On Balance

August 12, 2014

OnBalance_Inline

I moved studios this weekend and everything is still on the floor. Every surface is covered in piles of books and bin liners full of clothes. These days, a typical ‘studio’ day – or a ‘not at my job’ day – involves meetings with other artists, working on job applications and studying. When focusing solely on finishing a piece of work for exhibition or publication then a studio day involves a lot more writing and editing, and trying out different installation forms. For four days a week I am officially employed elsewhere. I live in my art studio which is basic but cheap. As a single person with no dependents, it’s okay on a temporary basis – but it’s far from ideal. I juggle this way of living, but behind the scenes there are, of course, worries: money and the future, mainly.

To go over some aspects of what I enjoy about making art: broadly speaking, it’s the learning that happens through making – gaining an understanding by doing. There is the craft or discipline of an art practice, repeating something over and over again until I start to make some sense of it. There are also the people I have met through making art who are very supportive – a huge amount of generosity with time, skills and knowledge is exchanged amongst us all.

In my studio time recently I’ve been thinking about the idea of oppositional language. For me, if what I want to do with my art practice is an analysis and making of a critical language, can it ever be truly critical if it is not simultaneously self-reflexive and has a vocabulary which presents opposition? I think it needs both these conditions.

However, in thinking about this in a wider sense, and as a form, oppositional language is problematic when it exists only in opposition to the thing it is opposing. By which I mean that it can sometimes be a language that occurs entirely in its relation to a pre-existing dominant language or political structure. Therefore, it will only ever be a shadow cast by this big energy-absorbing, ever-present thing – an opposition that ends up defining itself by what it is not.

In my practice, how do I communicate an opposing position whilst at the same time avoiding this permanent ‘anti’ state of being? How do I stop it from ending up as an exhausted cliché or over-used linguistic and visual forms? Within a particular critique political art may be considered as art which is made politically (this is usually attributed to Jean-Luc Goddard in the 60s: “not to make political art but to make art politically”). The idea here is that the artist (if they choose to or wish to address this in their work, or position their work in this context) is aware of the conditions of the art piece production. In turn, the recognition and confrontation of these conditions are evident in the work itself in some way or another and form a foundation of the critique within which it wants to be considered.

Depending on the artwork in question and the language it uses, political art can vary in form hugely, and can appear to be highly explicit to very subtle, but evident nonetheless. And this has less to do with the act of making art and more to do with the society and the power structures that this art is situated within, hence the politics of what is and what is not visible, who does and does not want visibility, and how people encounter art forms. What are the conditions that decide who and what is heard or not? This lies in institutions, in ideologies and in a massive web of different factors – and in the development of a critical language, the politics of communication are revealed.

The art works that affect me usually manage to be aware and reflexive whilst avoiding cynicism and hopelessness. Maybe they talk about something I didn’t know before or hadn’t thought about in a material or conceptual way? Maybe they’ve mastered the language of their practice beyond a self conscious reiteration of what is possible in a certain form? Or maybe I have no idea why I am affected by them at all and understanding will likely take me some time?

These works are clever, brilliant, very difficult to achieve, and maybe not without an admittance to failure in certain areas too. This is the work I like anyway. Even then, I am aware of how a critical language develops generally and within myself; what might seem excellent at one moment may fade over time and vice versa.

As I type and structure this text, I am aware of an ache in my face. This is from a cheerful-ish facial expression I’ve been wearing that lacks the acerbic quality of how I feel most days. In part this is a technique in writing to concentrate on how full my life is. I appreciate the choices that I have presently and have been able to make in the past. Nevertheless, this approach masks the choices I do not have and how that impinges on my life and my work.

For all that I am endlessly happy for, I have a grinding jaw and an embedded anger about what is not okay in my situation and in the situations of others. For starters: that there should be a citizen’s wage, that there should be significantly more state-supported social housing, that there should be free education for all. That the “getting by” strategies I have been involved in are utterly contingent on the resources I have had access to – and that these resources are presently not available to everyone. And whilst those strategies are okay for a short while, if they do not at the same time address and challenge the conditions that necessitate them then nothing changes. And so: to try again.

By May Topple