IT'S NOT JUST YOU HERE, FEELING THIS WAY, DOING THAT THING, DREAMING THAT DREAM
ESSAY FOR pUBLICDISPLAY.ART ISSUE 2, SEATTLE, MARCH-june 2022
The future of the arts is on my mind. I’ve been thinking about the way our conversations vacillate between what’s good and what’s bad for art and artists, who’s looking and who’s not looking at art, which artists and spaces have departed or remained. These issues are inevitably about survival. I think about them on a very personal level, as my role shifts from writer to curator to gallerist to writer again. But I don’t believe reducing our complexities to mere survival is right; I think that’s exploitative. Surviving isn’t thriving. I say this even as I worry about how and if and whether any of us endure.
We all work so hard. Across the US, we’re groaning under the weight of increased expectations and responsibilities, often without additional pay. The cost of living outpaces our wages, and we end up wondering what we are working so hard for and if we’ll ever have a chance to live the life our work presumably supports. Over the years, I’ve spilled a lot of ink examining and discussing situations like these through the analysis of arts ecosystems, sustaining patronage, and community building. At some point during the last few years, these analytical tools broke. Now, I’m more inclined to reclaim joy and pleasure in discussing futures I would rather see, beyond labor and capitalism. I crave manifestos with expansive imagination that acknowledge real-world hardships while transforming them into a promise of richer, more fulfilling ecosystems.
A few weeks ago, I crossed the southern end of the Duwamish River near Tukwila after the high waters from rains and flooding receded. Its muddy banks revealed sharp new erosion, slides, cave-ins, and cavities. It was beautiful, even though it was devastating. It made me think about the way bodies of water collaborate with the land to shape the earth—an overflowing river refuses containment and destroys its shores, building new biodiverse worlds in its wake, founded on richer soil. Seattle is a tidal place. Like our waterways, there’s an ebb and flow to most things here. Perhaps there’s something to cherish in the emptiness left by receding floods. The underlying shapes become clearer. There’s an expansiveness in this new landscape—space to breathe and take advantage of its pause. What if we stepped into that place where the churning water has stirred up the sand and mud? I want to hold this reflection throughout the following words as a place where something interesting could happen in a discussion about art, community, and new terrain.
Better futures and richer soil brought to mind the notion of value as a verb rather than a price defined in currency. Value can mean to cherish and uphold, to declare importance and richness in relation to well-being. Value of this sort requires passion, engagement, and commitment. The root of the word ‘value’ comes from a word meaning strength. Another term derived from this root is valence, which describes the ability of atoms to form strong bonds with other atoms. Covalence, recalling the power of rivers, allows water molecules to stay connected and fluid. They are joined but remain nimble and flexible. Perhaps there’s wisdom in this wordplay we can use to ask more direct questions: What value do the arts have to us now, amidst great change? How do we move forward in covalence as a community?
In the wake of our broadly shared, pandemic-accelerated sense of unease with late-stage capitalism, these questions matter. There’s a collective urge to engage again with creative people, creative works, art, and artistry. We are ready to step forward into a life with more beauty and more meaning. Yet many of us wonder how to take those steps and re-engage a new life surrounded by a creative community. There’s a sense of that pause, again. I’m feeling it, too. I know what I want, and what I want to say yes to: a future filled with art and artists, and a life immersed in creativity. But I’ve also felt listless, uncertain about what my re-emergence will look like and who or how I will be in my new shape. I’m unable to return to my untenable pre-2021 pace of attendance, workload, and production. Like countless others, I’m observing the need to choose my steps forward more carefully and deliberately.
I recently had a conversation with Diné artist and activist Demian DinéYazhi’, a fierce advocate for artist liberation whose work addresses the need to cease imagining apocalypse and instead imagine thriving futures. We reflected on the inequities of a demanding system in which we must juggle multiple jobs and leap through impossible hoops to support our creative production. Demian and I mused on how beneficial it could be if the money were more fairly distributed to artists and communities beyond institutional systems of grants and fundraising, so the entire ecosystem could flourish. Institutional grant processes impose burdens, demand unpaid labor, and put artists in competition with each other, leaving many behind. Secondary labor takes us away from the work of creating and becomes a grind devoid of pleasure. We’re prohibited from finding a work/life balance by the details of earning a living. When we’re constantly asked to make and do more, not-making becomes resistance to these demands. Essential to this discussion of labor is not just fair compensation, but the concept of our collective identity within it. Who are we when we’re not working, making things, or seeing things? What happens when we make things and no one sees them? If we had the ability to just be, who would we be?
All my life, I believed a creative work isn’t complete until the moment someone sees, hears, reads, smells, tastes, or feels it. As a writer, I’m amused by the thought of my work’s simultaneous state of existence and non-existence until that point. In retrospect, I don’t think this is entirely fair; it implies the sole purpose of any creative thing is to be consumed. But consumption doesn’t mean to feel, experience, or see. There is more to the relationship between the maker and the receiver. What about pleasure? We tend to assume pleasure on the part of the viewer or audience, and labor on the part of the creator or maker. While creative work is undeniably hard, play is crucial to creation. There’s pleasure in making things. To enjoy a creative person’s work is to share their pleasure, to experience it, and feel it vicariously. What makes good art, and whole people, are our multitudes. We flourish best when we let loose the confluences, cataracts, and tributaries feeding our veritable rivers of the self.
We are trying to tease something out of the interconnectivity between the individual who makes things and the collective who enjoys, supports, and enables such things. Throughout history, the objects we make in celebration and ceremony–that is, art–have been experiences shared in the present and across generations. Art’s making and enjoyment is never an individual act or experience. It is communal. The terrain upon which art occurs is a commons not owned by any person, institution, or entity but co-created and co-narrated by us all. Historically, the vivid imagination of artists has built the most exciting and unconventional places for these communal experiences. Artists know how to envision and activate space formally and in renegade ways. We’ve seen art shows in a warehouse, repurposed building, apartment, or houses–but what happens when a shelf, a mailbox, the trunk of a car, a garage, a fence, or a stairwell becomes an exhibition space? There are also multitudes of digital projects that challenge the notion of literal exhibition space occurring across virtual galleries and websites, servers, social media platforms, and even video games. Unobliged to conform to the convention of a white cube, and often in direct defiance of it, artists have always sought to build a commons in which co-collaboration, mutual aid, and celebration can take place, where we come together to build and nurture art communities. Artists enable covalence. And so can we.
An essay by Ignacio Valero, published in Art Practical in 2014, offers me endless poetic inspiration. EcoDomics and Cultural History: Valuing Art Labor Under Neoliberalism reads like a manifesto. In it, Valero addresses value and contradiction in the way we perceive or engage with the arts, and their proximity to or exile from power. Valero’s final proposal is that it’s possible to retake what’s been co-opted by exploitative systems, reclaiming and reshaping it in community and care as a social movement, as resistance, in ways that honor the labor and the passion of artists. He describes a place where we co-produce, where we relearn what it means to live within what we produce. So here’s my inspired understanding of how what he says translates to what things could be in the arts if we want to make it be:
We can’t just propose a space for art and artists to live and to stay and for those who enjoy them to play; we must relearn how to live in the confluence, we must relearn what it means to exist in an artistic community with solidarity, care, collaboration, and mutual aid. Each of us is a hub of social groups and activity, the center of a multi-circle Venn diagram of people around us whom we are influenced by and whom we influence in turn. Though we come together through this beautiful arts ecosystem, we come from different places, backgrounds, practices, and experiences. That is the virtue of cultural and artistic diversity, and it should be honored and upheld. This is the rich soil upon which new growth can take hold, thrive, and stay. We are collectively the river, the shores, the soil, and that which grows. This is how our confluences come together—we are all already in communion. Go forth and share art. Make art. Enjoy art. Talk about art. Integrate art into every aspect of daily life and living. Share everything you like with all your friends, including where to go and what to see—in fact, share this publication with them! Our actions don’t need to be momentous, only meaningful to us. Let us establish, create, and tend to what we value: art and artists here and now, on the shores of the river’s errant path.
We all work so hard. Across the US, we’re groaning under the weight of increased expectations and responsibilities, often without additional pay. The cost of living outpaces our wages, and we end up wondering what we are working so hard for and if we’ll ever have a chance to live the life our work presumably supports. Over the years, I’ve spilled a lot of ink examining and discussing situations like these through the analysis of arts ecosystems, sustaining patronage, and community building. At some point during the last few years, these analytical tools broke. Now, I’m more inclined to reclaim joy and pleasure in discussing futures I would rather see, beyond labor and capitalism. I crave manifestos with expansive imagination that acknowledge real-world hardships while transforming them into a promise of richer, more fulfilling ecosystems.
A few weeks ago, I crossed the southern end of the Duwamish River near Tukwila after the high waters from rains and flooding receded. Its muddy banks revealed sharp new erosion, slides, cave-ins, and cavities. It was beautiful, even though it was devastating. It made me think about the way bodies of water collaborate with the land to shape the earth—an overflowing river refuses containment and destroys its shores, building new biodiverse worlds in its wake, founded on richer soil. Seattle is a tidal place. Like our waterways, there’s an ebb and flow to most things here. Perhaps there’s something to cherish in the emptiness left by receding floods. The underlying shapes become clearer. There’s an expansiveness in this new landscape—space to breathe and take advantage of its pause. What if we stepped into that place where the churning water has stirred up the sand and mud? I want to hold this reflection throughout the following words as a place where something interesting could happen in a discussion about art, community, and new terrain.
Better futures and richer soil brought to mind the notion of value as a verb rather than a price defined in currency. Value can mean to cherish and uphold, to declare importance and richness in relation to well-being. Value of this sort requires passion, engagement, and commitment. The root of the word ‘value’ comes from a word meaning strength. Another term derived from this root is valence, which describes the ability of atoms to form strong bonds with other atoms. Covalence, recalling the power of rivers, allows water molecules to stay connected and fluid. They are joined but remain nimble and flexible. Perhaps there’s wisdom in this wordplay we can use to ask more direct questions: What value do the arts have to us now, amidst great change? How do we move forward in covalence as a community?
In the wake of our broadly shared, pandemic-accelerated sense of unease with late-stage capitalism, these questions matter. There’s a collective urge to engage again with creative people, creative works, art, and artistry. We are ready to step forward into a life with more beauty and more meaning. Yet many of us wonder how to take those steps and re-engage a new life surrounded by a creative community. There’s a sense of that pause, again. I’m feeling it, too. I know what I want, and what I want to say yes to: a future filled with art and artists, and a life immersed in creativity. But I’ve also felt listless, uncertain about what my re-emergence will look like and who or how I will be in my new shape. I’m unable to return to my untenable pre-2021 pace of attendance, workload, and production. Like countless others, I’m observing the need to choose my steps forward more carefully and deliberately.
I recently had a conversation with Diné artist and activist Demian DinéYazhi’, a fierce advocate for artist liberation whose work addresses the need to cease imagining apocalypse and instead imagine thriving futures. We reflected on the inequities of a demanding system in which we must juggle multiple jobs and leap through impossible hoops to support our creative production. Demian and I mused on how beneficial it could be if the money were more fairly distributed to artists and communities beyond institutional systems of grants and fundraising, so the entire ecosystem could flourish. Institutional grant processes impose burdens, demand unpaid labor, and put artists in competition with each other, leaving many behind. Secondary labor takes us away from the work of creating and becomes a grind devoid of pleasure. We’re prohibited from finding a work/life balance by the details of earning a living. When we’re constantly asked to make and do more, not-making becomes resistance to these demands. Essential to this discussion of labor is not just fair compensation, but the concept of our collective identity within it. Who are we when we’re not working, making things, or seeing things? What happens when we make things and no one sees them? If we had the ability to just be, who would we be?
All my life, I believed a creative work isn’t complete until the moment someone sees, hears, reads, smells, tastes, or feels it. As a writer, I’m amused by the thought of my work’s simultaneous state of existence and non-existence until that point. In retrospect, I don’t think this is entirely fair; it implies the sole purpose of any creative thing is to be consumed. But consumption doesn’t mean to feel, experience, or see. There is more to the relationship between the maker and the receiver. What about pleasure? We tend to assume pleasure on the part of the viewer or audience, and labor on the part of the creator or maker. While creative work is undeniably hard, play is crucial to creation. There’s pleasure in making things. To enjoy a creative person’s work is to share their pleasure, to experience it, and feel it vicariously. What makes good art, and whole people, are our multitudes. We flourish best when we let loose the confluences, cataracts, and tributaries feeding our veritable rivers of the self.
We are trying to tease something out of the interconnectivity between the individual who makes things and the collective who enjoys, supports, and enables such things. Throughout history, the objects we make in celebration and ceremony–that is, art–have been experiences shared in the present and across generations. Art’s making and enjoyment is never an individual act or experience. It is communal. The terrain upon which art occurs is a commons not owned by any person, institution, or entity but co-created and co-narrated by us all. Historically, the vivid imagination of artists has built the most exciting and unconventional places for these communal experiences. Artists know how to envision and activate space formally and in renegade ways. We’ve seen art shows in a warehouse, repurposed building, apartment, or houses–but what happens when a shelf, a mailbox, the trunk of a car, a garage, a fence, or a stairwell becomes an exhibition space? There are also multitudes of digital projects that challenge the notion of literal exhibition space occurring across virtual galleries and websites, servers, social media platforms, and even video games. Unobliged to conform to the convention of a white cube, and often in direct defiance of it, artists have always sought to build a commons in which co-collaboration, mutual aid, and celebration can take place, where we come together to build and nurture art communities. Artists enable covalence. And so can we.
An essay by Ignacio Valero, published in Art Practical in 2014, offers me endless poetic inspiration. EcoDomics and Cultural History: Valuing Art Labor Under Neoliberalism reads like a manifesto. In it, Valero addresses value and contradiction in the way we perceive or engage with the arts, and their proximity to or exile from power. Valero’s final proposal is that it’s possible to retake what’s been co-opted by exploitative systems, reclaiming and reshaping it in community and care as a social movement, as resistance, in ways that honor the labor and the passion of artists. He describes a place where we co-produce, where we relearn what it means to live within what we produce. So here’s my inspired understanding of how what he says translates to what things could be in the arts if we want to make it be:
We can’t just propose a space for art and artists to live and to stay and for those who enjoy them to play; we must relearn how to live in the confluence, we must relearn what it means to exist in an artistic community with solidarity, care, collaboration, and mutual aid. Each of us is a hub of social groups and activity, the center of a multi-circle Venn diagram of people around us whom we are influenced by and whom we influence in turn. Though we come together through this beautiful arts ecosystem, we come from different places, backgrounds, practices, and experiences. That is the virtue of cultural and artistic diversity, and it should be honored and upheld. This is the rich soil upon which new growth can take hold, thrive, and stay. We are collectively the river, the shores, the soil, and that which grows. This is how our confluences come together—we are all already in communion. Go forth and share art. Make art. Enjoy art. Talk about art. Integrate art into every aspect of daily life and living. Share everything you like with all your friends, including where to go and what to see—in fact, share this publication with them! Our actions don’t need to be momentous, only meaningful to us. Let us establish, create, and tend to what we value: art and artists here and now, on the shores of the river’s errant path.