Picking up on Matt’s statement that “sophistication is a facade,” a reader says she may one day open up an “anti-gallery gallery.”

Matt responds:

I think as artists we all support one another.  The philosophy of the individual artist is as individual as every human being is.  We are not part of the Borg; we are part of the universe.  Therefore each one of us is complete within ourselves.  We just have to find that completeness.

I happen to believe we were created with the ability to go out on our own great pilgramage, and each of us is charged with doing something with our lives.  The question is, what are we supposed to be doing?

I was once considered a successful businessman.  I got great pleasure from that recognition, but when all was said and done, I didn’t feel that that was my real calling in the universe.  As a businessperson, there are certain no-nos:  ways you had to dress, ways you have to act and be perceived.  As an artist, the world gives you greater liberty, because you’re “just a crazy artist.”  That’s why I believe I was able to make the transition from businessman to artist.  Most people at the time thought I’d lost my mind.  I think I found it.

My life then and my life now is as different as day is to night.  How the art world is structured is probably an oxymoron, because I don’t think the making of art is structured; it has a chaotic, wonderful, structured but unstructured way of acting in a world where, outside of the world of art, straight lines are straight lines, triangles are triangles, circles are circles, squares are squares.  The mind of an artist accepts and distorts reality and digs into the primeval part of our being to create the hidden objects of our dreams and imagination.  The artist creates a synthesis of the reality we live in.

The question I constantly ask myself is:  What reality am I really living in right now, and do I know it?  What reality is appearing on my canvas or piece of wood?  In what way am I creating some sort of outward picture of the contradictions and distortions of reality within my real world from my artistic world?  What is this picture, this helter-skelter imagination concept that I’m looking at, and what is real?  My studio?  My head?  Or this painting?

Probably the tension between the gallery system and the artist is the tension between two cultures.  The artists have complete freedom, while the gallery system puts itself into a box where the story must always be the same, must be told by them, must be shown in a certain surrounding.  It becomes a facade of sophistication and civilization within the real world that we’re all walking around in.  So then we take a piece of art, which represents another dimension, and naturally there is a huge tension between the two cultures.  One side says, “Look at it, and if you don’t like it, tough shit!”  The other says, “Look at it and buy it, because it is an economic event.”

Well, it is not an economic event.  It is a manifestation of the soul of the artist that happens to be, in some part, an economic event, because artists, like all other people who walk this earth, have to eat, sleep, drink, and have shelter.

When we go to have an operation to have our appendix taken out, we expect to pay the doctor, because he has the same needs.  So when we sell a painting, even though it’s like selling our first-born, it is at that point an economic event.  Except that no one needs another painting; you need an operation.

An artist is compelled by an inner force, a force not of this world, to make the things that flow out of the hand through the body.  That is the genesis of the tension between “Are you making this for money, or to soothe the inner beast within yourself?”  I imagine it’s a little of both. 

Matt