In this section, you will find personal stories and honest conversations with gallerists from various places in Europe sharing how their galleries came about. There is not a single story identical to another. In this section, we are trying to emphasise that there are many ways to start, run and develop a gallery. Our ambition is to generate inspiration and courage to start your own business, in your own way. 





Space, time and freedom: a protean conversation with Damian Rayne, director the Muse

“I guess it’s like parenting. You can’t pass on the experience to your kids. They’re gonna have to do it themselves”. (Damian Rayne, Director of The Muse, 03 July 2022)

This is the beginning of a conversation held some months ago with Damian Rayne founder and director of The Muse. Talking about young artists and residency programs, “parenting” doesn’t sound particularly original or interesting as a concept, lots of institutions, public or private, often use the rhetoric of parenting, taking care, raising new talents and so on to describe their programs. What makes the difference though is the very peculiar way in which Damian Rayne declines what he means. His idea of “parenting” is very far from our expectations, in his words: ”the idea of a residency was to create a safe space in quite a busy environment for you (young artist) to get on and produce six months work (…) but what is truly important is to give them complete freedom and complete directive over what they are doing, a sense of ownership of their time there, and not the feeling of being commissioned, guided or supported to produce something for a sellable agenda”.

That’s to say asking a newborn to master time and freedom. No protection nets, no warm arms to shelter in, no maternal guidance. Just diving in cold water. This is exactly what the young artists, applying for the residency program, are up to find at The Muse. Nothing more, nothing less. The recruitment conditions are quite clear, even if not formalized, in the words of Rayne the identity of the perfect applicant would be: young, newly graduated, used to work within the protective walls of the scholarly institutions, within which he/her spent his/her time focusing on the degree show production, soaked with the philosophy of “the more you do, the more you can do”. Solid bases to be dismantled: “ now you are in the real world context, where you’ve got to engage with actual people, industry and public. But you also have to deal with talking about your work constantly. Being on stage and having to stand up for what you are and what you are doing”. That’s to say: know yourself, find your way and make a narrative. Six months of food and rent for free.
Does it work? “A lot of creative people don’t respond so well, some people feel kind of disarmed when there isn’t a wall to push against. Some people feel a sort of resentment if there isn’t any structure, some welcome the freedom and become more absorbent of their environment in their attempts to channel into their work” Rayne summarizes.

How to define The Muse? “A space in which not being forced to produce artworks that may not be part of your journey” Rayne would answer. That’s to say: put yourself and your journey before anything else. To do so, “the residency program and the studio space have to be kept completely impervious to any other forces.” Just space, time and freedom. Freedom from the financial burdens of materiality but most of all freedom from “the blue-chip concept of pure curatorial intervention”.

This is what makes The Muse a model in itself, something different from an art gallery, a cultural association, a young artists program or a boot camp etc. In the words of Rayne, The Muse is a “stepping stone’ not a destination”, “a sort of “feeder” for other
galleries or other residency programs”. A sort of founding experience, something
generative to start building from, something that occurs before. We may think about an incubator but The Muse is not the case. The idea of artistic incubators is not new, (Kahn, 1995; Essig, 2014), most of them are sustained by public grants and non-profit organizations worldwide, especially in the States, and in some way, we can consider most of the European Residency programs a sort of incubators. But this is not the case with The Muse.

An incubator is a place that offers all the conditions to develop a career: facilities,
expertise, support and so on – in some way the traditional idea of parenting - The Muse instead offers young artists the possibility to dismantle all their previous experiences, in a space of solitude, to let them find their real voices, voices that come from inside, as the bases on which start thinking about what’s next. “what’s next” for Rayne implies a concrete engagement with what he calls the “ real world”: the need to find spaces, visibility, a public, the need to compromise with landlords or charities eager to offer young artists good opportunities but their rules, but most of all the need to achieve a long term vision on what it takes to run a creative business: “you got an insight into running a gallery which you can then scale down to syndicate shows with your contemporaries, your firm or other artists. By just going out and finding spaces. Creating a pop-up shows yourself, which is a good interim solution. There are a lot of ways that you can get an exhibition together that does not cost the money”.

While in an artistic incubator usually the problem of sustainability is up to the organizations themselves and the artists’ only concern has to be focused on the production, at The Muse this burden is almost left entirely on the artists’ shoulders as part of his/her journey of creativity. We are not used to thinking about a long-term occupation prospective in the arts, we are used to thinking about projects, programs, and commissions and we assume that this is normal as we don’t recognize art as a profession, charging the artists themselves of the main enterprise risks. In the Muse program, the real confrontation is not with the simple materiality of making a living for a certain period (rent, food, work tools etc), but with a long-term vision of what it takes to be an artist and under which conditions, learning how to cope with the enterprise risk.

The solution of pop-up shows that Damian described to us during our conversations is just a good example of creative ways to solve the main problem for young artists: finding
spaces to show their artworks that could also be spaces of resonance. The idea is to
organize shows in the empty spaces of the big Galleries between their shows, taking
advantage of their days off, or “try to use the spaces of the buildings all around London that were empty because the landlord or the tenant had moved out because of the rent
review, or the landlord was waiting for planning consent to level the building, And in the meantime, the landlord had to pay full rates on the building. If you are a charity you can get that rate removed, so we can respond to the few artist collectives that have gone in there”. In the case of the Galleries, the advantage to fill the spaces may be attracting a new and different public and in the case of the landlords the possibility to reduce losses.
This is a very peculiar way to confront materiality, the construction of a long-term enterprise vision accepting the risky coexistence of “two headlines saying commercial and creative”. But the risk he is talking about has nothing to do with the liability of the structural investment itself, it is a matter of losing autonomy and control over the core of the enterprise: “be an artists-led organization that keeps the core element of its Manifesto intact and free from any external influence”.

The Muse seems to be based on two assumptions: being an artist is an enterprise and the core of this enterprise is protean (Hall, 2004).
The first assumption is quite clear and present in the literature (Scott, 2012; Lingo e
Tepper, 2013): sustainability is a problem that has to be solved through the creative fluidity
of the nature of economic activities supporting projects and organizations. It takes the
ability to keep the “commercial line” totally independent from the artistic production but also as free as possible from donors, charities and public institutions' support and their
conditions. That’s why Rayne during our conversations talked about “hybrid” spaces, restaurants as show spaces, and farmhouses transformed into artistic labs for example. A new
hybridization of models and forms, a different use, or better interpretation, of the concept of artistic space itself. The only purism that he seems to conceive is the Muse Manifesto.
This is the element that makes the Muse a protean “enterprise”: a purism that means value-driven orientation and self-directed management. A value-driven orientation based on the Manifesto that defines the values –no external metrics - on the terms which measure success and achievements; self-directed management can create business opportunities in total coherence with the values.

What Hall (Hall 2004) proposes as the three “meta-competencies” for the protean model, self-awareness, creative adaptability and constant reflection, seem to fit perfectly the core of the Muse Manifesto. Adaptability to downsizing, rapidly changing economic conditions, instabilities of globalization, technology and its new languages pervasion, occupation and capability crisis, governments instability, politic prevarication on policies, world’s rules and social nets broke down by the pandemia. This is the “real” world in which the Manifesto is trying to re-think sustainability not as a main concern but as a natural way to cope in a creative way with this world which is very far from being ideal. To cope with this world takes a lot of different competencies that an artist has to achieve, competencies that may have not much to do with what we think of as “artistic”.


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In Conversation with... Arngrimur Borgthorsson, Co-founder of CC Gallery, Malmö Sweden  
A story of Iceland, youth, financial crisis and running a gallery in the south of Sweden
Arngrimur (Aggi) Borgthorsson is an Icelandic artist and gallerist currently residing in Malmö, Sweden.

Anna:
Hi Aggi, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I am curious to know as much as possible about your backrgound as an artist running galleries in Iceland and now in Sweden. Could you start from the beginning and share your story? For example, How come yoy started a gallery in the first place? 

Aggi:
I would like to start my story in Iceland. I studied fine art from 2000 to 2005, before the financial crisis. This was my first introduction to the “real” artworld. Before that, I used to paint buses and trains in the city back in my teenage years.

In my early 20s when I started “properly”, I had no connection to fine art prior to this. And I nailed it exactly at the right time, a time w ere there was an insane amount of money floating around in Iceland and if you had like, a shitty basement exhibition somewhere, you could call the brewery and they would send us tons of free beer, some banks donated a whole factory building to Icelandic art. And there were all these crazy events, also because there was money to bring in big artist names and stuff. So when I entered this environment, I did not realize this was abnormal. I just don't know, I thought this was being an artist, going to openings and getting sushi and champagne.


Getting drunk with Damon Albarn and restless students. In a way it was a weird atmosphere and I didn't know that anything was wrong. Straight after graduating in 2005, me and some friend started a Studio Collective in the middle of central Reykjavik. Back then, the central location made sense because it was so cheap.
If you were a student, you lived in the city center because nobody wanted to live near the bars and the galleries. And let me tell you; at the time there were galleries EVERYWHERE! Artists run galleries, like on every corner. I mean, it's a tiny town about half the size of Malmö (360.000 inhabitants). But on a Friday you could go and get drunk by just hopping between art openings, where everyone exhibiting actually sold most of their artwork on that same evening.

Anna:
Did these artistrun spaces not compete with bluechip and commercially run galleries? 

Aggi:
No! There was not a lot of those around at the time. It was more like grassroot movements. It was really like artists was running the entire market. You know,every month you went; “Oh! There's a new gallery.” When you would talk to the person running it they would say; “I studied in England, then I came here and I just like opened a gallery to show my stuff or show my friends stuff.” or whatever..

Anna:
Because the barrier was so low? 

Aggi:
Yeah. And there was just so much money somehow floating around but at the same time, rent and living was cheap. There was a lot of tourism. Always has been tourism.

Anyway, I was part of a studio collective where we also had a small exhibition space, and we just paid the rent ourselves. Then if we wanted to have exhibitions, that was no fun. But it was cheap! Because yeah, the Chess Federation used to have that space. So it was a very, like “office dry” space. And also like they were building Reykjavik's crazy financial center next to it, that was like the only skyscraper and so like, when we were working there it was shaking, because they were using dynamite to make the foundation for that skyscraper thing next door. And it was really like, like, and the thing is, like, if this is your entry point, you don't see anything wrong. You just go: “Oh, this is normal” because it's your only like, introduction to it.

It was sweet, to be honest. Like, I've always worked cleaning test tubes in the hospital like 40% and that like, paid my rent and the rent of my studio. And I was just doing art and kind of living kind of low income, cheap life with a lot of like, just like, it was kind of simple like. You kind of, I was not part of so much pain because I was so newly graduated but yeah, it was yeah, there was a lot happening. There was all kinds of crazy, you know, expensive stuff or like big name artists who were doing crazy projects and and just these types. What's his name? He was not too active and I was done by the time he was there. Yeah, solo so I have met them we can talk cool. But wait, hang on. What's his name?

Anna: 
Olafur Eliasson? 

Aggi:
Yeah! There was like also the every year.. Oh! Yeah, it was like Jason Walton, Paul McCarthy. It was like this kind of thing. Like, like they did some project. And the art students helped them. I actually refused to do that. Or like, I didn't refuse. I had the opportunity, but I decided not to, because I saw what the actual work was that they were making. Those are melted cheap. So I was like, No. I'm not gonna do this. And then they drove them to the center of town, in limousines down to the exhibition space. It was like this kind of stuff that could like happen.

Anna:
Like, a bubbel, a phenomenona? 

Aggi:
Yeah, it was it was all via brands and everything. But then 2008 financial crash started and it was when the protests started and then from then on, just like, everything burned down. Like, everything closed down. I struggled on for a bit until 2011 and by then, like all my friends had latched on. We needed to leave our studio close to home because we couldn't really afford the rent.

Yeah. And it was just like, like, unemployment, big time, unemployment. I had changed jobs, I worked as a stagehand in the National Stadium and we all got fired. My father got fired. My parents moved to Denmark because they didn't have jobs. So I'm like this, not to say economic flipping, because I was just like, fuck it is time to change. So my friend or not friend, but one who had been teaching at my school and I had worked with her gallery and she was a teacher at a schhol in Malmö, Sweden. She had told me it was was a good school. So I applied, they said yes, and I moved. Without really knowing anything.

But it was like, yeah, it was like, almost overnight, and I'm just like, Iceland was  completely in ruins and it hasn't recovered. Even now, it's not anything close to what it was. I don't recognize it. When I go back to Reyjkavik, like every single street has been turned into shops that sell T-shirts and you know, stuff like that. So no culture. There is stuff happening, but it's just not you know, and when I meet like younger artists they think I'm like making this stuff up because they don't know that environment at all. They're just like, it was like, because it sounds crazy. And it was, but to me what I remember most clearly is being like in the middle of it. It doesn't seem strange, because it's my introduction to the art world and it was awesome! 


To be Continued...








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