of Peter tanner by Joe Worley eter Tanner strikes me as a fairly ordinary sort of guy. He likes Pink Floyd and hockey (although he has some qualms about the kinds of salaries hockey players make). He likes to make pictures with his camera, with paint or with both. Now all this seems pretty rea- sonable. The truly remarkable thing about this guy is that he’s out there on the streets of Couver-ville every day peddling his ass to make a buck. Well maybe not his ass per se, but his artistic ass. He spends just about as much time making up posters and press releases to promote his work as he does making art. As well as ‘product’ he makes ‘product support’. These are the terms that he uses, and he’s not joking. Peter understands that, like everything else in the world, ART IS FOR SALE. The art market, being part of the economic reality of the late 20th century, operates on this (and only this?) principle. And when you start out utterly ignored by the art industry as Peter did and most of us do, and you want to sell your ~ art, you may have to throw a little of your identity into the bargain. That's right folks, ARTISTS ARE FOR SALE TOO. Peter says “it’s a bit like being an actor, you sell a little bit of your soul every time.” There are of course alternatives: jobs where there is no mention of soul in the contract. Peter Tanner has worked as a cook, a welder, and most soullessly of all, a gas station attendant. This was not sat- isfactory to Peter. “Something happens when you sell out and take a ‘straight’ job,” he says. “It hurts your soul.” A career as a photo-journalist ensued, but after eleven years Peter began to feel that his vision and independence were being cur- tailed: he was beginning to see things “through the eyes of the editor.” So the cameras were hung up and Peter turned to drawing and painting, “to where | feel things started [for me] on a cre- ative level.” But the skills he learned during those eleven years made him the efficient and effective self-promot- er he is today. “Now | make an image for myself,” he says, “and if people like it, then that’s great.” Whether people like or not, he makes sure that plenty of them see his work, or at least know of him. For example, how would one get the student press to devote space to oneself? Peter seemed to have the right idea when he simply showed up atthe door of the March 1997 / Planet of the Arts 21 Marketing Your Ass: The Fine Art Planet of the Arts office and pre- sented himself and his artist state- ment to the facilitators of the paper. Hence the article. Peter has some strong anti-capi- talism sentiments and uses only recycled materials in his work, which is a way for him to reconcile his politics with his practice. However, in the meantime, Peter is, he agrees, perpetuating the system every day to get what he wants from it. Seems it’s tough to earn a living as an artist and still be ideal- istic. In addition to the production and promotion of his art, Peter operates a psychedelic laser light show three or four nights a week at the Vancouver Planetarium. Peter's advice for young artists is “Leave your ego at home,” and “have a hard skin.” He also related a Pink Floyd quote which conveys the necessity of having a sense of humour about the whole thing: “MONEV...IT’S A GAS...GRAB THAT CASH WITH BOTH HANDS AND MAKE A STASH.”