Added Note on 6/10/2011

Recently I’ve been accused of having an agenda against the Plenum Space Gallery in my reviews based on the fact that I made the blog entry below. I would like to state that this is not true at all, and offer the following statement in response to this allegation:

I first posted this blog entry over a year ago, and in that year I have completely forgotten about this incident. Or at least it seems like a very long time ago. Yes, I was very angry at the time that somebody unjustifiably kept the money from the sales of a piece that took me more than a month to make. But as I mentioned at the end of the entry, it’s a relatively small amount of money, and I got over it quickly. Making this post was part of dealing with the situation, it made me feel better to vent my frustration than keep it contained, and I stand by everything in the post except for one part: the fact that it tells people not to go there. If you asked me about my opinion of the gallery a year ago I would have said that exactly, but it is not the way I felt when I began writing art reviews five months later and it is not the way I feel now, so I retract that part of the original post.

But moving on to the allegation that I am biased against shows at Plenum Space because of my experience, there is no evidence to support that theory because it’s not true. It was said that I “go out of my way to disparage shows there.” By my count I’ve published reviews of four shows at Plenum Space. The two most recent reviews were negative, the second one positive, and the first one more or less neutral. Is that really the track record of someone with an agenda against a venue? Wouldn’t it make more sense that they would all be negative, and that if I really wanted to “go out of my way to disparage shows there” that I would use my platform to take cheap shots at their artists every month?

When I published my reviews independently I had nobody to answer to, and thus, nothing to stop me from writing whatever damn fool thing I wanted. As this original blogpost would indicate, I’m not sheepish about speaking what’s on my mind out of fear that someone might be offended, so I think it would be fair to say that if I had a grudge against Plenum Space that I would have no qualms in making that a known fact. If I were taking shots at them it would be obvious from the amount of truly terrible, off-base things that I would have written. Again, what would stop me from doing that if I wanted to? I was just one guy with a computer, I could write whatever I wanted. Instead, I wrote well-reasoned reviews that offered justifications for everything I said as evidenced by traits in the work. I moved past my bad experience at Plenum Space long before I began writing reviews, and I think it’s self-evident that I treated the shows there exactly as I did the shows at any other venue in my reviews.

The rough guidelines I’ve created for doing my reviews are as follows:

-I try to review five shows a month

-I do not speak to the artist or research them at all. I look at what they have on display and form an opinion based on what they include in the exhibit.

-I do not write about artists who obviously do not deserve criticism/are too amateur to be held to any standard

-I try to avoid writing about established artists whose work I can find no fault in

-I write about exhibits that I have the most to say about, whether it be a positive or negative opinion.

-I try to avoid writing purely negative reviews unless there is not enough new shows to choose from and my options are narrowed to the point that a show I don’t like happens to be one of the five that I have the most to talk about.

I can honestly say that I would have preferred not having to write the two negative reviews of Plenum Space shows that I did, but in those particular months I was faced with a lack of shows that moved me in one direction or the other. So I wrote about them, and I stand by every single thing that I said in those reviews because I justify everything I say with elements seen in the work, and nothing else.

All this being said, the reason I write reviews is to strengthen the art community. I want to try and inspire people to do new, interesting work and avoid making dull, predictable pieces, and the only standard by which I have to do this is my own. I also want viewers to think more critically about their taste by explaining why a piece is successful if they agree with me, and if they disagree with me I hope it inspires them to construct their own justification, strengthening their own opinion about what good art is and, thus, increasing their capacity to appreciate it.

My focus in writing is on the work, and nothing else. And that’s all there is to it.

The following is the content of the original blogpost in question. I would just delete it, but that could be interpreted as an admission of guilt and I have nothing to hide as all I have ever done is expressed my raw, unfiltered opinion. Enjoy!

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I was waiting until the issue was resolved before making my thoughts known, but after my experience here is my advice regarding the Plenum Space Gallery: don’t show there and don’t go there. To be clear that I’m not speaking ill of Hannah Mott, the curator of the space. Hannah was helpful and reasonable through the whole process. My problem is that the owner of the space decided it was okay to keep all the sales money from a show I was already taking a sizeable loss on. I don’t think he kept the money under honest circumstances, but you can decide that for yourself.

The problem starts with Plenum Space’s notoriously awkward hanging system. They make it clear that the walls cannot be punctured in any way to install artwork, and provide a rail up along the rafters that the work must be hung from. I did this by stringing fishing line around the rail and through the hanging wire on the back of the work. The problem with this setup is that it causes the top of the work to dangle about six inches away from the wall. Unless you want to give people the impression that you’re a complete halfwit who couldn’t hang a decent show to save your life, you have to figure out a way of keeping the frame up against the wall without nailing into it. I figured the easiest solution was to place a piece of tape over the fishing line behind the piece so that it pulled the hanging wire and the frame up against the wall. As you can see from the photos of the show in earlier posts, it worked, and the show looked good.

A couple days after the opening I received an email from Hannah saying that when she took down the piece that was sold, the tape tore at the surface of the wall. I apologized, surprised that tape would be able to damage a wall, and offered to patch up any damage caused by taking the work down. She said that was fine if I could smooth out anything that needed it, and that the gallery had paint so I didn’t need to worry about that.

Then the day before I was to take my show down, I get a call at 9 a.m. while I’m at work from the gallery owner. There are actually three people who own the building that Plenum Space is in, but I’m not sure which one I talked to. I didn’t catch his name because I was so taken aback by what a condescending and presumptive jackass he was.

I take his call and he says “you know we’ve got a problem with that tape on the walls, right?” I told him I was aware that it had already caused some damage, but that I would be careful in taking down the rest of the work and had already agreed to patch any spots that needed smoothing out. “No” he said. “I don’t want you working on my walls. I’ve got a guy that does that.” He proceeded to give me the number to a repair guy, and told me to call and describe the damage to him, get a quote over the phone on how much it would cost to fix the walls, and then call the jackass back to tell him the amount of that quote. I was so baffled by this guy’s nerve and odd request that I said okay just to get him off the phone.

At first it didn’t make sense to me why he would want me to make the call. It’s his building, not mine. How can ANYONE make an accurate quote over the phone anyway? I hadn’t even seen the damage myself yet, what am I supposed to tell the guy? The whole thing stunk. Then it dawned on me. He was well aware that I wasn’t responsible for fixing the walls, and his idea was to have me call the repairman so that I would be giving an implied agreement to pay for it. That way if I complained about him keeping my money, he would have the defense that I was technically the one to order the work. At least that’s my theory. I suspect that he knew I had a valid argument to make in not being held responsible for the damage and was trying to be sneaky about covering his bases. That’s probably the thing that bothers me the most about this whole ordeal is that this guy was trying to be sneaky about it. I’d rather he have been unapologetically open in his dishonesty than try to cover his tracks like that.

You see, the contract I signed was very explicit in saying that piercing the walls in any way was prohibited. It also had a catchall that reads something like “the artist is responsible for any damages from installing or uninstalling the show.” In this case, this catchall is a problem because ordinarily tape will not cause damage to a wall. The walls of the gallery are not normal sheetrock walls, and as I found out through email conversations with Hannah, it was known beforehand that the walls are easily damaged by adhesives. In fact, one message revealed that last year there had been a similar problem with someone who had used double-sided scotch tape. Yes, scotch tape was strong enough to take the paint off the walls, and here I had my big heavy pieces stuck to the wall with industrial strength duct tape.

However, I was at no point warned about this, and nothing in the contract indicated that the gallery walls are made of anything other than ordinary sheetrock. If I had been told this information I surely wouldn’t have risked putting tape on the wall and figured out some other way of installing the show. Or better yet the gallery could be forward thinking enough to include a NO ADHESIVES clause in the contract if they know the walls are that sensitive, but that might be asking a lot, hmm?

So anyway, further damage of the wall was unavoidable when I took the work down. I don’t know what their walls are made out of, but they’re nothing like anything I’ve ever seen before. There was no good method for taking the tape off. No matter how slowly I peeled it brought along chunks of paint and wall material with it. The wall appeared to be made out of some kind of chipboard or paper material. I’m not sure what it was, but it was definitely the first time I’d seen tape cause significant damage to a wall.

Despite the fact that I was never made aware of the fact that these were unusually sensitive walls, the gallery owner kept my $150 in sales to pay for the repairs. If it was an amount of money worth fighting for I’m confident I would win in small claims court, but it’s really not worth fighting for. I had to learn the hard way that the Plenum Space gallery is owned by at least one unethical and dishonest person, so if you’re an artist looking for a place to show, go somewhere else. Or if you do show there: for the love of God, don’t stick ANYTHING to the wall!