It’s difficult to plant your flag in the ground when your position keeps shifting.
By which I mean, I’ve done so much reading and thinking and discussing over the past few days; I’ve been privileged enough to hear so many differing points of view that my sense of Purpose, which was singular, a solid black line, has begun to blur & haze, like a watercolour or a charcoal smudge.
I’m incredibly thankful that I have non-artist friends. Though it’s true to say that most of my friends tend to be expressive in some way – some are musicians, some write graphic novels, some are performers, some are academics – having people in my life who provide a break from the Art World, and who can also offer interesting perspectives on things I’d been considering, is really valuable to me. Often the perspectives they offer are more beneficial than the input offered by fellow artists, who tend to offer variations on “why do you need to question what it means?! Just make art, man!”
But it really isn’t the case that I’m taking time out from my day to sit and pontificate on these issues. These are things I have been considering for some time, while making things or applying for things or writing or researching or just doing the washing-up. One of my reasons for beginning this blog was that I found myself asking these questions anyway. It is important to me that what I do matters: that it benefits the wider world and that it benefits & nourishes me. This causes a lot of hesitation & self-doubt, true; and my portfolio is nothing like as full as 99% of the other artists I know – but at the same time, I feel supported by this internal process (that comes very naturally). As well, I think that it’s important to keep interrogating what it means to be an artist – a state of being with the most loose of definitions. Perhaps if I were a nurse, I would find myself asking, “What does it mean to be a nurse?” – but I don’t think so.
I am writing at a point in time when, in many ways, art is a broader and more inclusive thing than at almost any point in the recorded past. Art can encompass a vast range of processes and outcomes, and – more than this – as a term, it is ours to define and re-define, as radically and as often as any of us might choose to do. As well, there appears to be a sea-change occurring, a real paradigm shift, as thousands of professionally-qualified graduate artists (many of whom who attended university art departments rather than art colleges; many of which will have had a commitment to “readying our students for the World of Work”) begin to demand greater consultation, respect, better working conditions and a living wage. So, too, are those who wish to work in arts admin demanding better: with the fantastic news last month that the Arts Council has suspended all advertisements of unpaid jobs on its ArtsJobs service, and a number of government-commissioned reports/consultations – not to mention bolshy Facebook groups creating and mobilising grassroots support – it seems that our venerable institutions will have to seriously rethink the rotten system that allows them to pay their directors and curators thousands, leaving little-to-nothing left over for the artists who make the work and the “vollies” (as volunteers are condescendingly called) who make it happen. (On top of this will come the government cuts – of which more in another post.)
Within this rapidly shifting context, it becomes important for me (with my untraditional background) to try to unpick my relationship with the art world, to find my place and stake it out – or else get pushed aside, drowned out, trodden over by the hordes of professionally-qualified, loud-shouting, Saatchi-chasing careerists. There must be a space for silent and reflective work that is also contemporary – this space is what I wish to seek out, or carve out; whichever is necessary. Whether or not inhabiting this space can constitute a career (read: a living), or even half of one, remains to be seen.
