How important was the mise en scene to all of this? Perhaps little if you compare it to the goal of organizing a local town meeting. Was it a crash course in cultural anthropology, or a form of participant observation of familiar behaviour, collected from a specific group that demonstrated their very different public and private faces?
The distinctions between a professional self and private persona is very similar to the act of collecting since we exhibit different sides of our character and personality to those who are looking at or interacting with us. In Collecting Dust and Other Things, the only characterization it seemed required, was to come as you are.
That being the case, it is questionable whether the 14 or so participants ranging in diversity and profession under the collective umbrella of the arts community as it exists in San Diego — i.e., gallery owners, teachers, curators, museum directors, performance artists, art critics, collectors and the like — revealed themselves entirely. If they did or did not, beyond each person’s stated role here, there would not have been any particular reason, in either case to defend, expound upon, and change the current balance of power and cultural status quo, since it was not required of the exercise.
Did we attempt, nonetheless, to leave our own indelible mark upon the work? Did the process yield something vital or useful after all? Were we preaching to the choir or was it an accurate portrait of San Diego’s artistic health and viability? Yes, we all live and work here; some of us chose to, while others just made their way as they arrived. If there is something to be said about us as actors, it is that we are highly adaptable to artistic and cultural change, and like carpetbaggers, we carry our product from town to town.
It doesn’t really matter where you live until you discover what is apparently missing — or that you don’t have, but need to collect --which, inevitably, is always something. The wealth of information to be had from this is invaluable because it shifts perceptions of how our seemingly disparate jobs overlap, and examines various criteria by individuals or clans working independently within the same cultural milieu, which, in the end, have the same problems and needs of exporting Art, with a capital “A,” to the public and to each other.
I’ve seen plenty of bumper stickers that suggest we “think global and act locally,” but often we find ourselves thinking locally as well as acting locally in San Diego. This is not necessarily a problem, per se, except that the parameters for effecting change on a community or global level start to dwindle as the implementation becomes narrower or more self-referential.
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