Working full-time in the studio
Edward Winkleman wrote an interesting article a while back about artists not being taken seriously by what was then Deitch Projects if they had a "day job." The article and the ensuing comments from his post have been brewing in my mind for a bit. The reactions have all centered around the affordability of being a full-time artist when one's work has not found the necessarily market force to sustain a full-time practice and whether the necessity of food, health insurance, other needs of sustenance (and thus the need of a day job to keep food on the table) are necessarily reasons for an artist to not be taken seriously, i.e. gain validation.
For someone who has been on both sides of the coin, from working full-time and often 100 hour weeks, and thus only having an hour max to my studio practice on work days, to, more recently, having the luxury of spending 8 hours fully immersed in the studio, daily, and uninterrupted for weeks and months on end, I think that there is no question which is the better option for the studio practice. The question though is, can an artist be taken seriously despite not having the means and resources to have a full-time devotion to a studio practice?
I think the question is further compounded by issues raised by Winkleman's most recent article, "The Need for Affordable Failure." He writes,
It isn't that one necessarily needs to find the next media friendly gesture and cash out on it before the next headline appears. For myself, the luxury of spending 8 hours fully immersed in my studio practice daily uninterrupted is that the dialog is sustained with the painting, and this, finding the rhythm or the groove to the practice, allows for growth beyond mannerisms and histrionic demands on the practice of painting that necessarily requires patience and a big time commitment.
Back in the day of art guilds and journeymen, when artists worked in the studios of established masters as assistants until they could in turn become their own bosses after learning the craft of their practice, a painter was given the time to develop his/her craft by the system itself. Nowadays, when art training is set up as a series of diplomas that one acquires by paying exorbitant tuitions to art schools etc., affordability is a constraint, because money, debt, and all the baggage of getting the MFA, pushes one to want to find formulas and replicate the mechanics of "attention-grabbing in order to make art that looks like art that could sell or be shown in a gallery" [I quote Jan Verwoert, see video below]. And worst, being an assistant nowadays does not necessarily mean learning from the master, as often the assistant's skill set exceeds that of the master anyway (yes, I am thinking of Koons, Hirst etc.) but instead, the assistant's time and effort is exploited by the master without necessarily in the end opening up into possibilities outside of being exploited.
So how does one find affordable time and how can one be taken "seriously"? The question to this question comes to this, why does one need to be taken seriously, and why would one need that validation in the first place? The crux of the issue is this: it was an assistant to Jeffrey Deitch who parroted the whole criteria in the first place. To be more clear, the question should be, does one need to be taken seriously by this particular assistant to Mr. Deitch? Does one need to be taken seriously by anybody at all?
Of course, to be taken seriously by a gallery assistant implies being possibly compensated for one's efforts, for one's practice, to gain recognition. This endless need of finding a material benefit from art, from the making of art, from the selling of art, is, in my eyes, the fitful spasm of our late capitalist enterprise, trying to squeeze the last drop of the unaccountable and wonderful uselessness of art (its désoeuvrement), of what is beautiful, into commodity.
I enjoyed very much spending time this morning listening to the German art critic Jan Verwoert lecture on "adjacency and laterality" as a way to leave behind the old and unsustainable paradigm of the avant-garde. He seems to be saying that one can always just do a crab walk and lateralize oneself outside of the whole enterprise, so as to live and to work free of the imperatives of conclusions and ends:
I think ultimately the implication is this: the need of approval in the guise of commercial or critical success, is ultimately a disguised form of an infantile imperative that one needs to learn to dissociate from one's identity as an artist, as gratifying and positive as it may be. There are no guarantees in life, so why should one require anyone in particular, to agree with one's practice at all? The stakes may be high, or they may be nothing at all, it all depends on one's perspective.
To end this rather sombre reflection in a more tongue-in-cheek way, I will quote the ever effervescent Simon Doonan whose rants on Slate about culture are often completely out of touch and out of context, as haute couture fashion should be, but then again:
"Studio," 2003, oil on canvas, 72 x 54"
I think the question is further compounded by issues raised by Winkleman's most recent article, "The Need for Affordable Failure." He writes,
"Our best minds can't be pressured into increasingly playing it safe, because the stakes are so high. Not if we expect them to really make a difference. Failure is simply part of the process."Sometimes, one wonders whether one can ever dissociate money from time. In the exchange that exists in our current economies, it seems that money does buy time. One can afford time with difficulty in the modern world where lives and time are spent making money in order to pay for the necessities of "living." In my mind, "affording failure" as such is allowing oneself to have the luxury of the time to fail, to restart, to rework ideas.
It isn't that one necessarily needs to find the next media friendly gesture and cash out on it before the next headline appears. For myself, the luxury of spending 8 hours fully immersed in my studio practice daily uninterrupted is that the dialog is sustained with the painting, and this, finding the rhythm or the groove to the practice, allows for growth beyond mannerisms and histrionic demands on the practice of painting that necessarily requires patience and a big time commitment.
Back in the day of art guilds and journeymen, when artists worked in the studios of established masters as assistants until they could in turn become their own bosses after learning the craft of their practice, a painter was given the time to develop his/her craft by the system itself. Nowadays, when art training is set up as a series of diplomas that one acquires by paying exorbitant tuitions to art schools etc., affordability is a constraint, because money, debt, and all the baggage of getting the MFA, pushes one to want to find formulas and replicate the mechanics of "attention-grabbing in order to make art that looks like art that could sell or be shown in a gallery" [I quote Jan Verwoert, see video below]. And worst, being an assistant nowadays does not necessarily mean learning from the master, as often the assistant's skill set exceeds that of the master anyway (yes, I am thinking of Koons, Hirst etc.) but instead, the assistant's time and effort is exploited by the master without necessarily in the end opening up into possibilities outside of being exploited.
So how does one find affordable time and how can one be taken "seriously"? The question to this question comes to this, why does one need to be taken seriously, and why would one need that validation in the first place? The crux of the issue is this: it was an assistant to Jeffrey Deitch who parroted the whole criteria in the first place. To be more clear, the question should be, does one need to be taken seriously by this particular assistant to Mr. Deitch? Does one need to be taken seriously by anybody at all?
Of course, to be taken seriously by a gallery assistant implies being possibly compensated for one's efforts, for one's practice, to gain recognition. This endless need of finding a material benefit from art, from the making of art, from the selling of art, is, in my eyes, the fitful spasm of our late capitalist enterprise, trying to squeeze the last drop of the unaccountable and wonderful uselessness of art (its désoeuvrement), of what is beautiful, into commodity.
I enjoyed very much spending time this morning listening to the German art critic Jan Verwoert lecture on "adjacency and laterality" as a way to leave behind the old and unsustainable paradigm of the avant-garde. He seems to be saying that one can always just do a crab walk and lateralize oneself outside of the whole enterprise, so as to live and to work free of the imperatives of conclusions and ends:
To end this rather sombre reflection in a more tongue-in-cheek way, I will quote the ever effervescent Simon Doonan whose rants on Slate about culture are often completely out of touch and out of context, as haute couture fashion should be, but then again:
Today’s successful artists, on the other hand, seem obsessed with money. How, you may ask, does this jive with the artist’s bohemian esprit? In the age of Occupy, when the 1 percent are so reviled, how do groovy, liberal, and, one assumes, democratic dealers and artists rationalize their politician-like reliance upon, and coziness with, the super-wealthy?
Ultimately, the question is not about whether one is taken seriously by authority figures, nor whether one's work is validated by sales in the art market. The question is, "do I as an artist believe enough in my work to be capable of being completely ignored by every one else?"
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