An Irish artist is bypassing the typical gallery hierarchy by organising an online art show in Sicily, writes Paddy Agnew.
'I get mad as hell because it seems every second person you meet is an artist. I read obituaries in the paper: 'So and so died. He was a retired life-insurance salesman, a good husband and a father, avid golfer, gardener and artist.' I've spent my whole life learning how to do this shit and some prick takes up painting when he retires and he's my peer?
"I meet someone at a party. 'So what do you do?' he asks. I reply, 'I'm an artist, a painter.' He looks at me kind of funny and says, 'Oh yeah, my mom paints.' or worse, he asks me: 'What do you paint?' So I say 'paintings' and walk away to get another drink and he thinks to himself 'what a f**king asshole'."
"So my question to all you artists is, what do you do and why do you do it? If you have an answer like 'I paint portraits because I get commissions to do them' or 'I love flowers because they have really wonderful colours' or 'I work in a Taiwan studio and paint 300 seascapes a day because I make $35 a month doing it', don't bother answering."
The above speaker is the Canadian artist Hillel Kagan, just one of more than 70 artists from at least 20 countries taking part in Trapani 07.07.2007, otherwise billed as "ArtProcess - the online art community's first annual offline exhibition". This is an art show with a very big difference, one that has by and large been conceived, gestated, imagined and planned by the artists themselves, rather than by an arts council, a local government arts officer, a gallery, an institutional sponsor, an art critic or whomsoever often gets to organise art shows and biennales.
To some extent, this Trapani (in Sicily by the way) exhibition is not so much a case of art for art's sake as artists for artists' sake.
The guiding light behind the Trapani exhibition is John-Paul Delaney, a Wexford man who lives and paints in Rome. Like a lot of artists, Delaney found and finds himself regularly up against some very big questions. What is art today? How do you make art today? What are an artist's responsibilities? Rather than heading down to the bar and asking these weighty questions as he looked into the bottom of a glass of chilled Pinot Grigio, Delaney opted, three years ago, to set up a web site, www.artprocess.com, just to see if there were other artists out there interested, preoccupied or engaged by the same issues.
Slowly, very slowly, but surely, it seems, a global conversation among artists set itself in motion. Images and voices from Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, the UK, the US and elsewhere began to make themselves seen and heard.
The artists not only showed one another their work (they uploaded it), but they also engaged in wildly varied exchanges that were and are at times insightful, simplistic, pretentious, but never boring. In essence, the artists not only looked at the work, they also talked among themselves about the process of being an artist and making art: "Artists still need to go to the pub and bitch and this site provided the place," says Hillel Kagan.
John-Paul Delaney is not certain, but it seems likely that his site was the first of its kind. Since then, London's Saatchi Gallery has come up with a similar idea - Saatchi Online (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk). Right from the beginning, however, Delaney was keen to make the site user-friendly and communicative rather than commercial. He wanted it to be a place where the artists would communicate with each other, not an art auction room.
"If people want to supply links indicating where their work can be bought, that's fine but that is not the information we supply on the site," Delaney told The Irish Timesin Rome last week.
The idea of taking this online exhibition "off line" and holding it as a regular, common or garden art show came about thanks to one of the artists, Italian Antonio Sammartano. He told Delaney how much he liked the site and then invited him down to Sicily to hold a show in Trapani.
"I told him I wasn't interested in doing a show for myself but rather I wanted to do a collective exhibition. When I went down, I liked Trapani right away," says Delaney, "it reminded me of Ireland before the boom."
SITUATED ON SICILY'Swest coast, Trapani is one of those places that tends to be known throughout Italy for all the wrong, Sicilian reasons, that is, the Mafia and reports of mafioso activity. It is also, however, an attractive seaport with a medieval town attached and lies close to Erice (also home to the exhibition) and the place where in Virgil's Aeneid (you all remember this) Aeneas came ashore to perform the funeral rites of his father, Anchises.
In short, Trapani and Erice are the sort of places rich in Sicily's tapestry of Roman, Greek, Arab, Norman, Bourbon and other historical influences, the sort of places that prompted the great German poet Goethe to observe: "Without Sicily, Italy leaves no image in the soul; it is the key to everything."
There will doubtless be those who sneer at the "self-selecting" aspect of this exhibition. Where, you might ask, is the quality control? The answer is to be had by consulting the work on the site. Paintings on canvas, installation works and sculptures all feature in an exhibition that ranges from the abstract and the geometric through to the representational.
Not all the artists who meet on the site will be meeting in Sicily. Those who do take part in the Sicily show, however, have been asked to do a new work for Trapani.
Regardless of critical and local Trapanese reaction to the show, ArtProcess will live to ride another day. Having done well to get funding in Trapani (for posters, publicity and the use of spaces such as a former prison, the old fish market and a deconsecrated church), Delaney has already staged an encore, since he has organised an ArtProcess exhibition for 2008 in the handsome Tuscan fortress town of Lucca. In future, Delaney would like to take the exhibition out of Italy to many different places including, of course, Ireland.
Will this be an exhibition that will run and run, not just on the cyber waves but all over the world?
