Artist Criteria

What is objective art?

What is this space for?

Whatever goals and ambitions you have had as a so-called artist, can you suspend those ambitions to enter into an inquiry held within an objective space? Can you suspend your opinions of yourself, the world and others? Can you observe your own work, simply observe it and not ask it to represent your opinions? What is gesture, colour and form if it does not represent your opinions? Can the work itself be a search, a journey into the unknown? These are not questions with ready answers. Subjective and objective are not absolutes, either/ors which never meet and are set in opposition to each other. But it seems that they are different directions to follow. I can explore my personal history and how it shapes and affects me and my experience. Or I can seek fresh experience without conditioning by attempting to set aside the personal elements of past history. Perhaps the first step is to see the subject as object, to view ourselves and our experience objectively by dealing with the raw data of experience as it presents itself in physical sensations emotions and insights without the further interpretation of personal history. To move towards the objective is to move from the personal to the impersonal, from the unique to the universal, from the past to the present.

Artists need not know intellectually the aim or meaning of the experiences conveyed by their art. It is enough that the artist be able to attend to the experience, clarify it and capture some of its effects. Nor does the viewer need to understand the experience; it is enough to receive it. Objective art, if it is possible, is an agreement between artist and viewer to share a state of being through the medium of a work of art.

Having said this the gallery is not here to represent or promote the individual artist, rather it holds the space for work which is a manifestation of true inquiry. The gallery is not a space to be manipulated to suit the artist’s personal aims, rather the artist must share a compatible intention without which all association is merely a vain pursuit and contradictory to what the space is held for, the study of objective art.

For those artists who after reading the above and going through the web are still drawn to enter into a dialogue with us please visit the gallery and talk to Barbara, Cathy or Deborah. The final decision on work that will be shown at the gallery is made by the Board of Directors.

June 2004