Saturday 20 April 2013

Saturday

After my second failed attempt at maintaining a blog featuring my art and—even more absurd—having me actually talk about it, I will now be keeping this as a bit of a Kaspian Shore and probably PRISMA Collective diary, featuring all the latest art world gossip you've never wanted to hear.

Maintaining an interesting blog isn't easy—managing a group of 30 artists even less so. Me being overly enthusiastic and critical at times probably doesn't make it better.
My collective has been together for a little more than one and a half years now, and sometimes I feel like I missed the turning point when PRISMA transitioned from a chaotic group of crazy talent into a slightly chaotic kind of business. With a large group of people come so many different personalities and attitudes towards work and the close bond I am trying to establish, especially if you keep in mind the fact that we started out with no actual set of guidelines or any type of framework that would give everyone an idea of how in- and extensive this whole project would one day become. Could I travel back in time with a sackful of all the experience I made within these past one and a half years and start over again—hell, I would do it!

The internet is a curious thing, offering us endless opportunities to get in touch with other people, and it certainly helps to promote art that nobody would ever get to see if you came from a small town in the countryside like me. The downside, however, is that people vanish as quickly as they appear, and it can be a crazy amount of work trying to keep communication alive. I have been abandoned by internet "friends" a couple of times, and I have abandoned others myself, which is a nasty thing to do. Now, personal relationships, they come and go—people share emotionally intense times with each other and then they part, we mourn and pick up the pieces and eventually move on. The fickle and impulsive dropout I am, however, in charge of a business, of a group of self-determined, well-respected artists who have been around much longer than this collective's founder—oh, it is always a struggle.

Communication is the keyword here—communicating as an individual, communicating as a group leader, communicating as an artist and as part of a community—keeping everything and everyone together with a passion and much ambition, I sometimes lose track of what my ambitions are and what my passion was for.
One ambition from the beginning has been to hold together our original lineup for as long as possible, which has proven to become more and more difficult considering our different schedules and personal circumstances in life anyway. Making unpopular decisions, replacing one artist for another, realising I've made mistakes—I guess I am longing for a bit of harmony, conformity even, after these troubling times of changes and falling apart.
When you fall in love, you go through a period of excitement and beautiful carefreeness before the monotony of everyday life sets in and you will be forced to reposition yourself. My infatuation with PRISMA lasted a few months and now I am trying to make this relationship work through hard times, which means deconstruction and reconstruction and saying goodbye in order to figure out where this ship is headed.