I was helping a collegue with their performance. We lined a gallery floor with a carpet, it was a hot day and we worked long hours. Good honest work. They where a postdoc researcher, their partner had a PhD and I’m a junior researcher. The measurements of the carpet had to be exact and I felt stressed, ending up making the same measurements over and over.
“Every repetition is an iteration”. I said kneeling on the floor and we exchanged smiles.
We are reaching an academic saturation point. Most artist I know have a university degree and practically everyone has the theoretical competence to set the framework for their praxis. Theory is a source of inside jokes and good for aligning alliances.
Theory is a joke and our work remains the same.
It’s no wonder grants feel like a lottery system. Literally all of my peers are as competent as I am. As public art institutions don’t have programs which we could use to map trajectories by, art in Finland is in a state of entropy.