April 2023
Dear readers,
This PhD project partly springs from many conversations in UK experimental dance about the role of artists in publicly-funded organisations which are committed to supporting and presenting their work.1 One frequent fixation of these conversations is of artists taking on formal positions of leadership – e.g. directorship, curation, being a member of a selection-panel or board of trustees.
I am broadly sympathetic to this. In 2017, I had a meeting with a young producer, about how the dance organisation in which he worked could support my practice. It became clear early on in the meeting that he really didn’t know his stuff. Which is fine: I believe in entry-level jobs. But last year I saw that he was appointed the artistic director of a local arts center. In the years between, he had been able to ‘rise through the ranks’ of various arts organisations, such that he could now be trusted with such a position of industry leadership – whereas I feel like I am likely to access such a role as I was in that meeting 7 years ago. I felt despondent about the futures open to me in this field, and wondered what to do with feelings of wasted potential.
However, when I hear appeals for artists to be granted such positions of leadership, I usually find myself full of hesitancy and questions. For example: what does being “an artist”, in particular, offer to such a role? What can an artist do, that an administrator, a cleaner, or a receptionist can’t? I do not presume that other artists represent my interests. I suspect I am just as likely to disagree with fellow artists on aesthetic, institutional, socio-political and inter-personal issues as I am with a producer with a salary.
It’s also hard to decide who is or isn’t an artist. Many of the staff working in these organisations are or once understood themselves to be artists. We expect emerging practitioners to pay their rent by working part-time in a bar or as an usher – but is someone working 4 days a week as a finance officer, or as a full-time academic lecturer and researcher2, still an artist? The desire for artists to take on organisational roles of leadership seems somewhat contradictory: how much can someone take on such management or governance labour without this subsuming their entire professional identity; without this rendering them no longer ‘an artist’?
I suspect that something that often motivates these appeals is how the figure of the artist is bound up in the fantasy of doing things ‘differently’. Art, and the artist, represent a break with norms, and the sense of possibility and freedom.
Last month, I gave a 10-15mins presentation on this final point – this ‘promise’ of the artist as doing something ‘differently’ – at a day-long symposium at Kingston University addressing ‘Approaches to social transformation through the arts’3. You can read the presentation here, or listen to it here.
I’m not totally satisfied with the text. There’s a lot more to say on the topic, and it whizzes through some theoretical stuff of which I have a shaky understanding – but I think it serves as an OK introduction, and it very usefully revealed to me some of the gaps in my understanding. If it brings any particular writers or texts to mind, I’d really appreciate hearing about them as I continue my research.
I hope you’re all doing well. I’m really appreciating the sunshine in the UK, even if it’s still pretty chilly. Below is a photo from my studio, from where I’m sitting and writing.
Amidst sunshine, notes, and flowers,
Paul
There is someone I’m thinking of in particular, who held a number of roles of office in arts organisations that framed them as ‘an artist’ – yet whose practice had for many years exclusively taken place in universities as ‘artistic research’. They were totally disconnected from practice taking place in other contexts (grassroots, professional, etc.), yet were still happy to be holding such roles which (implicitly or explicitly) suggested they were representing the perspectives and needs of freelance artists. I regard this self-positioning as a pretty flagrant expression of ego: their continued need to understand themselves as ‘an artist’, despite being fully absorbed into the institutional framework of UK academia.