November 29, 2010

Today brought the first meeting with the ROM.

Mike Skubic, Michael Rubenfeld and I with Sarah Garton Stanley on a speaker phone met six officials of the museum in a huge board room after passing through two sets of secured entrances. It left me feeling a little like Bambi meeting Godzilla, but not too much. The gathering was still very much about me, my art, the play and my legacy and I was very much being listened to and taken seriously.

A few moments were nearly incomprehensible to me – like when I was asked what the insurable value of my art would be. So many of my pieces are on dollar store canvas boards. Most have been produced in less than two hours. The largest price I have ever earned was $500. Insurable value?

The meeting was useful for us to get our bearings. Godzilla has traditions, policies, internal politics, union reinforced job descriptions, rigid time schedules and really bad coffee. We have to learn the ropes. Inclusion isn’t about “doing our own thing” – it is about seemingly incompatible entities finding ways to authentically express their essences while being mutually supportive and, in so doing, creating space for the unimagined to emerge.

It was good to see the space within which the 3 to 6 month exhibit will take place. It is a relatively small but well lit and not to noisy room. It really is an anteroom, along the pathway to the dinosaurs. This means that there will always be lots of traffic through the room but that many “visitors” will not initially have the inclination to stop.

At this juncture, because of this pathway, I am imaging designing a “highway” where signs will be posted that there is to be no stopping due to dangerous circumstances. At the same time there can also be more subtle invitations to stop and stay awhile, to discover something magical about life and yourself!

I don’t feel that this exhibit will be as much about my art as about the various stages I have been through in developing my own ideas about Inclusion. My art will be one vehicle of several used to get the ideas across. We will be using the play, video and I hope something interactive that pulls people into the exploration. I also hope that the exhibit can appeal to children and teenagers. Currently the ROM officials mainly talked about children as if the main concerns about them are their safety and that they might destroy stuff!

There is no sense at all of what, if any, financial opportunity there is in this. I attempted to express that to do this well I, and others, would have to give up other opportunities to make money. The process does not reveal anything about money at this point. First things first in the ROM’s way of doing things is to produce a document – a proposal with a creative theme – that gives them a sense of what they will be committing to. They get to say back if it’s doable. They say back what they are willing to do and not do. To me it’s like negotiating in the dark, but at least after today, it’s a little less dark.

I am in a very strange space indeed. On the one hand my creative juices are being called on like never before. On the other I am dollars away from bankruptcy, only weeks away from serious illness and suddenly playing with the “big boys” – people who have the capacity to take my legacy very far indeed but also who have very different agendas than mine.