It’s a dirty little secret that we’ve been trying to cover up for hundreds of years now, but maybe it’s not to our benefit to keep in this one closet any longer.
The question of immaterial labour has haunted the identity of the artist ever since Velázquez campaigned to elevate art above craft. The production of illusory or conceptual work seems at odds with any embodied toil in the processes of its creation. There are rarely invoices, timesheets or job tickets for artists to quantify or account for their work. Rather, they are assumed to create, but not to labour.
The gains of this deception are of questionable worth. Freed from an association with labour, artists presumably enjoy greater social standing and mystique. And yet, what once was an asset in aristocratic society has become an impairment in today’s capitalist economy. Distanced from toil and material work, artists stand uncomfortably in contrast to the premium on productivity levied at other vocations.
This seems to be a point made again and again by Kelly Mark, an artist that continually positions herself as an art worker rather than what we might imagine an artist to be.
In & Out (1997 ongoing until 2032) consists of the continuing accumulation and display of punch cards documenting all the hours spent by the artist in her studio. It is owned by a private collector, who pays a yearly stipend for the continuation of Mark’s work (and, in a way, Mark’s own studio practice), thereby becoming her “shitty boss”. The multitude of cards, which measure and visualize the time spent in labour, forefront the activity of art making as a form of toil, sustained and extracted hour by hour.
Likewise, Working Hardly Working (2009) teases out this play of expectations, pitting the difficulty of maintaining a practice of work against the presumed sloth of artists such as Bruce Nauman, whose pieces present more mystique than product and are far distanced from manual craft undertaken by the artist’s own hand.
It is interesting to consider what could be at stake in conceiving of art as labour, whether material or otherwise. Different forms of valuing are won and lost in this paradigm shift. Instead of status, the artist gains legitimacy; instead of heroization, the artist is awarded wages (Mark, for instance, has successfully renegotiated artist fees to work for the minimum wage rather than the CARFAC standard, and come out ahead). Arguably, in turn, this new understanding of art work stands to dignify the profession, albeit on the terms of productive economy rather than through the value of art in and of itself.
And yet, this does not precisely address the nature of the kind of work artists engage in. While Mark’s studio time is on the clock, this measure of her labour does not explain the character of her time spent at work. Rather than the alienated toil of a factory worker, the labour of an artist is more strongly immaterial and relational than industrial work. Despite hinging around a material object, the purpose of much of art today lies in its emotional and conceptual affects.
This opens up an entirely different understanding of work and of toil, one that might be aligned with Michael Hardt’s idea of immaterial labour. Reworking Marxism for the 21st century, Hardt sketches out a working class based out of offices and institutions rather than factories, engaged in the exchange of services and information instead of material commodities. This post-industrial work not only contains the potential to be very exploitative (imagine the emotional wear on the call centre worker or health care provider), it also has become an increasingly invasive organizational system as the work day creeps outwards from 9-5 into a cascading string of second jobs, weekend projects and evening events.
Art making, understood in this context, can also appear quite exploitative. The lack of boundaries between work and life, the incredibly low rate of pay per hours worked and the unequal relation between the artist and the public are all challenges that can weigh particularly heavily on art makers. It can be a thankless, oppressive job when things are going poorly.
This is not to say, however, that artists and other immaterial workers are purely exploited. Hardt makes the case that those who we might see as victims are also powerful agents in many respects, endowed with unique capabilities that emerge out of their skills as post-industrial labourers. Much of this kind of work, be it the creation of affects or the organization of systems, essentially outfits these workers with the tools to create new social relations and political arrangements. Between artists, teachers, nurses and clerks lies the ability to form new societies, if creatively and collectively applied. In this space of possibilities, perhaps there is even the potential to form more truly democratic relations.
We might therefore say that art is work- work with the dual potential to empower or oppress its maker. Still, that definition excludes the attraction towards art making that many experience which seems to extend beyond a rational calculation of capital.
To fully account for the pleasure of art making, one can turn to Peter Kropotkin’s notion of the need for luxury.
Kropotkin, “The Prince of Anarchism”, makes an important intervention into the usual Marxist rhetoric on labour. His anarchistic vision for work does not glorify toil, but instead seeks to completely minimize drudgery through the intelligent application of engineering technologies and a radical rethinking of consumer waste. Living on little means sacrificing less in labour, freeing time for individually driven pursuits and desires. Moreover, rather than abolishing luxury goods as bourgeois vices, Kropotkin claims that they still constitute vital human desires for ornament, beauty and leisure. For Kropotkin, this may have included his beard, which we must confess is quite luxurious and pleasing.
Art seems easy enough to situate in this context. As a common luxury good, or as affective leisure, artworks are not to be reduced to ideological tools or status objects. What’s more, the drive to make art is theorized on the level of the individual, presenting art as a vocation more than another job. Art making, like all immaterial labour in Kropotkin’s social arrangements, is a calling and an individual passion. The manual drudgery and affective demands that comes with the job are costs paid gladly for the pleasure that comes from the creation and community of art work- and perhaps the power of agency that comes in turn with its immaterial labour.
Seeing art as work, then, is to conceive of an artistic practice with conscious consideration to the nature and cost of its labour. Forefronting art as work may form the first step towards improving the conditions of this labour and exploring the potential that it offers as a common luxury and political resource.
However, as is the seeming nature of all labour today, my work here is hardly done. I’d like to open up the conversation about work and art to Latitude’s online and tangible communities. How are art and work divided in your experiences, and what may be at stake in recognizing art as labour? Please feel free to leave your comments below, or, alternatively, come by the gallery next Wednesday night for October 5th’s Theory for Dinner. We’ll be looking at a short chapter by Kropotkin and a talk by Hardt, which I promise will be more leisure than toil.
“ 1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
…
4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
As some of you may know, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was selected as the reading for Wednesday’s Theory for Dinner- a monthly exchange of food and ideas hosted at Latitude 53. Revisiting this text in preparation for this gathering has brought a few questions forward when considering what, precisely, we are to make of Guy Debord today.
While The Society of the Spectacle is a little longer than the ideal Theory for Dinner text, it’s easy enough to break it down into bite-sized pieces. Debord writes in point form, pumping out pithy statements, each of which can be chewed-over in their own right. Don’t worry if you can’t get all the way through Debord’s short book for Wednesday- just find a few ideas that make your head spin. The first chapter is particularly good in this regard.
You know what this Wednesday night is? Theory for Dinner Time. Any last minute cramers can find our processional hymn, Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces”, here.
Unlike the seminar room, drinking is somewhat encouraged. Bring tasty snacks, libations, and an appetite for discussion. It’s far better to come with questions rather than answers, so please don’t be discouraged by any linguistic trickery on Foucault’s part. He’s a pretty likeable guy once you get to know him, I promise.
Merriment starts at 7pm and the philosophizing begins more so around 7:30, so the court finds your lateness quite tolerable.
I hope to see your faces and get to know you better!
The past week I’ve been talking with Edmontonians about their willingness to visit and participate in what we might call the city’s major cultural institutions such as the Winspear Centre, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and the Citadel Theatre. The quotes above are a few of the answers I’ve received. They seem somewhat innocuous in a point of time where visitor numbers are high. It’s clear, however, that while attendance may be up, inclusivity and broad community access remain elusive.
To a certain extent, this is the same old song and dance. Institutional critiques have long been a motivating factor for changing curatorial strategies, museum stewardship, and the ethical commitments of arts organizations to the communities around them. Fred Wilson suggested that the histories and narratives of oppressed peoples were problematically excluded from the presentation of high art and cultural artifacts when he juxtaposed slave chains with plantation silverware. The Situationist International suggested that institutions were problematically removed from their communities by proposing to blast a holes in museum walls and build labyrinths inside. HansHaacke suggested that galleries were not the neutral custodians of art that they presumed to be by exposing the politics and business interests of the immensely influential but often invisible board of directors as the subject of his art.
All these points are well taken, and should be taken further. However, even if we manage to get the content of cultural institutional right, there remains a larger problem, which is simply getting everyone through the door. Patronage to these places is overwhelmingly correlated with membership to middle to upper economic, educational and social status groups. Why is this the case?
There are many answers, and many responses. Firstly, the monetary cost of admission is certainly a factor, though there are now ways to get around this barrier. You can get tickets to the symphony for $20, the Citadel does rush seating, and the AGA has free access nights. Secondly, the content of these institutions might be seen as being abstruse, but this is also changing. Despite the complaints of cultural purists, the orchestra’s playing Disney, the art gallery’s exhibited Warner Brothers cartoons, and the theatre’s showing The Sound of Music. It’s hard to find a program without something that might be seen as a populist gesture. Thirdly, and supposedly, it’s not even the architecture anymore. The classical temples, opaque and poised upon stone pedestals apart from the bustle of the street, have been replaced with glass walls, public atriums, and assorted shops and cafes in an attempt to serve the public as purveyors of both high culture and low consumption. As sociologist Nick Prior suggests, you can have one’s Tate and eat (in) it too.
And yet, if my conversations on the street are anything to go by, something is left out of this account- something less easily quantifiable and more in the realm of subconscious impressions. Something, I think, that might be better explained by an appeal to the aesthetic experience of cultural capital.
By this, I don’t mean cultural capital in the same sense that Edmonton was Canada’s Cultural Capital of 2007, though that vague designation was pleasing. This kind of capital, as developed by Pierre Bordieu, is a kind of personal commodity just like economic capital. We ‘buy’ our admission into cultural institutions and the comfort we experience therein through the capital we inherit from our parents and nurture in our education. We can trade this capital for social prestige and economic advancement (which gives a whole other spin on philanthropy and wage-work in the arts sector). It’s the subtle ownership we experience or lack in our dealings with culture, and it varies between institutions and people. It’s the difference between ignoring a security guard and feeling scrutinized by his gaze. It’s the facility to which you feel involved in a community instead of nervously visiting. Cultural capital, I would suggest, is what needs to be audited in our institutions if we are to account for the failure of inclusivity.
So how are our institutions doing? To pick on the shiniest elephant in the room, the AGA has some real problems. Rather than conveying a sense of openness and inspiring futurity as promised, Randal Stout’s architecture seems to suggest most predominantly an aesthetic of hygiene. The steel and glass of the building seem hostile to the bodies of its visitors, showcasing the smudges of fingers and the clamour of footsteps somewhat accusingly. Ever present security and a lack of seating discourages visitors from lingering too long, while the absence of participatory art displays breed passivity and disengagement in those without the educational foundations in visual literacy. The comfortable dinginess of the Enterprise Square location is sorely missed.
More problematically, I would suggest, is the management of event spaces in the gallery. I am incredibly annoyed when I interrupt wedding photos by simply I climbing the public staircase, and I feel like an intruder when I open the doors to the building and am immediately greeted by a roped-off corporate function. The fracture of public and private space makes the AGA an exclusive rather than inclusive venue and raises the cultural capital requirements immensely. It would seem that the gallery’s contract with Compass Group has effectively stifled the promise of the New Vision campaign to transform the AGA into a public meeting place. You can meet there, but only for a very premium fee.
But the AGA isn’t the only culprit here. The Winspear Centre locks up during the day, stopping countless curious pedestrians at doors they can peer through but not enter. Even Latitude 53, ostensibly a community-centric organization, can be off-putting when it hosts fashion events and stylish fundraisers for its ever-trendy hipster audience. Almost everywhere, the graffiti of the philanthropic class is widespread phenomena. It seems somewhat at odds to think of it as My Winspear when Enmax, Telus and many affluent individuals have their names on the wall or on my seat. Likewise, it’s youraga but it’s Ledcor’s theatre and Ernest J. Poole’s gallery. Finally, rigid dress codes, disengaged staff, and the absence of queer, immigrant and aboriginal voices on administrative teams are pervasive and surefire ways to make an unwelcoming experience at any institution. All these factors raise the cultural capital required to enter these spaces comfortably. They present very real barriers to institutional accessibility that need to be addressed in tandem with economic and programming concerns.
At the same time, I don’t want to naively declare that these problems are easily or completely fixable. Many of the factors that contribute to cultural capital come from funding demands, which are only likely to intensify in the coming years. You can’t ask for something out of nothing, least of all in the arts, and it’s a fine line of balancing different capital requirements to satisfy as many people from as diverse backgrounds as possible.
One space where I see some encouragement- one institution where cultural capital requirements are remarkably low- is the public library. The EPL does a fabulous job providing content and programs for hugely varied groups of people in an environment that is both welcoming and inclusive. The interiors are warm and homey instead of cold and sanitized, and patrons have an opportunity to effectively curate the content they interact with. I think some interesting things might happen if we began to think of our institutions as cultural libraries rather than museums.
At the very least, we should endeavour to bring the wider community into our cultural spaces, rather than forming communities out of the few that make it through the door.
Yearning for the days back when salons were de rigueur? Us too. Thankfully, our current writer-in-residence Anne Pasek has stepped to the fore and is happy to announce Theory For Dinner, a bi-weekly evening full of conversation about art theory and ideas coupled with a potluck meal of great eats. To find out more, I interviewed Anne last week about her plans for the upcoming series. | Interview by Alyssa Kuhnert
AK: First things first, how would you describe Theory For Dinner in a nutshell?
AP: My friends and I have been describing it as an “art-nerd book club”, though that’s not totally accurate. It’s a discussion group, open to anyone, that centers on a short piece of writing (about art or art theory), usually no more than 10 pages. Theory For Dinner is for people who would like to do a bit of thinking and mull over ideas in the company of good food and good people.
AK: Sounds like a great idea. Opening up the discussion to anyone who’s interested. Where did the idea for the series first present itself?
AP: I was talking with the previous writer in residence, Carolyn Jervis, who was lamenting how hard it is to make time to read up on philosophical issues once you’re out of university. And, in conversations with my friends who are practising artists, it became clear that there are many people who are interested in theoretical ideas, and in fact work through them in their practice, but for whom reading a scholarly book is no easy task.
So, it’s a project to bring theory out of academia in an accessible way, mix it with artists and community members, and see what comes out.
As it turns out, many of the ideas in these theoretical texts are terribly practical, and can be explored in many different ways as artists and citizens. No need for a PhD and a dictionary to make sense of the world.
AK: Do you have any ideas of what kind of material you’d like to cover during the series? Perhaps you have a dream piece of theory be to cover for the kick off of Theory For Dinner?
AP: Well, I was thinking on Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces”. I’ve used it previously in my writing for Latitude 53 when discussion heterotopias, and it seemed to hit a chord. But ultimately, I want Theory For Dinner to be more of a circle of equals and explorers rather than a group that I lecture at. I’d like to meet with people, learn about their interests, and pick things together.
As the Writer in Residence, one of the biggest perks of the job has been strangers emailing me interesting bits of writing and philosophy. Everyone out there seems to have discovered these interesting pieces of larger ideas. With the series I’d like to mix, stir, and simmer them all together.
AK: Where did your own interests in theory come from? You’ve written on the blog that you possess “a near evangelical love” for it, especially in regards to art.
AP: Well, a lot of the work I’ve done in my academic career has been the bridging of theory and art. I find that quite often art and theory present novel and complementary ways of working through problems, making issues visible, and explaining our interrelations to one another.
So, by reading theory and working with art, a myriad of connections, ideas, and modes of being are exposed.
By bringing the two together, one can explore something I might call “the artistic mode of living”, where almost everything can have the weight of an important philosophical idea, or an artistic accent. And that gets me really excited, I love sharing the ideas and perspectives that come out of this intermingling.
AK: Well I am definitely excited to see how the series unfolds. On a more pragmatic note, when will Theory For Dinner happen? Also, dinner’s mentioned in the title—will actual food be involved?
AP: The plan is to hold biweekly meetings—every other Wednesday—though as we get to know each other as a group we may want to collectively change that. And yes! Even if you’re apprehensive about theory, come for the meal! It’s a potluck style gathering, so bring a contribution and an appetite. And, not to get too carried away with myself, but I am a great cook. My share will be delicious and vegan friendly.
There’s something very epicurean about sharing ideas over a meal that I think will set and excellent tone for discussion.
AK: Sounds delicious. When is the projected kick off date for the series?
AP: Wednesday July 27th. Mark it in your calendars!
Thanks very much to Anne for her time and excellent interview, as well as her great idea for Theory For Dinner. Stay in touch to find out upcoming details about the series here on the blog and on our website .
Sometimes events seem to line up with a perfect synchronicity.
For example, it is very appropriate that on the eve of the Marshall McLuhan centenary the Art Gallery of Alberta is host to the exhibition Andy Warhol: Manufactured. Warhol, the infamous pop artist, was not only a contemporary of McLuhan, he was in many ways a similarly pivotal media critic of the 1960s and beyond. McLuhan was to Warhol an “honorary muse” and the Andy’s often repeated phrase, that “in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” is actually borrowed from our dear Marshall.
Both Warhol and McLuhan were avid in their study of advertising, incorporating snappy slogans and iconic images into their public portfolios and personas. This layer of flattened, easy to consume wit often belies a far more complex and analytic substructure at the heart of both figures’ work. Beneath the gloss, I am convinced that Warhol and McLuhan engaged in a complementary examination of the effects of media on identity.
McLuhan, as I’ve mentioned in previousposts, suggested that the ‘cool effect’ of TV involved its viewers in an unprecedented kind of collectivity. The medium’s “simultaneous sharing of experiences as in a village or tribe,” McLuhan claimed, “creates a village or tribal outlook and puts a premium on togetherness… and mediocrity as a means of achieving togetherness.”
Compare McLuhan’s statement with Warhol’s:
“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”
Could it be that in Andy Warhol we find the early iteration of McLuhan’s television tribalism?
What is it about TV that seems to flattens our identities, and perhaps engenders the embrace of mediocrity? What sort of critical lens might Warhol have to bring, not just communities of consumption, but to the media that structure them?
Herein lies ground that Andy Warhol is not often credited with breaking. In his life outside of pop art paintings, Warhol was also an experimental video and film maker. One piece in particular, Outer and Inner Space, is a surprisingly complex and nuanced examination of the differences between media and their identity effects. It should come as no surprise, then, that McLuhan’s theories are perfectly adaptable to thinking through this film.
Firstly, the mechanics of this piece require a bit of explanation. Two films are being projected simultaneous onto two screens (although the film reels have been digitized in this work’s incarnation in Andy Warhol: Manufactured). Each screen features two images of Edie Sedgwick: the actress who was Warhol’s temporary obsession in the 1960s. One set of Edies consists of pre-recorded video, played back on a grainy TV on the left of the two screens. The other Edies on the right were recorded on film in front of the television. The film Sedgwick, beautifully rendered in a smooth silver greyscale, seems quite at odds with her TV counterpart with her posterized, generic face.
The film Sedgwick and the TV Sedgwick seem to alternate between pointedly ignoring each other and engaging in a kind of dislocated conversation. The audio in the piece is incomprehensible; we hear only loud prelinguistic noise from Sedgwick’s lips. Here McLuhan’s point that the medium is the message may be true in a very literal way.
Our engagement with both portraits is quite distinct. The televised Sedgwick is reduced to flat anonymity- an easy bearer of the look the audience casts on her. The filmic Sedgwick, conversely, frequently exchanges gazes with the audience, who is made more acutely aware of her discomfort in proximity to her double, and her increasingly desperate search for cues from the off-screen Warhol. In McLuhan’s parlance, one Sedgwick is hot and one Sedgwick is cold. One is an individual, and one is a repository for a tribal identity. One is inner and one is outer. One is wine and one is coke. By butting the two together in the same, doubled frames, Warhol sets up the conditions in which to examine our different engagements with radically diametric media.
However, I’ve only scratched the surface on this piece. I’m hoping that we can have something of a collaborative (but not necessarily tribal) discussion in the comments section of this blog. Have you seen this piece? What were your thoughts? What kind of work do you think is being done here with identity, and how might that play into McLuhan’s theories of hot and cold media or Warhol’s fascination with celebrity consumption and collectivity? Alternatively, maybe neither approach appeals to you and you think about this piece in an entirely different frame. Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If, at the end of the day, there are still many lingering questions (and I do hope this is the case), University of Alberta professor Marco Adria will be giving a free lecture at the AGA on July 20th concerning the relation between McLuhan and Warhol. We can lay all the hard questions on him.
A video clip of Outer and Inner Space is available here.
Andy Warhol: Manufactured is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until August 21st.
This is clearly a heady and on-going debate that I about to wade into, and I don’t want to be swept away by the current, so I’ll begin by saying that I certainly won’t be concluding things definitively, or illuminating all the possible ways to answer this question. My task at hand is merely sketch out three dominant models of what makes art artful, and suggest one of many intriguing alternatives. Clearly, there are many ways to answer the provocative question: What is art?
Firstly, to some, art consists of harmony and sensory pleasure. The Humanist school of thought sets up camp here, arguing that art is the highest order of the “human condition” (an ever nebulous and lofty term). Surprisingly, this is also where scientific research takes us. It seems that evolution has cognitively wired our brains to aesthetically appreciate visual information favourable to survival in the Pleistocene era. Art, in this view, is the pleasurable expression of a visual ideal. Art intrigues the senses and explores a kind of human universality.
In-between Edmonton’s snow storms and perilous slush there sometimes emerges a brief window of perfect pedestrian weather. The sidewalks are shovelled and ice-free. The wind is warm so there’s no need to bury your face into a scarf or tuck your chin into your jacket collar. You are able to be aware of your surroundings in ways that the cold often denies us. If winter is the season of downcast glances and plodding steps, then spring is not only a time of re-awakening the senses, but also intensifying the gaze.
Whether watching passersby from a patio or taking in the multitude of a festival crowd, many of the phenomena of living in the city are profoundly scopic and situate us in a network of visual exchange. Vision is often thought of as a fleeting act, innocent enough, and certainly not harmful. And yet, there are those who claim that looking can be a vector of power and that gazes, moreover, are very rarely an equal exchange.
Barbra Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), 1981.
These kinds of thoughts have lately had me pondering issues of surveillance and the freedom of mobility in the city. A convincing argument can be made that public spaces are never free spaces because we are always disciplined by this network of implied vision. Someone, after all, could be watching. This is a relatively old idea, and one that found its way into some very influential theory. I’d like to run two such theoretical models by you, and also suggest how theory might find its way into practice.
So the torch has been passed again, leaving me with the distinct pleasure of being your Writer in Residence for the next six months. I feel in very good company indeed, following Carolyn’s excellent arts advocacy and Fish’s Gonzo journalism. I hope to build upon these contributions and also leave my own mark behind. But, before we get into any of that, it would be quite rude of me to continue without introducing myself properly.
Hi there. I’m Anne. I’d like, if I may, to have a conversation with you about art.
What does it mean to you?
What can it do?
Alternatively, how can we justify and defend what seems purely impractical and frivolous, particularly when it isn’t making you money, or nicely off-setting your couch?
I’m sure we’ve all heard that accusations before, whether levelled from a conservative uncle (or certain government administrations). Isn’t it always the case that art and its advocates are forced into the defensive before rhetorical blows are exchanged- always fighting against the ropes, as it were? Art often doesn’t even get the chance to take a stand as this discussion is more often than not precluded from ever beginning with a roll of the eye and a shrug of the shoulders. Pfft, Artists, man- They’re all… you know?
The thing is, perhaps we don’t know. What, precisely, do we call upon our artists to do? Art has alienated a lot of people over the past 150 years, to the extent that the average guy on the street avoids going to art galleries because the art inside has developed a reputation for being unfathomable rather than illuminating. Artists, producing rather opaque work and seemingly in dialogue only with each other, get decried as fools, and the entire enterprise of art making becomes a privileged space removed from the economy of the rest of society. To be an artist is to get a pass, to be able to get away with doing seemingly ridiculous things, but at the cost of never quite being a full citizen. Occupying the infantalized space of idiot savant the ‘ridiculous’ artist performing ‘ridiculous’ acts is admissible into society only in so far as we don’t have to take them seriously.
Suffice to say, I see this as a problem- a P.R. calamity, if you will.
This crisis, as I see it, arises from several loci. Our art education has not caught up with the conceptual turns of contemporary art. Just as we would struggle miserably through the novels of Borges and Falkner were it not for the guidance of our teachers, the gestures of Yves Klein, Zhang Huan, or Frank Stella can seem pretty incomprehensible if we don’t have the pillars of philosophy, visual literacy, and history to fall back on. With the exception of a few innovative art education programs such as that of the Art Gallery of Alberta, I see this education as everywhere lacking.
Secondly, a lot of artists can’t write and don’t speak up. It may seem like a particularly cruel double-standard to expect artists to be both visually and literarily coherent, but all the bad artist’s statements out there really do art a disservice. While I understand the desire to avoid over-determining a viewer’s experience with didactics, I also see a profound cowardice in shrugging one’s shoulders and absolving oneself of responsibility for the interpretation of art once it enters the public sphere. More often than not this is laziness or poor form on the part of the artist and it does everyone a disservice when a viewer walks away feeling completely frustrated or confused. Please, artists, write good statements and speak eloquently about your art, or else you perpetuate the continual infantilization of artists in the world today.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the disconnect between art and the public also emerges from our lack of a coherent answer to the questions of What is art? and What can it do? This is where I really want to focus my residency for, as impossible as it is to answer these monolithic questions, they still beg a response in the form of continual and fluid speculation. When we have some expectations for the art we see- and when we as viewers are as engaged in the search for answers as the artists producing the work before us- then not only will we see some amazing things, we’ll also have a larger, more inclusive community. And that, I believe, it to everyone’s benefit.
In the history of modern art, the driving task has been pushing the limits of what art could be. From gestural brush strokes to abstraction, from flung paint to bare canvas, and from ready-mades to the completely immaterial- in the process of interrogating the boundaries of art we have also thoroughly deconstructed the term, exposed its artifice, and opened up new parameters of sensory and conceptual experience. However, we’ve lost a lot of people along the way and our expectations for art are quite scattered. While I’m certainly not going to advocate a return to the academies, a socialist realist turn, or that everyone suddenly start painting like Norman Rockwell, I do think that it’s time to maybe, hesitantly, start reconstructing art and re-imbuing this term with some meaning and gravity.
So, the question before me in the next six months is this: What is the function of contemporary art, and just how does one go about engaging in it? This is, of course, something of a trick question, because there are no definitive answers and no end to possible solutions. But I thought, by way of introduction, I might describe a few ideas I’ve come up with so far.
In high school, art was my haven. It was a space I could go to to make things and engage in some light emotional catharsis. There’s not a teenager in the world who wouldn’t benefit from a few hours spent with some dark paint and some angry brush stokes. Art can be profoundly therapeutic.
I probably wouldn’t have done much with art if it weren’t for Joe Strummer. (He was the frontman of the English 80’s punk band The Clash, for those of you who may not fit neatly in my demographic- hell, I don’t even fit in it). I adored the audacity of his principled rejection of Thatcherist Britain and his commitment to using art to reshape his society without succumbing to the nihilism of his generation. His music became an anti-racist space that blended an increasingly global sound, documenting injustice and absurdity domestically and across the world. From him I took the inspiration that art can be a social critique and art can make its own culture.
When I went on to art school in college, art suddenly shifted from being an exploration of interiority to becoming a way of looking at the world. Spending hours staring at the figure was, in many ways, a devotional experience. I used to get pretty deep crushes on all the models because to draw them, to study them, was pretty close to loving them. Art can open your eyes. Art can be a way of knowing.
After graduating I found my way to Peru, to a small village on the boarder of the city of Cusco. I worked with a group of kids and a really cool 20 something working his way through art school. Together we made a mural of a giant world map. From this I learned that art can cross boarders and create communities. Art can be an exchange of ideas.
When I returned to school again I immersed myself in the history of art. Far more interesting than the tautologies of form or the linear narrative of modernity was, for me, the story of the historicity of objects. What did it mean to image the world in a particular kind of space? What conditions and ideals are disclosed in the representation of the body? How has art supported or condemned regimes of power? Through this study I got the sense that art can open up the conditions of history and divulge a tantalizing sense of what has been.
I later had the chance to make my way to New York to see the great works of modernism. I was fully prepared to dismiss what I saw as an insular turn away from the social responsibility of art, towards the edification of the few and the fiscal reward of those who traded in art as indiscriminately as the stock market. What I saw, instead, profoundly troubled my politics. The Jackson Pollock’s, Mark Rothko’s, and Donald Judd’s were incredibly, annoyingly beautiful. I spent many hours in front of these works, entirely at war with myself, until I grudgingly came to the conclusion that it’s quite alright for art to be purely aesthetic and emotionally affective. If you’re lucky, art just might move you to tears.
Lately, however, I’ve been approaching art from a different perspective. I’ve been reading a lot of theory and philosophy and I seem to be able to approach art through no other angle. Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler and Martin Heidegger have all left their mark on my way of thinking and have fundamentally altered how I see art, and what I look to it to accomplish. Much of my writing as of late has taken the form of reading art and theory as compliments to one another and, for better or for worse, that’s what’s likely to unfold in this residency. The way I see it, art (great art, at least) can take the shape of a poetic investigation of ideas and relations with the world. Art can be a form of philosophy with its own unique resonance.
This theory stuff, however, tends to be a rather gated community. Reading a lot of these thinkers is tough work and, like art itself, it tends to get dismissed as impractical and ridiculous in its own right. (Perhaps this is why I see art and theory as such good companions). At any rate, it proves to be an obstacle to no one’s benefit and I’ve taken it upon myself to work towards democratizing some of these thinkers, and bettering the access to ideas in Edmonton’s art community. So, in the coming months, I hope to further the discussion of art and ideas while providing a primer or two on some of the most influential philosophers on contemporary art practices today.
I also hope for this discussion to take the form of a dialogue rather than a lecture. I greatly encourage you to leave your feedback in the comment section of this blog, which I will be checking in on frequently and hopefully. I also recognize that for all the convenience of the web for getting ideas out there, it can be a horrible medium for getting ideas back. My ultimate goal in this residency is not the top down dissemination of knowledge, but rather a horizontal exchange of ideas across the arts community and beyond, into the no-artist’s-land of the general public. So, to that end, I’m working on developing something of a book club/discussion circle so that we can all come together face to face, perhaps over a meal, and challenge and inspire each other. If you have any suggestions or preferences as to what form this endeavour should take I would absolutely welcome your feedback. Likewise, if any of my above rantings suggest a question or comment, it would delight me if you could share. I would love to know your take on art’s PR problem, its function, and what your history with it has been.
My name is Anne, and I would love to have a conversation with you.
