Gallery System

Author : Russ Bickerstaff

One more thing love: I believe I forgot to tell you about this strange experience I had the other day. I had visitors. (Yes!) Visitors. Isn’t that strange? From off world of course. I hadn’t seen them before. No idea where they came from. I believe they were interviewing me for something. They do some sort of thing for their world. Some piece of journalism or some sort. They didn’t have the usual media sorts of equipment, though. Actually, now that I think of it their uniforms looked kind of…military.

I don’t know what they were after. It was hard to follow everything. Their language was so low. They actually spoke out of their faces. Can you imagine? Beastly things. Not terribly sophisticated. They were grunting these questions at me. Awful. I know.

Evidently they had been to all of the rest of the worlds in the gallery. They were so brutish and aggressive. Asking all these questions in their face language. Hateful. It was enough to give one a headache. But I felt more than happy to answer their questions. An audience is an audience even if it insists on barking at me like that. They HAD come a long way to speak to me, even if they were being rude.

I tried to answer their questions as best as possible. However, I can’t help but get a feeling that they didn’t intend on being insulting when they asked if I’d been to the other planets. Can you imagine? Had I been to the other planets?

Well not many people that I know of would be unaware of a gallery system when they saw one. It’s positively written all over the star. Even the lowest life forms know THAT. But it was an interesting opportunity, you know, because they didn’t know about the art. I was interested in what they thought of my work. The impressions of the truly ignorant. Fascinating stuff in theory. They were SO banal, though. Utter disappointment. All they wanted to ask where they came from. And it’s not like they were in the business or anything like that. Couldn’t exactly talk shop with them.

Tried to tell them those things out there were my creations. They just didn’t get it. What was I to say? It was all very tedious trying to tell them how I created this or created that. The dragons on this world. The grid of ice on the other. I tried to explain to them what I was trying to express with my work. But as always, the work really has to speak for itself. And it really must speak for itself with people who are sophisticated enough to understand it. Yes, they were intelligent enough to travel across systems. But even insects have a kind of intelligence about them. It was all very tedious.

Anyway, good luck with that latest project of yours, my love. So much brutality in your work. So many gassy planets. Don’t know how you manage. And then to simply let that one third from the sun develop the way it has. Just shoot out a little bit of raw material and let it do its work. Fascinating and minimalist I’m sure but I that sort of thing just isn’t for me. Come to think of it, the ones who came to interview me just might’ve been from one of your works. I know, I know I treated them well. Don’t you worry. I think they’ll be the centerpiece of my next work, actually. Lower life forms are SO interesting to work with.