This is the last week of the show and I am glad.
Tomorrow is the last Saturday.
Hallelujah!
I now realise I am not cut out for being a gallerist and next time will stick to chairmaking and general all round troublemaking.
I think it will be much safer for everyone.
Most people who have been to see the exhibition have been smart and curious and polite but then there are those you just want to slap with a wet fish and send them on their way. Being a gallerist however requires you bite your tongue and smile with studied politeness. Your only recourse is to send them mental death rays.
You would think as you get older that you would get more sanguine – more philosophical. – more sweetly nana. Don’t believe it. Menopausal women are the meanest bitches you will ever meet.
I don’t know what happens but what starts as mild irritation becomes wild rage and you spit fire from every part of you and tongue lash and shriek like a demented harridan. You take umbrage at the most innocent comments.. usually to do with disrespect…and find yourself standing on imagined hillsides holding maniacal skirts lambasting a great ocean of idiots.
Slap them! Poke out their eyes with sticks and then cut off their heads!
Beware the policeman who patronises you. Beware the street drinker who leers your way in blurry confusion and mostly beware the child shop assistant who treats you as if you are invisible.
Hell hath no fury like the woman ignored.
The thing is you can see yourself doing it – reacting in a way that is entirely out of proportion to the situation but you cannot stop it. It’s as though you are on the fast train to Bedlam.
All those unresolved problems… all those sleights and hurts and disappointments you buried in big glass jars at the bottom of the garden bust out and compete for your attention.
As soon as you deal to one and push it back down another pops up.
It’s like playing that Japanese mole bashing game on acid.
Some women take HRT and others self medicate and some even turn to witchcraft. The really scared ones do it all and get plastic surgery and a face full of botox to boot.
None of that would work for me and I figured that the hormonal storm must have some reason so I decided to ride it out cold turkey.
I bought a big ships anchor and kept it by my bed and then I started chairmaking…stitching and stuffing and lashing…the twine is coarse and the stitches large and the needles long and dangerous. Knots are pulled tight with exacting repetition. When the heat and the rage begin to rise I take up my needles and hammers and make chairs… giving them the distortion of form but keeping them strong and glorious… making them deliberately decorative to taunt my own purist soul.
I make banners that say fuck the fucking fuckers and gild bricks for wanton throwing because I have no poetry left in me. When it all gets too bad I imagine armchair destructions and play them out in my mind in great theatrical detail before reducing them to a simple solo swan song on film.
Such is the ongoing art of my own incomprehensible rage.
I really am not cut out to be a gallerist.
