Reflections on a year in the arts (Part 2 )
You get off downtown west kerby station and descend a gentle slope to a pair of glass doors. In 1967 to celebrate 100 years of confederation, Calgary built the centennial planetarium. A landmark of brutalist architecture, I remember the glow of the dome at night. The hard edges of concrete set against an infinite sky. Every single space has its own expression of a unified language making the building feel a lot bigger than it is.
My office had a porthole out into the atrium. I shared this space with my boss and the CEO’s assistant. A space we sometimes shared with my boss’ dog, Ludo. The heavy walls often made me feel as though I was inside a fortress. Many mornings I was among the first to arrive and it was easy to wander around to enjoy the exhibits and also take in the river. The building was a monument. I had often felt Calgary as a city to be immature in terms of its cultural offerings, here this was not the case.
In my first team meeting I looked around and found myself surrounded by main characters. None fit into a set type and the room vibrated with charisma. I, by contrast, was a jumped up kid coming off 7 months without a real job. At a certain point I was bound to feel like I must have pulled the wool over somebody’s eyes.
How do you look like you work in an art gallery? You take the parts of your wardrobe that you feel express you and your character best and you amplify them a bit. Maybe at a certain point that means dressing like a Tom of Finland drawing but it doesn’t strictly have to be that way. In an environment that is the epitome of high culture, one must necessarily possess taste. In this manner, I passed the test. One’s personal style is the thing that communicates to the world what they pretend to be. Fashion is not superfluous, it is a walking advertisement for what you represent. Every moment could well be a menswear moment… And perhaps every moment should be.
Okay so I could at least look like I belonged but there was a bigger problem: actually doing my job. It was my first time being in a programmatic position. I will now wax philosophical on the topic of leadership. Everyone wants to be the one that chooses what goes on, everyone wants to be a creative director and be the big shot and execute all these ideas about what they would do if they were in charge. Dreaming the thing and doing the thing are very different. I like doing things. But I didn’t know how to do this thing.
I learned that it takes a while to learn how to do a role of any consequence. As my boss would say to me every so often, “there will always be learnings with every event.” and this was true time and time again. The role required a trust in myself I heretofore had not needed to exercise. I was in a position to make certain decisions and I had to trust my own judgement in order to make those. For anybody seeking to lead, its important to know that you cannot always make the right call. That isn’t to say that you should lie down and let poor judgement happen when it happens, but that it should not come as a surprise when fortune turns against you, because it has happened before and it will again.
One’s ability to respond to the challenge and peril in the face of the wheel of fortune is the stuff of leadership. While I did not have any direct reports, my position as a professional gatekeeper put me in a position of authority outside of the organization and I had to learn how to comport myself as such.
At its most basic, however, to lead means to go forward and others follow. You go forward towards an ideal or vision that you have in your mind. So how to practically execute a vision as abstract as “bringing contemporary art and performance in conversation with one another?” Well, you tell a lot that that is exactly what you are doing. That was the distillation of the vision. But a big practical hurdle is that the professional jargon, the terms, phrases, and working processes between artists working in the performing arts and the visual arts are completely different.
Indeed, there is so much that each side of this divide can learn from one another but there is also much that is already in common too. To use an example: Performance Art. This is distinct from “The performing arts” which involve opera, music, dance, and theatre. Performance art is rare in Calgary, but it is fundamentally indistinguishable from an act of theatre. A person does an activity and is observed. The same principles can be applied from theatre but performance art usually lacks a narrative. In a gallery, an act of performance is not expected to involve an explicit narrative with characters, a beginning, middle and end, and words. Hm, that sounds a lot like contemporary dance? Perhaps that might fit in a gallery?
Anyway, theatrespeak is a thing and this isn’t an essay about theatrespeak. What it IS about is the importance of time management. Performances take up time, that’s the whole point! They need time to rehearse, space to rehearse, and time to perform. And if your theatre is also being booked for weddings and video art, you need to find a way to navigate a tangled web of bookings and priorities in order to reduce conflict and increase efficiency. To this end, calendars are extremely important. Being clear with yourself about when a certain activity should take place will allow you to communicate that in advance to others.
Events are complex moving parts but really all anybody cares about is Who, What, Where, When, and How. It is that simple but not necessarily easy. I would often find myself as the middle point between a team booking staff and a partner organizing their event. Knowing what information I needed and how to get it was important if we were going to get any of the 70 events that I had on my plate done.
When it comes to being present during an event, it's important to be able to step in if needed and to not ask anybody to do anything that you are not willing to do yourself. I never asked anybody to do any public speaking on my behalf, I did a lot of public speaking as a part of my job.
All these things take time. It takes time to grow into one’s position and I’m proud of the fact that I took a role that did not exist before me and made it into something substantial. I was programming and managing a theatre but in practice I was also selling that theatre. We were asking other people to pay for our staff and my labour. This meant we could offer the theatre at a very competitive rate but I wasn’t about to let just anybody present work as a partner to the organization and it certainly wasn’t going to become a revolving door of recitals and schools of rock. I had to be selective. At first this was done more or less based on vibes, does it fit into a somewhat nebulous conception of what belongs in a contemporary art gallery?
I had to be discerning, which meant I had to do a fair amount of curation. But what does that even mean? What is contemporary art? And what is the conversation in the arts today? I’ll dive into these questions next week.
