‘People don’t construct their identity in a vacuum: they create who and what they are in conversation with others’
Stephen Duncombe, ‘Notes From The Undergound: Zines and the politics of alternative culture
‘All I know is that I know nothing’ Socrates
This evening I’ve been thinking about today’s Samosa Chana Chaat Chat Club*, with Adam and Cat Simons, Josh from Official Culture and Gideon Seymour, and mulling over the freeform conversations which included
– Self definition : How do you describe yourself – as a professional or an amateur artist?
– Would defining art as ‘work’ demystify it, make it more valued and less elitist to people?
– Does getting paid for your art compromise your integrity as an artist? Is the idea of creative integrity a luxury?
– ‘Selling out’? What does that mean? Being funded by the state? Being paid by a corporation?
One of the things I am interested in is mapping my learning so that I can trace how my knowledge develops through conversation, reading, thinking, and doing. That’s partly why I’ve been exploring Storify to track the Twitter interactions I’ve been having, and why I’m blogging this meeting now.
Learning, and identity are communally made, and always in flux:
“the type of subjectivity produced in art that operates at the social level -that involves collective action, dialogue, participation and so on – was shown to be one that opens up onto the horizon of ‘the common’…. this collective experience … ‘exceeds’ the closed individualism, self-advancement and cynical instrumentalism of capitalist relations, lays the foundation for the constitution of a social organisation of a new (that is postcapitalist) type described by Hardt and Negri as ‘the multitide”
Radical Resonances: Art, Self-organised Cultural Activity and the Production of Postcapitalist Subjectivity; or, Deferred Self-Inquiry of a Precarious Artworker, 2008 – 2011. Andy Abbott Phd thesis, 2012
Thinking this evening about the amateur/professional question which Adam posed, I coincidentally pick up a book, ‘Did Someone Say Participate’ (Eds Miessen and Basar) and find a chapter called ‘The Amateur Professional’ by Shumon Basar.
The essay discusses the cultural weight given to the word ‘professional’ (“years of learned traning, expertise in a particular field, and knowledge that can be used in an economic system of value exchange”) against the negative meanings of ‘amateur’ (“either to be taken lightly and made fun of (for they often fail in their achievements) or (s)he is to be feared lest (s)he pretend to be a Professional and dupe you into a false sense of security'”. Basar, writing about a architecture project he was involved in, talks about the embracing of the amateur as a positive attribute, allowing for greater open-ness and creativity. “We exploit our own professional naivety as strength. We choose to remain amateurish”
He concludes
“Being outside the mainstream knowledge space, the Professional Amateur consolidates their outsider context and believes it to be another species of “inside” that happens to be “outside” of the normative “inside”. Belief is the primary logic of survival for the Professional Amateur: belief that when everything is possible, the possible is merely anther part of everything”
Full article can be read here http://amateuristnetwork.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/…
After I finish writing this blog, I will tweet a link to this blog to my fellow conversants. Maybe there will be another conversation on Twitter, in which others will join in. Maybe we will resume the conversation in real life, at next week’s meeting.
Knowledge and community evolving, virtually and in real life, over samosa chaat, over Twitter.
* ‘Samosa Chana Chaat Chat Club’ is the invention of Adam Simons, following some lunchtime chats over samosas during the Bradford Baked Zines popup shop last month. It is an informal, social gathering, a chance to meet, eat samosa and talk. Today was the second SCCC, and there are plans to meet up again next week.
