Our Bodies – Your Art
Such a waste of time… I’ve totally had it with the social media and tech giants. Life is far too short and I am not going to play their game any longer. It would appear that ‘they’ are there to maintain us in a shitpool of our own making by tying us up in knots, leading us down garden paths and showering us in a Kafkaesque deluge of rules, bureaucracy and dead ends.
The Arts Council have made a verbal apology to me regarding my complaining of the Arts Council giving grant funding to start up business that impact upon existing business’ incomes. When I pursued this in a formal manner, hoping to encourage the Arts Council to be clearer and fairer and considered , they refused to engage further but instead directed me to their formal complaints procedure.
Well, you can’t actually buy a person, that isn’t legal in the UK although we are sure it happens, but you can rent a person for a few hours and they will pose for you, an individual artist or a college group or privately delivered art class or a media company etc…
So, we asked the National Museum if we could deliver once a month life drawing in various rooms in the museum with a model or models reacting to the artworks in that room. We committed to delivering a minimum of one session in Welsh and also having a Welsh speaking artist on hand at all others. We said we’d work at times to suit the museum and would tweak the proposal to suit the museum.
2019 saw a raft of organisations artists and colleges asking for women only models. None could offer any valid reason apart from perhaps a college stating that the students were working on a project aimed at women.
A big thank you to the staff at Little Man – they are amazing and are always there to assist us and make our life not easier but definitely more pleasant… Unlike the staff employed by the ‘big man’, Google…
Please note that we will remove any of these privately operated proscribed art providers if they advise us that they are paying models £20ph or over and that they will mirror any increases in pay that we make in the future and that they do not start delivering life drawing in direct competition with us, for example, starting a new city centre life drawing evening on a Tuesday… As for the colleges and universities, we’ll remove those from this list if they choose to enter into a service level agreement with us for life model provision and agree to a five year plan with payment by invoice.
‘This is wholly unacceptable either from a business or from a charity or from whatever the SU regards itself as. The appalling disregard of eight years of contact with, employment by and support for student groups by myself and by Cardiff Life Model Collective and by my other business Wales Outdoors in favour of the actions of a new Art Society president without any attempt at settling this matter in an amicable manner is as close to as beyond belief as I think I have been in all of my business associations.’
Cardiff Life Model Collective has been supplying naked people for art classes in South Wales and beyond since 2010 and it’s been a very enjoyable, if at times, bumpy ride.
You’ll have seen my posts Google Are Scum and Google Are Scum 2 that detail the idiocy and meanness displayed by google. This is a further update…