What does it mean to be an artist?

The saddest thing that I received in my email today was an invitation to the opening of an exhibition by a group of recent graduates. I read through the explanatory text, and realised with a sudden jolt that it read like a covering letter for a job application. The language of self-justification, phrased like a plea. An extended passage describing how the exhibited work would appeal to various social groups… It made me so sad. That it’s really come to this.

But there are also happy things! I’ve found that writing this blog & enunciating my concerns/sense of isolation has un(b)locked something in my unconscious. Suddenly I have a much clearer idea of what it is I want to be and want to do, and a method of operating that doesn’t involve forcing myself into an uncomfortable position, the more accepted paradigm. (This is something I’ve been doing my whole adult life; trying to substantially alter the inalterable stuff of my psyche, that I might better fit alongside my contemporaries. Chameleon instinct, ever adapting. I’m ready to try being myself, unaltered.) I’ve come to realise – and it was so very obvious – that one must make something from what one is given; that that is all there is to be done. So rather than feeling guilty and inert because I am not exhibiting enough or working in the same way as other artists I know – or worrying because I feel that my contemporaries don’t rate my work – instead I’ll find a way that works for me, rather than against me. Instead of feeling hemmed-in by isolation, why not feel liberated by solitude? Perhaps it’s in how you approach things.

In other news, I’ll be accompanying some of my bookworks to the Piccadilly Self-Publishing Exhibition and Fair, which will take place on Sunday 3rd October at Piccadilly Place in central Manchester (the exhibition will continue until the following Friday). The event is being co-organised by Caitlin Howard (a-n blog here) and Sophie Lee, two fantastically talented recent graduates whom I met at the Manchester Artists’ Book Fair last year. I’m so excited to be a part of it!

I found an extract from Georges Perec’sThe Infra-Ordinary, which I loved, and which chimes beautifully with much of what I’m thinking of these days:

‘How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

‘To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

‘How are we to speak of these “common things,” how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.

‘What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.

‘What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

‘Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

‘Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

‘Question your tea spoons.

‘What is there under your wallpaper?

‘How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?

‘Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

‘It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.’

—

…

Today I have spent knitting and reading and watching the rain.

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.

Everything has gone a bit topsy-turvy over the last few days, with the news that our landlord is selling our flat & would like us to move out as quickly as we can. In amidst the endless, depressing round of viewing houses that are not-quite-right and trying to plan some trips to other cities (S. is finally following his heart & going back to uni to study film-making), I’ve had time to scrawl a few notes, but nothing more. I’ve finally found half an hour to sit down and flesh them out a bit. Apologies for the poorly-written, bitty, conversational tone!

Emily Speed picked up on my use of the word ‘homogenic’ in relation to the arts. She rightly pointed out that the word ‘art’ now encompasses many vastly different ways of working. This is true, and is something I welcome – particularly since only through this broadening of definition and of scope do I get to call myself an artist. The homogenisation to which I referred is a homogenisation not of work, but of approach; the approach to making work, and the approach to being an artist in the first place.

I often wonder if I am the only one who finds the whole process utterly exhausting. The unspoken doctrine goes something like this: an artist must be public; and half yourself must be given over to others. Research, compare, see art all the time; fill your head with the work of others: an insular system of call and response, bounce and rebound. I find it difficult to maintain this and still make work that is true (in the same way, when I am writing, I cannot read too much). My inner “voice” is a distinct but quiet and fragile creature, easily influenced & overwhelmed by other voices, other ways of doing.

I find a lot of the work that I see by young/emerging artists exhausting, too. It might sound odd for a person whose entire practice is rooted in philosophy, in ideas, in the intangible, to be saying this, but I see so much work that is conceptualised to breaking-point; that is overthought. A conceptual background that outweighs the visual outcome; pieces of work backed up by lengthy catalogue texts that become required reading. “Interesting” work, as opposed to work that takes my breath away. Many of these artists are vastly more successful and respected than I am, and rightly so, for they certainly try harder, and certainly “play the game” better than I do. For I am coming to understand that I (and, therefore, my work) thrive on solitude, quietness and intense, first-hand experience; the private self and the inner life rather than public demonstration. Of course, there are other artists who work in this way too, but in Liverpool, where I currently live and work, I appear to be in a minority of one, in amidst the noise and clutter and slick self-promotion. My mistake has been to attempt (to over and again attempt!) to place myself with in the prescribed boundaries of what A Working Artist ought to be, and invariably fail.

It seems to me that there are broadly three types of artist: Amateurs, Professionals and Outsider Artists. In my next post, I would like to try and define these three types, and think about how they overlap and interrelate. Input and new perspectives are very welcome, so if you would like to post a comment explaining what those three words mean to you, in the context of art-making and living as an artist, please do!