practicing

Last night, I went to a dinner organized by PEW charitable trusts, a big arts funder in the US. I liked their description of the characteristics of the curatorial projects they favour: ‘Excellence, imagination, courage’. There were about fifteen or twenty of us; everyone else runs small collective spaces while I guess I’m classed as an independent. We had to say something about our ambitions for our curatorial practice–so curators have practices too! Not sure if I have a curatorial practice, but I said something about my ambitions anyway: facilitating transatlantic exchange and working within the shared spaces between visual art, writing and research. Anyway, hearing about how to get funding was inspiring in terms of dreaming up relevant projects–though I won’t be eligible until next June, and only if I get another couple of shows under my belt by then.

Walking my chihuahua-pomeranian, Bella, this morning, trying to be mindful and appreciate the moment, the few days we get of curling Autumn breezes here before it just gets cold, thinking about what a practice is.

I like Sophie Cullinan’s idea that it’s something like a Buddhist practice, in that you keep going back to basics, to the Zen beginner’s mind. That reminds me of one of my favourite books, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Goldberg’s thing is that whatever you decide to make your practice–writing, drawing, running, Zazen sitting, dancing, cooking, even business–the effects of that intention and that habit permeate through the rest of life and who you are, prompting deep questioning, joy, change, growth… all those personal development terms that I’m equally attracted to and suspicious of.

I think this translates to the way we typically use ‘practice’ in artspeak, in that we’re referring to a constellation of behaviours, thought patterns and relationships–not just the maknig process or its product–resulting from our decision to nurture a specific habit and specific artistic identity.

What I wrote the other day about a practice as enacting a unifying desire when life is so fragmented still feels right. Things so often don’t make sense and getting through the day is frequently a lot of work. So perhaps having something that you can always refer back to is grounding in the way that a good, loving family is grounding.

Not sure what kind of practice I may already have, or would like to develop. But I feel like learning to be ok with ambiguity, with everything being fragmentary, is as important as making practic-al sense.

Um, so, ever since I heard people, lecturers, talking about ‘art practice’ on my foundation course in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I’ve been curious as to what the term actually means, and why it’s so important to us to have a ‘practice.’ Rather than, say, a skillset or a job or work or vision or commitment or, simply, ‘my painting’ or ‘my writing.’

I started at Chelsea College of Art & Design late, in Winter, having flip-flopped between visual art and philosophy, eventually squeezing into their painting department on the Kings Road after a tearful Christmas holiday. During my first week, I had a tutorial with Lucy Gunning, and expressed how I felt kind of lost.

She said:

‘You haven’t found your practice yet. Or maybe you’re not sure if you even have a practice.’

Throughout varying degrees of lostness in the ten years that followed, the concept of a practice as something to find (within oneself? out there somewhere? via habit?) stuck with me. And I kept on wondering, why ‘practice’? That term comes with vague recollections of Marxist and anthropological theory, and now I’d like to pinpoint those references, and also trace when, exactly, it was that artists started referring to themselves as having a practice, and what it was that they meant.

I work now mainly as a writer. Making a home in Philadelphia, USA, I’ve come to value being an art critic – something that I’ve always wanted to move beyond – as the local community here has wecomed me with me open arms. There’s a lack of critical writing about the work being made here. Now, I regularly fill that gap — perhaps this is my practice and it has somehow found me? Maybe walking my dog is my practice: that’s the most clockwork-regular habit I have.

I think I want to think about practice in more depth because, moving to a new country, things feel fragmented, new, difficult to grasp for a long time. It would be good if I could define something, if something bits felt unified. Having a practice seems in some ways to add order to a messy life – at least, that’s how it looks from the outside. Although, maybe all of this thinking, ordering, rearranging is practice (in the sense of learning) in living with ambiguity.

I’m still not sure if I even have a practice. But, anyway, my plan is to read and write through this.