I’ve always had a complicated relationship with art. More specifically, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with knowing if what I make is art or not.
I’ve been working on a bit of a personal artist/creative CV and I’m really struck how almost everything I’ve done that I’ve been proud of has been as part of a group or collective. Part of this I’m sure is ADHD/Autism brain that is equal parts people pleaser and also struggling to finish tasks alone, a very irritating combination. But I think on some fundamental level I’ve just never felt like the things I can make on my own are as interesting, valuable or fun as that which I can do in collaboration with others. To me I think the point is the nice time had when making the thing, not the thing in itself, the feeling of a change in yourself and the people around you, the power of relating, of imagining a different world.
Until recently I’d never thought of this kind of collective work as a type of art at all. If I have to put a moment to it, it was probably meeting Jeanne van Heeswijk on a call about our PlaceCal project that made me realise maybe I’d been doing a kind of art practice most of my life without thinking of it as such. I’d thought of it as a type of community organising I suppose, with my role in it being quite functional — usually doing some combination of live sound, setting up websites, and more recently supporting other people with strategic and statutory insight from a lifetime doing this. Sure, there was a lot of creativity in all those things, but it never felt like it added up to me as an individual having what an artist would call a ‘practice’. But after 15 years being involved in and around dozens of groups like Queer Mutiny North, Resistance Lab, Trans Safety Network and The Border House, I’m realising I really do have a creative practice here, a vision for a world I want to live in, one that I’ve been pretty instrumental in making happen, and in fact that creative vision has really been my driving force for a really really long time.
I think most of all I’ve just simply never felt encouraged to cultivate a personal arts practice. It’s never seemed like something for me. I’ve felt actively dissuaded from it in past relationships and through interactions with queer art spaces even as I was actually exhibiting work in a kind of ‘yes we let you display as its an open call community event but we both know you’re not a real artist-y artist’ kind of way. It always felt to me like you had to be a certain kind of person, have a certain kind of cool mystique, probably with some tattoos or wear all black, have probably gone to art school, a certain kind of Instagram-friendly personal brand, probably a little bit of a dickhead about your work lets be honest and generally in queer arts spaces an identity that you wear as a badge displayed front and centre in your work. I felt like I was none of these things, and no-one helped me feel otherwise. Ironically I have prob always been a bunch of them (especially the dickhead one), but just… never had any confidence or encouragement to think about myself in that way.
Anyway, cut to last week and I’m reading my friend Stefans’ PhD (as you do). It’s about Deleuze and architecture and expressionism, and there’s a section that goes into great detail about how intellectual property (IP) works. To be meaningfully interacted with in a courtroom, IP has this specific need to have a single author that has an identifiable moment of inspiration or creativity that creates a clearly bounded and outlined entity, the spark of genius, that can then be patented, copyrighted or trademarked depending on what kind of thing it is. Essentially there must be a moment of divine inspiration — a pinpointing of the space a ‘new’ idea is created in order that attribution can be given to a single person, which is a thing that can then be owned, rented and sold in its own right.
The thing is I feel like culture works the same way, translated to a different context. In general in the world things like painting, knitting, writing, food, sculpture, video games and so on are things people make and do all the time everywhere with little care about being a Painter, Textile artist, Novelist, Chef, Sculptor, or Video Game Director.
Stefan’s PhD connects a formalism in literature with one in architecture (emphasis added):
[…] the construction of a formalism in linguistics first required a distinction to be made between literature and non‐literature, thus drawing the boundary of the formal discipline in which to construct a formalism of literary criticism. The literary formalist method was characterised ‘by the attempt to create an independent science of literature which studies specifically literary material’ but it was immediately noted that ‘the object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness’ (Eichenbaum 1926). (p186)
Eisenman appears to begin his formalist project for architecture by following the literary formalists: He distinguishes building from architecture in the same way that they distinguished literal language from literature. He argues that architecture may be discerned from ‘building’ by the clarity and power of the intention of the architect and how these intentions are communicated – how it manages to ‘project and sustain’ the architect’s communicative intentions. (p185)
So anyone with the skills can do some DIY or make a house for that matter, but there’s a formal, grounded and real sense in which the architect doesn’t ‘just make buildings’, but rather exists in the world in a habitus of architects and having their work valued in relation to the field of architecture, rather than the occupants or wider society. It’s the same for people who wish be great writers and to have the attribute ‘literariness’ attributed to them: poets and budding writers who want to make it in any city’s writing scene and be recognised as a Writer. It’s the difference between just getting on with making a thing, and wanting to be known for making the thing, for any number of reasons (such as earning a living, I’m not knocking it!).
For me it’s always been the same with being an Artist. I like the creating and the doing and the doing it with other people. I’m not so keen on the bit where things are captured and presented shorn of context as ‘the art’. And ‘community art’ feels like it’s always been presented to me a lesser category, a relegation bracket for people who can’t do real art. Doing things with others has been a way to distract myself from the fact that I have a profound discomfort with doing a thing on my own as when I do that it has to be lumped in with all the other things in a similar category and be judged on those lines. It immediately shifts me from being someone doing fun things with my friends to being a ‘creative’ (🤢), or worse, a ‘content creator’ (🤮). And really, I just want to vibe. Except lets be honest I that’s prob not entirely true, I also want to be that nice kind of scene famous where people like me and respect my views and I can have nice invites to do things in lots of cool places and have my name on a couple posters with other people I like and earn a decent income doing it. And I want to have ideas and people just do them and never get flamed or criticised or told I’m bad. Only good fame no bad fame. But without seeming like I’m looking for it. You know?
What does this have to do with the theme of non-representational technology, I hear you ask?
Well, it strikes me that an Artist is a representative technology. The etymology of ‘technology’ comes from Greek and is something like ‘systemic treatment of an art or craft’. So an Artist is one kind of systemiser of Art, if you want to think of it that way. There’s a very childhood definition of art that is something like ‘art is anything people believe is art’, but I take this one step further to say ‘art is what Artists create’. It requires a moment of attribution in the same way intellectual property does — an individual or group staking a claim for the ages that any given work (in the sense of both ‘a work’ and ‘the work’) is worthy of being recognised as big-A Art.
It’s a bit like starting a new RPG with a fixed class system. Are you a mage, cleric, bard, warrior, or ranger? Sure rangers can learn a few low level healing spells but you’d never call them a Healer. Maybe all this is massively obvious to people who work more in the creative industries than me (I have made most of my income ostensibly as a web developer), but it wasn’t to me and I wish someone had told me at some point!
Anyway. This is probably a very big-I Intellectual place to start but this is why I’ve decided to make more big-A Art. I’m realising that I have a lot to say and what I bounced off was more this sense that being an Artist wasn’t for me, and maybe it’s not! But I’m looking forward to finding out with a bit of a clearer understanding why I bounced off this kind of individual work.