sometimes life seems to test the limits of language, any language, to pass through the tough membrane of our prejudices and habits.
Weeks before the Maison des Artistes had kindly emailed a lovely invitation to participate and also an invitation to attend a rap-up party at the UNESCO building the last evening. Somehow I managed to email back an RSVP to the party but not the convention proper. So when I arrived early all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and walked past the museum security to the sign-in table my name wasn’t on the list. My bad. The Maison des Artistes staff told me if I waited perhaps there might be extra space. So I stood awkwardly around the table and watched as slowly they handed out badges to the snaking line of attendees. The longer I stood eavesdropping and people watching as the pile of badges slowly shrank, the more I got how far off the mark my vague idea of what an European Convention of Visual Artists was from reality. I guess I imagined it as a colorful hybrid between an art opening and a star trek convention. Some place where you could let your freak flag fly - only with style. Everyone in the que seem to have a satchel or pda or just look so organized. Worse, everyone seemed to belong to some official group. This is nothing against groups. In groups I very proud to be a part of I still feel inadequate. I walk around feeling slightly eschew as though my sweater is perpetually buttoned out of sequence or I have permanent toothpaste stain on my chin. So after everyone else had been seated I slunk down the stairs with my precious badge and tried to find a seat in which to hide.
By the lunch break I was feeling much better. The social, fiscal, legal position of the visual artist in europe like the rest of the world was sufficiently bleak as to make my own modest career seem slightly less embarrassing. I am lucky to live in France where a visual artist, even one from the US such as myself, enjoys considerable legal and social protection compared to say Bulgaria. But mostly because all the speakers, those organized looking people without fail appear to be working hard to improve the visual artist’s lot and even more astonishingly to approve of our collective contribution to society. Everyone here seemed to like me, a living working artist, or at least like me as an abstraction. Plus I wasn’t alone.
Although we were the clear minority, I was one of a clump of artists eating lunch on the floor. First to sit down was Jean Salou of Calvados in Normandy.(his site) He was an older man who seemed to be an archetype of the artist. His parents wouldn’t let him go to art school and so he is autodidact who has painted his whole life. I only hope I have the same energy, flirtatiousness and ambition when I am the same age. Next wasThere was a clear distinction between the two groups. Even though there were not enough chairs somehow only artists were eating on the Pompidou’s high traffic grey carpet. I don’t know exactly what the implied meaning would be. Is it that artists worry less about our dignity? Or perhaps it is that we dress more casually so it is easier to sit down on carpet? Still the distinction was warm and convivial and lunch passed in a blur of introductions, catered food and the murmur of a swirling conversations.
