Well, the Brewery Artwalk is over, and we spent Monday breaking down the show. The Artwalk crowd was totally different from the crowd I’m used to at Walled City or Angels Gate, they seemed a lot more casual and less likely to become really engaged. We got a pretty number of people coming in and saying “everything else here is crap, but this is good” which is a bit of a wierd compliment (art’s not a race), and those folks got really engaged. I had a long talk with a Japanese fellow wearing a headband who practically drilled me on the issues addressed in each piece, which was cool. Most viewers glom onto the first novel thing say “that’s cool” and then wander out.

visitor with cleaver

Above - enthusiastic viewer/visitor participation. One of the best things I occasionally get to do as an artist or gallery director is to encourage people to transition from viewers to participants, from visitors to guests. You’re not out to change their lives, but you want to show them that there’s more to art than the passive act of looking at work and absorbing the context of provided written materials. It doesn’t even matter if the participant does something stupid, cliched or dangerous, what matters is that they do something. I really feel that the experience of art has become a largely passive or submissive one, it’s not so much that you go experience something and bring it into the context of your being, it’s that you absorb a pre-ordained context into your perceptions.

Edith, Michael and Carol

Above - Edith Abeyta talks with Carol Es and Michael Phillips. A lot of people came up from the South Bay to see the show before it closed. These are my people. I routinely find that art viewers from the South Bay or from “outside of the narrow vision of Los Angeles as a city that stretches between the Hollywood and 10 Freeways from Downtown to Santa Monica” are more talkative, more interested and more open to art that is different than their expectations. Maybe it’s because they have fewer expectations and assumptions to begin with. Anyways, there was a lot of great chatter to be had over the weekend, and I got to meet many
new people.

The wierdest thing about the artwalk visitors was their inability to understand that the taps on the bar were indeed working taps. We got a lot of questions about the beer setup around the lines of “is that real” (one of my favourite questions, since it’s so context free as to be answerable in only one way, yes). Maybe the audiences I’ve been dealing with at Walled City were more inclined to take any opportunity to imbibe than the more “middle class” audience of the artwalk. I don’t know. I do know that the beer was a real asskicker and anyone who had a few got a lot more talkative. I didn’t see it, but supposedly my buddy Nicholas ended up rocking out on the table for a bit.

Breaking Down the Show

Christ - note to self: Make art out of lighter materials next time. I have a tendancy to engage in “lumber overkill” in my projects. Even the loose elements of my piece were heavy. Not counting the canned food that’s going to my basement as part of my earthquake/riot/war/zombie readiness supply, I ended up donating 720 pounds of food to the LA Food Bank. After cutting down the lumber to maximum lengths of 8′, I was left with almost a score of 2″x4″s. It all fit in the van, but man it was a long day, and my thighs are permanently on fire from going up the stairs while carrying a load. Not that I’m complaining, but if there’s any aspect of my artmaking that says “Marshall’s an imbecile” it’s my overwhelming urge to use heavy materials in my work, especially given that I don’t command an army of brain wiped slaves to carry out my every whim. It’s probably not a good thing that my next project/fiasco requires large amounts of coordinated, physical, human labour to be completed.