How the ultimate cost of arts admin can be the quality of the work
There’s so much admin to do to be an artist: applying for funding, running a small business, self-promoting, securing and running a studio - not to mention learning to do all these things, which run contrary and counterintuitively to what you are taught at university, or your day job - that the amount of time left for making work is small. Making work is the only slice of the pie that can be shaved down, in the same way as it was until very recently easier (perhaps rightly) to disrespect your own time than someone else’s.
The hidden cost of having reduced time is that it rules out making work that is difficult to make. Therefore, modern ‘sculpture’ exhibitions tend towards the disposable; flags, slogans, pamphlets, consumer technology, adaptations of plinths and railings, junk materials. These are commonly hidden under the guise of reflecting society at large or political activism. The reality, setting aside the Duchampian influence which makes it possible at all, is that it’s the only kind of work that sculptors have time to make. (A friend accurately described it as the school of “oh shit, that essay is due today, isn’t it”)
Of the two major interacting forces in the production of art, thinking and making, the thinking component can place on the tube or in the pub. Indeed, work can reflect thinking, and the many artists who fit this trend aren’t wrong to continually point out that lots of ephemera is mildly interesting. Even in London, conceptual development time isn’t eaten into that much, and it can even be helped in some cases by free-form association and altered states of consciousness.
But there are places you can’t get that way. I’m don’t mean to imply that work with resistant materials is a priori better, but simply point out that there are material explorations it is physical impossibility to access while trying to impose your ideas on it. You can communicate ideas with objects, but without proper materials, you simply cannot explore the quality of materials themselves, and allow these in turn to inform ideas. This must, by necessity, decrease the range of possible work, which is a net loss. It loses that deep and emergent thinking that we crave and pretend to laud, respectively, and essentially cuts us off into our minds and away from our hands. It is also a loss to the ages; we will have classical sculpture, Epstein busts, and (for better or worse) Moores for millennia to come. For our work to be ephemeral is fine, and a valid reflection, but for all of it to go that way by default can tip into a lack of humility and perspective if you only arrive at that position via the rat-race.
Materials are expensive, they take a long time to work. Therefore, the modern artist’s profit in making work from real materials is eaten into from every side; time is money, money is also money. The temptation, then, is to make work that is a stand-in for work.
This approach is ungenerous to the audience, and disrespectful of material. Imagine being someone who feels a little out of their depth, but who is taken along to the RCA graduate show, to be confronted by what is quite blatantly some wet cardboard tubing and a pair of red wellington boots. You would be forgiven for flying into a rage at so much tat, but unfortunately it leads to despondency and a feeling of inadequacy on the part of the viewer.
There are many former peers who are more ‘successful’ than me, who have amazingly frequent shows in minor London galleries. These contemporaries tend to make work that I ‘could’ make. I acknowledge, as ever, that in an important respect that claim is not borne out, as I wouldn’t be motivated to cast a flannel in resin, or a butt plug in chocolate. But in an important sense I could; given the manifest, Donald Judd could’ve made your work, but you can’t make his; it’s a physical impossibility.
I don’t blame these artists. If you want to be an artist, making and lecturing, and this is what the galleries and the institutions reward you for doing, then of course you do it, but it begs the question of whether the incentives are right. And I suggest that they are not, from the pressure to create an oeuvre, the arbitrary timings of a course, to the demand to fill a space - as if solid work is in fact a gas.
How on earth do we get out of this situation?
Off the top of my head, perhaps the default mode for the RCA should be that you pay both years upfront, with the second year to be deferred indefinitely as standard, allowing people and works to develop independently of the institution for as long as they need.
p.s. In a connected realisation, the price of beer must be dictated by the housing market. If pubs are real estate, and pubs are in decline (therefore it is not solely dictated by the ‘demand’ market), pubs therefore have to be more profitable/less effort than turning it into flats. Therefore, it is the housing market that dictates beer prices. This alone accounts for the rocketing price of a pint in central Manchester, and why it has been too high down South for years. In turn, this accounts for the Southern habit of having the head of a beer poured off and no sparklers on the taps. I don’t know how coronavirus fits into this, but considering all the beer going down the drain at the moment, it ought to be nationalised: the inalienable right of every freeborn Englishman to go to the pub must be upheld.
p.p.s. LB when you read this I hope it can be the start of a dialogue and I am indebted to you for giving me something to write about. AG and BB likewise
p.p.p.s. If you are from the a-n it’s hopefully clear it’s not bursaries I am referring to here