Archive for November 2004

The following is a response to Jennifer McMackon’s question, “What do you mean when you say ‘…in today’s world, artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant…’ ? What makes art significant? What hampers the significance of art? And also why is it (insignificance) a luxury – what makes insignificance so expensive we can’t afford it?” Those questions were to earlier comments I left on the Zeke’s Gallery website regarding the posting Is the Horse Dead Yet? – Timothy

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Luxury, in the sense that I meant it, is that which is not required, but is something that comes about when the basics are in place. I was reading Hume last night on how luxury is a dependable motivator – at least it was so from his 18th Century Scottish perspective. But culture – our work as artists – has always been a bit of a luxury. Once you got the food and shelter thing down, you can afford to use your time to think and create pretty things to trade later.

I realize that the present grant system the protests are trying to maintain is partially there so rent and food can be taken care of allowing the acquisition of the luxury of time. Here, ‘luxury of time’ can be defined as “useful through emptiness” – free time, empty of needing to be used otherwise (for survival), allowing it to be used to think and create.

Art has for most of its history had a certain practical significance but its uselessness (empty of meaning which would define it as necessary for survival) has made it luxurious. The wealthy collector spending a few million for an object or wall hanging today when the money (which should be understood as nothing more than a quantification of the planet’s material resources) could have been put to better use, signals status, and by definition makes the object a luxury.

The statement in question was in part my way of agreeing with Chris [Hand, of Zeke’s Gallery]’s point that collectors are willing to spend big bucks for American works – as Nicolas Bourriaud (a fave of mine) has said nicely – ‘they’re buying a signature’ and not much else – while Canadian artists continue to be overlooked by both the international and internal markets. Of course, as AA Bronson has pointed out above [in previous comments to the post this is a reponse to], there are exceptions which can make the thought of being ignored seem ridiculous. However, I don’t think it is a far-fetched thing to say. The Ken Danby show which opened earlier this month got coverage on the CTV 11.30 news and the show itself on CBC evening news a few days later. (Bronson’s show last year at the Power Plant got neither). And while Danby may seem to be an example of interest in a contemporary Canadian artist by the internal market, the point I’m trying to make is of all the openings held week after week, month after month – how often to do you see television news cameras, except at those openings by those few who have managed through luck and circumstance, to rise to the top of the hierarchy, those whose names are known, so that collectors would want to buy their signature for top dollar?

Please spare me counter-arguments based on the idea that television and the media in general shouldn’t mater. They do matter, and our absence from being represented on it means something. [2004.11.28 7.05pm – Of course, there’s always Zed, but I think the point still stands – Tim].

In saying that artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant, the idea is that the Canadian art scene, as I know it, doesn’t seem to care about success, as it’s traditionally understood. Instead it is actively pursuing the development of a theory of failure, which seems to be both misguided and self-destructive by design. Artists are choosing to be insignificant because they have the luxury of doing so. They have the luxury of doing so because of their perceived dependency on the granting agencies, and they are full of socialist ideologies preventing them from wanting to participate within the capitalist system.

I used to be as decidedly ideological about socialism as the rest, but we have to face the fact the capitalism is here for a long haul. There’s simply too much momentum behind it that without a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions the system won’t change soon. At best, we can use the system to accomplish socialist objectives, but we can’t replace it. The Canadian system of socialized programs and free market capitalism works, but it isn’t perfect, as recent obsessions over health care show. The Council’s effort to embrace the market as the real arbiter of value and to encourage artists to put more consideration into their career by concentrating on shows doesn’t strike me as such a bad idea. It seems like it’s worth a try.

We need to ask, why is capitalism, a system whose faults are glaringly obvious to those who can think, so popular? I’ve just said that the market is the arbiter of value, and it is. Now, I’m not a neo-con by any means, I don’t believe in talk of invisible forces, but before artschool I studied anthropology, so I understand the market as the space by which we trade our objects, our goods. Nicholas Bourriaud is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; a centre modeled on the idea of the market in Marrakech. The idea being that you have lots of exhibitions where you chose to show interest in, and interact with artists as you would a merchant – communicating in a way so that you are ‘sold’ on the work, or you tell them their price is too high and move on to something else. In art, in luxury, in anything, it’s only worth something if somebody wants it. Hume’s line of thinking was that because people usually want luxurious items, they will work to obtain them. I mean, we’re living in North America because four centuries ago, Europe had an unhealthy obsession with gold, which I consider worthless because I have no particular desire to own any.

The debate over artist-run centres and funding changes are focusing on the idea that artists and artist-run centres are engaged in research and publication, as if they were scientific – AA’s example above. I guess this means they are supposed to be creating the language of a future market – creating the interest so that people will want to own either this work, or work like it, in the future. AA’s definition of success above is that his work is the collections of various big-name institutions. The market of the international institutions bought the work. And that was only made possible through the combined efforts of many people, critics and artist-run centres who were operating in a different time. I think it’s fair to say that if AA were 25 today, he wouldn’t get anywhere.

People don’t want our shit, they want Manzoni’s, because he had critics who were ready to embrace the possibility his ideas represented and communicated that, so that he made it into art history and we take his work seriously. Critics in the traditional media rarely review artist-run centres. When they do, they are usually uncritical, but instead are full of praise because they don’t want hurt any feelings. Friends review friends. We always want to be able to look someone in the eye so we don’t tell them when they suck. In science – peer reviewed journals keep the crap out. They aren’t afraid to tell others when they suck. Scientists develop enough self-critical awareness to know when to avoid wasting someone’s time, which I consider the worst thing you can do as an artist. Of course, that itself is a can of worms – I’d like to think that it’s the critics job to help us know when our time is being wasted or not, and while highly subjective, criticism is based on the idea that subjective response is predictable. If you want to adopt the idea that artist-run centres are presentations of zeitgeist and trend research, then you have to be happy when someone dismisses the work.

As Churchill said about democracy, capitalism may seem to be the worst system except for the others that have been tried. As intelligent citizens, we must accept the capitalist system and work within it to make it work for us. We must be engaged with our society, or society will screw us over, as it is doing. We’re all supposed to be upset about the CC changes -we’re having these debates -but it has merited only a brief mention on the CBC website. Again, another example of traditional media’s obsolescence. But also an example of how the editors of the nation’s news don’t consider what we’re doing newsworthy. We are insignificant. We will continue to be insignificant – the fantasy that we might be able to live off our work as artists elsewhere, (or further up the ladder, by those who began climbing in different times), will continue to be a fantasy as long as we continue to alienate ourselves.

Believing the status quo is fine is a sign of conservatism. I want to be recognized by this society as valuable for what I am as a cultural worker, and not be forced into the humiliating economic position that three-grand grants are supposed to be worth pursuing. How about 50 grand a year grants? How about treating artists like doctors, and giving them a salary so they aren’t forced into the nonsense of academia, if they are so valuable to society, and if socialism is really worth pursuing in this case? What clerk in any corporation is asked to work for free and support themselves with a menial, or infrequent part-time job on the side? I know, there are interns, but interns usually have some money behind them allowing them to do that, with the expectation they will be fully employed one day. And the money supporting interns is usually inherited, is from a livable grant, or is a student loan which they’re supposed to pay off later. A system of perpetual internship, as the art world seems to be, is broken and needs fixing.

The expectation that as cultural workers-and-thinkers we have to work a paying job as well as pursue our careers as cultural workers-and-thinkers, and go through the grant-lottery so that we might be able to take some ‘time-off’ is unfair, and is only perpetuated by the myth of the starving artist and the fact that artists through behavior and attitude have alienated themselves from public sympathy, so what’s news for ‘us’ is not ‘for them’. Do you really want to live the rest of your life this way?

So, I’m torn between wanting to have money in the bank because a collector is willing to give me some in return for something I made, or because s/he was taxed so that the government can give it to an agency, so that my peers (who I can’t criticize lest they develop a negative bias) can in turn deem me worthy. And even if they do deem me worthy, the funds being limited may mean that the process of filling out forms was pointless. The Right hate taxes because they would prefer the first model – the collector choosing to support me – is better than the second, where the government gives ‘their’ money to things which they don’t agree with. Obviously we need a better understanding of taxes, but this current animosity, and the reasons the CC has limited funds, is partially because artists have adopted a position where they believe being offensive is a measure of success.

Artists may have the right to offend the Right Wing but we need more sincere effort of explanation and less intellectual posturing which assumes attitudes of superiority. Lets also consider the following: how many of us got into the arts because it was cool – going along with that concept’s fifty year history of pissing off the establishment? How many of us, in turn, got into the arts because we wanted to bring beauty to the lives of ourselves and others? Even within the art world, it seems, people are motivated by selfishness (the cool right) and by compassion (the beautiful left).

Ultimately, I think, I’d like to see artists embrace the 21st Century rather than continue to romanticize the late 20th. It is not fair to think that the Canada Council’s programs, nor our whole artworld infrastructure, as sustainable as anything else within the current system manifested by its bureaucracies. By all accounts, today’s world system is not sustainable. We can’t count on our future being the same as it has been. The world ten years from now will be in the process of cleaning up the mess of the past 40 including the Republican disaster of our present.

Within any bureaucracy, change only comes in response to problems. The happy-go lucky vagueness of a system gets increasingly tied down until policy is so rigid it becomes inhuman. That describes a process where the present emerges out of shortsighted decisions, rather than envisioning a future and making decisions based on its goal. I assume that the current petition is based on the idea that the CC is being shortsighted, which is a lot to assume since the Council engaged in a process of consultation, and tried to engage the Canadian art community. But it is shortsighted of artists to assume things are fine as they are.

Envisioning a future is a process that on the one hand can give our country a patriated constitution, Bill of Rights, and Universal Health Care, but it can also create fascism. The fascist history of the last century seems to have created a fear that ‘vision’ is the same as ‘ideology’, and prompts talk, as John Ralston Saul points out, of ‘inevitability’. The current fashion of equating vision with ideology has encouraged our infamous shortsightedness, as we’re afraid to look past the horizon, and continue with band-aid solutions to larger systemic problems. Since artists are the ones this society trains and educates to envision, we should at least be trying to fulfill that role instead of poeticizing failure and the abject, considering offense a success, and only mobilizing when the Canada Council wants to modify its bureaucracy. The envisioning I see in contemporary art seems to be more or less based on “look at me” than inspiring people that life is worth living and that a better future is worth working for. The best art wakes people up to what is possible, not the brilliance of your ego.

So, what I meant by that statement is this: artists are ignorable because they are ignoring society. Ignoring society is a luxurious position. It’s what the whole idea of the ivory tower is about. But in order to demand more respect for ourselves, we need to be respectful to begin with. By being insignificant, the government can screw us over with ‘chump change’. By becoming significant, collectors will want to buy our work, and we can have better lives. We can become significant by producing work that people actually like, and not by asking for their continual indulgence. Collectors will be more responsive to work people like, because as eBay has shown, people will buy any crap touched by celebrity. Take Canadian literature – anybody ever heard of a girl named Atwood? It’s not like she sold out; my copy of The Handmaid’s Tale has study questions appended to it.

If we don’t want to be dependent on collectors, we need the government to take us more seriously. But that won’t happen unless the public in general takes us more seriously. And that won’t happen until we stop being assholes be treating everyone who disagrees with us as simply conservative, instead of trying to be convincing. The real conservatives are the ones who won’t let themselves be convinced, who prefer ‘golden age’ scenarios to the reality of an ever changing world.