Outside the Established Art World
Outside the confines of a museum or gallery, artists are able to bypass the gallery system, thereby retaining more creative freedom. Nowadays, artists no longer need to present their work in the traditional manner of hanging them on a white wall in a gallery to gain prestige. Instead, more and more artists are instead choosing to engage the environment around them or to utilise various online platforms to garner attention and fame; with the added bonus of being unencumbered by interests or financial restrictions imposed by others. This alternative business model is not initially accepted by the art world, and it doesn't need to be as it already proved that it is successful.
Two prime examples of this are artists, CJ Hendry and the duo Christo & Jean-Claude. One has gained her reputation through her Instagram account which now boasts 346k followers, the other has seized success through epic large scale land installations.
CJ Hendry is a must follow on Instagram, her hyper-realistic pen and pencil drawings will leave you dumbstruck as you question if it isn’t really a photograph. Through the use of Instagram, she makes her work more accessible to everyone, posting clips in the duration of time leading to the realisation of the final piece. This provides something galleries do not. It offers a peek into what went into the work and invites an unfiltered direct discussion line between the artist and her followers. Last year, she unveiled her first solo exhibition, ‘Monochrome’. This was independently self-funded and, in the spirit of accessibility, no admission was charged. If you go and check out her account currently you can see the behind the scenes of her up and coming exhibition, ‘Rorschach’, which includes clips of her bouncing around on an inflatable bounce house designed to mimic the appearance of a mental hospital.
Photo taken from CJ Hendry's Instagram
Christo and his late wife Jean-Claude are known for their large scale land installations e.g. the covering of Berlin's parliament building in fabric. This allowed them to open a new form of communication that allowed for the purest expression of their work. The act of displaying their work outside of a museum or gallery invites the general public to see their work and interact with the works at their leisure, whilst they go about their daily lives. This interaction between the community and artworks in the environment around them is a stark contrast to the disciplined environment you are immersed in when you enter a gallery. Recently, the plans and sketches of Christo’s next undertaking have been unveiled, the covering of the Arc de Triomphe in the spring of 2020. This will be his first solo project since his wife’s passing in 2009.
Christo, The Arc de Triumph, Wrapped, Project for Paris, Place de l'Etoile, Charles de Gaulle
(Pencil, charcoal, wax crayon, fabric, twine, enamel paint, photograph by Wolfgang Volz, hand-drawn map and tape / Photo: André Grossmann / © 2018 Christo)