Rural art collectives are cutting out the metropolitan art tsars and staging their own shows.
One of the truths of rural life is that power and money and modernity usually lie elsewhere—in the metropolitan other. Well, it’s a truth of sorts. But it’s a truth that’s starting to loosen its grip.
Rural life the world over is in the midst of changes that are altering not just who lives remotely, but what they do there. Artists have often seen rural life as an option that allows them to live and work on meagre incomes, but it usually comes at the cost of profile, access and any semblance of urban arts cool.
However, even that’s starting to change, because technology has begun to make geography less relevant, not only for artists, but for rural communities in general.
There’s always been a disconnect between the work and concerns of the bush and the endless self-fascination of cities. Cities want what rural folk can give them, but they don’t want to know all the grubby details. And for rural artists this has meant that it’s been almost impossible to get the attention of city gallery-owners, curators, funding bodies, art magazines and, as a consequence, art buyers and the art market. It’s been an almost feudal and very one-sided relationship.
But over the past five or six years, many rural artists have realised that technology, especially the internet, offers them the chance to form new communities with people working remotely in another part of the world. It’s been quite liberating for many of these artists to discover that others share similar concerns, outlooks, and approaches to their artwork and to their own universes. As a result it’s begun to free these artists from the need to endlessly pander to their metropolitan cousins.
RN 360documentaries has investigated the new informal networks of artists, brought together on the internet, that are cutting out the middle man and staging their own shows and happenings.
For the full report, go to Remotely Connected.
