(Photographer: Patricia Klich)

GAIA PROJECTS:

G.A.I.A.(GLOBAL ART IN ACTION), is an artist’s group and exhibitions project, which seeks to bring art and global awareness closer together in a productive and creative dialogue about how we live.

In June 1985 I was focused as much on the TV screen as the rest of the world as LIVE AID unfolded in front of our eyes with concerts in the U.K and in the U.S. What I wasn´t expecting from the many interviews about the events taking place across the day was the raw, uncut, and more than politically incorrect language with which Bob Geldof demanded that people give him their “f**king money”. He was honest, aggressive and Irish. It seemed that art could be made to do things, and it could also cut through the veil of “civilized”debate. 25 years later, and at least 15 years of activity in the art world have left me with the feeling that great change is still needed, and that art can and should be a catalyst for this change.  How can this happen?  How is there room for change in an art-world which is as much subject to the forces and economic rules of the market as any other business? The change needs to come firstly as a desire to return art to it´s primary place and function.

Art has an ability to be both an aesthetic object and a deeply profound means of communication. It can be both specific, and open at the same time.Yet there are reasons why art and artists seem to have been somehow silenced and/or marginalised in our times. In the streamlining of the arts as just another area of education and work, the systems in place have prepared the young artist to be ready for a careerist, and competitive market place. That market place has, since before the second world war, transformed art into a commodity which is primarily an investment that is dictated not by the quality of the work at hand, but by the fashions of the day and the fetish of collection.

As a group we will seek to provide for artists and other interested parties a way in which to express and share their own interests and passions about our changing world. As a community of people, GAIA admits that there is a social contract, and that we are both as individuals and as groups responsible for the changes happening around us.

Dermot Browne.

January 2011.