Here is the exhibition; it will be held in The Kitchen Gallery for a very short time, so make sure you get to see it. There’s a private view round about now so that’s why I’ve got the kettle on. The exhibition is a mixture of realistic found work and fantasy pieces. There’s some conceptual art and some photography and some language-based fragments. The kettle’s about to boil. Anybody want a bun? All the pieces are for sale, by the way. Got to pay for the holiday somehow. We got back yesterday and it’s still swirling round my head; its tide will soon be receding but for now it’s in.
There isn’t a catalogue for the exhibition but I can tell you that this first piece is a kind of dynamic interactive event. I’ll just empty these sandals on to this doormat. Then I’ll empty these other sandals and the wellies that some people wore on that damp day. I know; I should have emptied them outside, but I’m an artist.
See how what could be almost an entire beach piles up. I bet you could make sandcastles or at least the decimated ruins of sandcastles from this stolen sand from stolen moments. Sand aficionados would know that this sand came from several different beaches in a number of different weathers, and that the gathering of all these sands in the wellies and the sandals (hence the name, of course. Or maybe not.) is a kind of artistic intervention. Imagine the Sisyphian task of separating the grains and taking them back to where they belong, to address a kind of sand-lack. There are people at the private view (well, my family) chatting the kind of arty small talk you get at these events. Someone asks how many grains of sand there are on the mat. Someone of a more practical frame of mind reminds the spiller that they’ll have to do some sweeping later, which is a bit like reminding Dalí that he’ll have to tidy up those melting watches.
The second piece in the exhibition is the postcard that you forgot to send and which turned up in your cagoule pocket when you got home. It’s a time capsule from the first two days of the holiday, which were drizzly and grey. The message is gnomic and haiku-like: ‘Weather not great. Been to the slots. Sunny tomorrow.’ I like the shift from despair to optimism in those few words, a lesson in style and concision for poets everywhere. The postcard is stood up on the windowsill where it catches the light. Is it worth posting it now, is the philosophical question that is on everybody’s lips. Well, mine. The person it is intended for lives quite a long way away so they won’t know if we’re home or not. Perhaps it would be worth saving for another year. Perhaps it would be worth sending at some incongruous time like Christmas. That would make it a kind of Mail Art, that branch of art that trundles across the world powered by stamps and DIY optimism.
I sit at the table to sup tea and run a few holiday videos in my head. The table wobbles and a tear of tea rolls down the mug’s face, or the mug’s mug. Now I know what I can do with the postcard: I take it from the shelf, fold it into four and put it under the table leg, steadying it and stopping the mug weeping. Art can be practical, of course: it’s not all gossamer wings and the shock of the new.
Next in the exhibition I’m curating comes a lovely piece that is a lesson in instant nostalgia: a fishing net and a red plastic bucket full of shells. Even last week, as you took the bucket and the net back to the car after the day on the beach, they were totems of some idealised past, a beach day that you will talk about for months, if not years, to come. The way the kids collected shells for hours. The way the shells rattled into the bucket. The way the kids stood together looking out to sea for just long enough to photograph. The way we kept holding shells to our ears to hear the sea. The way we decided to hold shells to our eyes to see the sea. The way we decided to hold shells to our noses to smell the sea. The way one of the kids danced when she found a ten-pence piece. The way I told her that if she held it to her ear she could hear rich people singing, and we both tried it before she put it in her purse.
The net is fragile and there is an aromatic/stinky line of seaweed wrapped around it that seems lost in the landlocked air. The net of the net is blue and it is so torn that it is hanging like an old circus poster that remains long after the show has moved on. It stayed in the car boot for a few days and I took it out tentatively because if the net tore completely away then what would I be left with? Can you call a net a net if it is just a stick and the net bit of the net is nowhere near the stick? Is it a net kit? Maybe as part of the exhibition the visitors to the gallery could be encouraged to make their own net? Let’s face it, it’s not that hard. On its own the stick has a kind of poignancy, as does the netty bit; together they are completely net, apart they are, well, nothing really. Two blank canvases waiting patiently for meaning.
The private view is almost over. Someone has said that the old net needs to go in the bin and we’ll get a new one next time we go to the seaside. The shells are staying in the bucket. The card will continue to steady the table. Art, eh? It is what I say it is.