Blog - Anabel Roque Rodriguezhttps://www.anabelroro.com/blog/Mon, 26 Oct 2020 11:41:09 +0000en-USSite-Server v@build.version@ (http://www.squarespace.com)#MuseumHour: Failure as a Museum WorkerInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Art as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezTue, 27 Oct 2020 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/museumhour-failure-as-a-museum-worker56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5f96b5d5aa018b57d3112a58On October 19, 2020 I got to host a #MuseumHour on the topic of failure as a museum worker. #MuseumHour is a platform on twitter facilitating discussions within the museum industry. The team recently updated their Manifesto & Guide, reflecting even better the changes our professions have been going through.

This has been the second #MuseumHour discussion I’ve hosted this year, the first one was on Success as a Museum Worker and the latest one seemed like a continuation, because let me state one thing upfront success and failure are shaped through metrics that are influenced by race, class and gender!

It’s a topic I’ve been working over the past years, you can find an ongoing interview series I’ve been conducting with museum and creative professionals on What success Looks Like to Them here> or take a look at some of my thoughts on labor issues and art as labor>

It’s been a rich and deep discussion and I want to thank everyone who participated for their honesty and vulnerability in the answers they’ve shared. THANK YOU! In the following I’ve collected several of the tweets so that these conversations don’t get lost.

]]>#MuseumHour: Failure as a Museum WorkerWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXVI with Esthir LemiInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 28 Jul 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-26-esthir-lemi56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5f155b38999ba21dbd0e60faEsthir Lemi - composer, Artist (Athens, Greece)

About: “First piano lessons, ballet lessons and first year in school happened simultaneously in 1980. I remember a beloved dance teacher, good music, my piano diploma in January 1991 and a Harold Pinter play at the Municipal Theatre in Patras. Since my early school time I had the firm belief that I was a painter and that I was going to study under the wing of N. Kessanlis at the School of Fine Arts in Athens and then move to Berlin, which I actually did. Kessanlis' Studio closed in 1998 and I got the IKY Greek state scholarship, then the Onassis Scholarship and started my MA at the UdK in Berlin. Back to Athens in 2004 for my composition diploma and the start of my PhD research at the University of Athens on Total Artwork. In 2008 I moved to Zurich, started a research in haptics (merging analogue technology with innovative tech platforms) at the ICST. I presented my PhD thesis in 2012 in Athens and moved to London for an artistic collaboration with the EAVI team at Goldsmiths. In 2014 I was the first European artist to receive the Fulbright Schuman funding, introducing a new concept of the artist as engineer/scientist. While working as a postdoc, on how the brain triggers different stimuli via our senses and the way our senses interconnect, at the University of Michigan, I had a joyful collaboration with R. Esslinger and C. McRae: together we created Loompianola!, a hybrid instrument. Then in 2014 in Copenhagen (haptic diary project), 2015 in Istanbul (Archaeoacoustics), 2016  in Helsinki (Lighting design project and solo exhibition), 2017-18 in Athens (lecturing Arts and Anthropology at the Athens School of Fine Arts) and 2019 in Marseille for Escales, a sound permanent installation at the Galleries Lafayette / Prado. 2020 back in Athens, working on Through the Looking Sound project, a kaleidoscopic score for a solo pianist, performed by Jana Lukst in N.Y. and Toronto.”

More about Esthir on www.esthirlemi.com.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the art world?

I started working as an artist around the millennium, when curators seemed to earn more fame and glory as the artists themselves, therefore, during my master degree, I have learned how to collaborate and work within the new reality of sharing “fame” with colleagues, instead of building a single artistic persona, that would gain fame individually. However, I think that fame functions merely through “gossip technology”, with all media patterns like word of mouth, fabrication of media personae and a focus on the appearance of things: the fabrication of a product. It is probably a side-effect of how the significance of art shifted into a product closely linked to fame and that has led the big institutions to focus more on fame, than the works of artists them-selves. In other words, I see fame as a spotlight created in art spaces with such an architecture and symbolic value, where the longer you stay under that same spotlight (e.g. the self / or the product) the more famous you be-come—it is a self-fulfilling prophecy There are just a few artists working on research who are super famous - my discipline as a composer is not related to any kind of fame. It is a long-term research and its longevity does not produce, nor aims for short-term fame. It is more dependent on the respect of people who are following similar paths in their artistic research.


What is your approach to rejection as a part of success?

When my work has some kind of success with the audience, the resulting debate around it, whether the work was really worth, often becomes louder and somehow aggressive, therefore I believe there is some fragility on reaching the spotlight of success, since the working environment is competitive per se. It is important for a professional to remain dialectic inside - and to understand that through every creative work we do change our mind and our practice, we re-evaluate things etc. I do believe that there is no win-win situation, because when a project reaches the best possible outcome, then the anxiety grows on how to reinvent better and more creative ideas – together with the need to relax and cool down, which is an oxymoron--success is never a neutral condition. It is not rare that the work an artist considers as his/her masterpiece is not always the same one that their audience and critics consider as their most important one. The capability to deal with a rejection makes an artist more aware of how to deal with a success, since the rejections demand a new reflection on the process of the work itself and thus, a different level of maturity in the artist’s self-awareness. The same maturity leads to the understanding that every successful project is merely a transition to a next level of the artistic process.


Any thoughts on income, financial stability and success?

Financial stability is considered as an equivalent of success, but we all understand too well that artistic labor is full of compromises that we need to accept. We provide our labor and we get paid for this. However, artists are still seen as if they were working for pleasure, and there is a lot of work to be done in order to create better labor conditions, in order for the artists to learn how to stand up for their rights within the market. I know many famous and successful artists who do not reach financial stability, while they provide constant profit for others in the art market. Covid-19 has revealed similar problematic situations in many countries, and this is the most significant thing that must change in the future: labor in the art world must be paid, for it is hard and tenacious work, and the pleasure of it should never be used to diminish its value or create excuses why people should not be financially compensated.

© Esthir Lemi

How do you define success as an artist?

I consider the macroscopic pattern we follow on success as patriarchal. As I am allergic to competition, I get inspired by artists who transform that pattern of a hierarchic pyramid into a tree –into a real ecosystem- and create branch-es and leaves that expand as individual ways of communication and artistic collaboration. These artists are for me the most successful.


Do you have role models for success and who are they?

Pina Bausch has been and will be an inspiration for me because of her en-tire artistic approach. I am deeply moved by the fact that she didn’t hesitate to introduce her team and each and every collaborator as an individual artist. The composer Jannis Christou is a rare example, in my country, of an artist that was able to find a space for everyone in his own team, so that they could flourish with their talents and grow their own artistic persona. Moreover, he expanded his compositional work deep into other disciplines. His hard work to understand the performative, whilst respecting the limits and needs of the artists he collaborated with, is something I deeply admire.


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Ι would try to explain to her the compositional term of macro- and micro-structure, the meaning of understanding narrative identity and the self as an on-going process of re-defining things, and tell her to “fail again, fail better”.


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

While working abroad, it is difficult for me to filter my work out of the national-, gender-, or age-based approaches, even though my work is not an example or representative of any of these areas. I am against female art as a kind of a minority approach concept, and I do not consider my research on origins so naive to let her reflect any kind of stereotypes The very same notion of fe-male art, as it is often used, defines women as some kind of minority, which at the end of the day is anything but feminist. I am more interested in creating tools for the next generation, especially for women, in a world where they would not be in need to define their work through fighting but instead concentrate on the tools themselves.. I feel today we still use language, tools and structure that have been made for a system that is persuasive, encouraging the game of the dominant and boosting discrimination and violence, although humanness is the key. I focus on humanness.

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXVI with Esthir LemiHow to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IVFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezTue, 23 Jun 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/how-to-mend-the-brokenness-part-456f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5ef0b61ac03f0766ae21eb92This is part IV of an unfolding mini-series trying to provide some starting points to reimagine futures, provide solace and at least start somewhere. If you want to contribute find the form here>

Following answers provided by:


Anonymous, Art Historian und Museum Worker, Norway

What or who is helping you to cope during these times?

I guess the same as usual… probably somewhat “classics”, but I’ll share a few:

I always appreciate keeping family and friends close (even though many are living in different places all over the world), enjoying their conversations and energy, and I especially value when people allow me to be there for them in return. It is also very encouraging to speak with other people who work in the art world and who can truly relate to the passion, creativity, structures and challenges we meet every day. I am very fortunate to have a few people in my circle who are both close friends and who can relate to situations from this perspective.

I also believe that honoring the feelings and emotions that come up is important. It’s easier said than done, I know, but still – I find it helpful.

Other things: Regular exercises and hobbies, fresh air, smile, food, water, and a good night sleep… oh, and ice cream and/or snacks. I dance every single day (almost), sometimes just for a short moment or goofing around (it has always been my go-to-thing). Last, but certainly not least: Stop. Take a deep breath (or more). It is ok to slow down without feeling guilty.

What have you learned through this mess?

It is not something I have learned now, but a positive reminder (one that keeps coming back to me every now and again) is to honor questions I can’t answer, or rather: I don’t know how to answer quite yet.

One aspect related to this for me now is to find a job, and not having a clear path on what my plans are is feeling exciting, challenging and liberating all at the same time. So, as many questions arise that I can’t answer at this very moment, I focus on what I know. What I do know is that there are so many inspiring areas in the art world that make me happy, that I am curious about and that I would like to explore and research – and now I have the time and I am using this opportunity to dive into some of these areas, which excites me every day.

How did this situation affect your work and what have you learned?

I have been unemployed more or less since the beginning of this year. Now, as many in the art world are familiar with, being unemployed from time to time or having slow periods as a freelancer happens. Unemployment and job hunting can be frustrating and exhausting, and rejections are certainly not the best confidence boost. However, instead of focusing on that part of it, I decided to embrace this time. For me it has been important to appreciate this time and appreciate this as an opportunity to refresh, reenergize and refocus. As it turned out, this extra time has enabled me to explore different areas of the art world, my own projects and getting involved in a different way than I had done before, which I really enjoy. As the weeks and months passed by I was slowly getting my ducks in a row. Projects and a few processes were coming along, and then – everything was abruptly stopped or postponed because of lockdown in March.

Being unemployed before and during this situation I’ve learned a few things of course, but I’ll share particularly one observation with you:

What caught me by surprise was the way people reacted to unemployment. I found one of the most difficult parts of this experience to be when I told people I was unemployed … getting their reactions and when they let me know (in both subtle and not so subtle ways) how it was not ‘socially acceptable’, as though I wasn’t trying hard enough. Even more so (in some cases): The awkward silence that followed when I said that I did not perceive unemployment as a failure, but it could be a great opportunity, perhaps even a commencement of something new. The (temporary) situation certainly does not take away the skills or knowledge you already have, and it is important to remember that a linear CV might be more often than not outside of our control.

During this year, unemployment has unfortunately become a reality for so many. When the pandemic spread, jobs were cut (temporary or permanently) and many were going through the process of being furloughed or fired. Personally, through this mess I am actually happy to notice that similar thoughts and discussions I have had earlier this year, are now topics talked about or addressed repeatedly (with variations of course) in the news, in podcasts, on the radio, in daily conversations, etc. Also, it is nice to notice how people are now slightly more understanding when talking about unemployment or other issues related to the matter – actions of support and respect that I hope will be remembered and will continue to develop in a positive direction. Respectfully, I am very aware that this isolated experience is a small issue compared to how serious the situation is, the many different side-effects and catastrophe many are experiencing.

What have you been learning about community?

This is a big question, and I don’t have an immediate and clear answer, but I will offer what I recognize from my perspective in the art world: I find it reassuring to see people coming together, researching and finding solutions, and showing understanding, patience, affection and compassion for one another in many different ways. I hope this helps, and perhaps some of these changes and experiences could also be of great support and inspire us in the future.

]]>How to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IV#MuseumHour: Success as a Museum Worker Art as LaborInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 09 Jun 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/museumhour-success-as-a-museum-worker56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5edba9346081415fb0f58714On June 1st, 2020 I had the pleasure to host a #MuseumHour on twitter around the topic of success as a museum worker. #MuseumHour is a platform on twitter providing really interesting discussions and support for anyone working in museums. You can join Mondays 20:00-21:00 UK time by following the hashtag.

It might sound strange to think about a topic such as success during a pandemic and during a time where many are fighting on the frontlines for more justice. In my research and the many hundreds of hours of conversations I’ve been involved with, one thing became clear: success is always shaped by race, class and gender (You can find an ongoing interview series I’ve been conducting with museum and creative professionals here> or take a look at what I’ve been writing about art as labor>)

It is important to talk about inclusion and diversity from as many angles as possible and the longer I’ve been involved in diversity work, the more I’m interested to see what institutional environments do in order that people from underrepresented communities can succeed better. Because let’s say one thing loud and clear, the current systems benefit those who already come from contexts of privilege and enable them to succeed while those dealing with the oppressive impact of race, class and gender need to fight harder to succeed.

It’s been a fascinating discussion and I want to thank everyone who participated for their candid honesty and vulnerability in the answers they’ve shared. THANK YOU! In the following I’ve collected several of the tweets so that these conversations don’t get lost.

Q1: What does professional success look like to you? Visit the Thread>

Q2: What conditions do we need to be able to succeed? Visit the whole THread>

Q3: How Do race, class and gender shape professional success? Visit the whole Thread>

Q4: What are your thoughts around financial stability and success? Visit The Whole Thread>

Q5: What changes and actions need to be implemented in museums so that people from underrepresented groups can succeed better? Visit The Whole Thread>

Q6: Did your understanding of success change during COVID-19? How? Visit The Whole Thread>

Q7: What do museums and the whole creative industry need to implement Post-COVID-19 to ensure a more equitable future? Visit The whole Thread>

Q8: How do you cope with failure? Visit The Whole Thread>

Q9: What insights did you gain through some of your biggest career failures? Visit The Whole Thread>

Q10: What has been your most valuable advice you’ve ever got regarding your career? Visit The Whole Thread>


Q11: What is one thing you wish you had known before starting this career? #MuseumHour Visit The Whole Thread>

Q12: Time for some shoutouts: Do you have role models in this industry? If you can’t think about someone in particular, what characteristics does a good role model need in order to serve as a good example for you personally? Visit the Whole thread here>


]]>#MuseumHour: Success as a Museum WorkerWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXV with Rachel FriedmanInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezThu, 14 May 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-25-rachel-friedman56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5eb953d8f37be845ff8ccf9fRachel Friedman - Writer, Brooklyn (NYC)

Rachel Friedman is the author of And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood and The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost. Her writing has appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her son.

You can find more about Rachel on her website> or on twitter>

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the creative industry?

For me, the appealing part of fame is the money that would probably accompany it. Having enough money to work on whatever artistic project you want for the rest of your life is a tempting fantasy. There is a relationship between fame and talent but I don’t think it is a direct line from one to the other (at all) – so it doesn’t strike me as something one needs to validate the creative work. I also can’t imagine that desiring fame is a particularly satisfying motivator of creative work.


What is your approach to rejection as a part of success?

I think you have to be on nodding terms with rejection to endure in the arts. You don’t have to rebrand every rejection as some edifying experience – the way “fail up” culture would have you believe you should (in America, at least). It’s more useful, in my view, simply to learn how to sit with rejection without feeling as though you, or your work, is a failure. I was a serious musician as a kid and that was excellent training to become a writer because my skin was already somewhat thick. When I am ready to pitch a story, I make a list of publications I think would be a good home for it. I tailor the pitch to each pub, of course, but when I get a rejection, I cross it off and move down the list. I have learned to disentangle my ego from rejection enough to endure it.

Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

For most artists, making a living in the arts means financial instability. We each have to figure out our own risk tolerance when it comes to that instability. You learn this over time through experience. I ultimately realized as a freelance writer that I worked best when I had a steady paycheck. Twenties me was horrified by the idea of having to go into an office a few days a week. But thirties me realized I’d been indulging in a “starving artist” mythology that didn’t actually serve me as a writer. What served me was freeing up the psychic space to write that had previously been occupied worried about paying rent.


How do you define success in the creative industry?

Success is working on writing projects I care about and having my work resonate with the readers who find it.

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

I just wrote a book interviewing a group of former friends from Interlochen, an arts camp we all attended as kids. Those people become role models for me of the various ways one can balance art with the rest life (relationships, kids, paying the bills, etc.) At one point in my life, I would have given you a list of famous writer role models, but that list was more about comparison than aspiration. I used to spend an unproductive amount of time wishing my writing life looked a certain way in order for me to define it as “successful.”


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

You are the wisdom you seek. I realize that sounds Yoda-y. I love advice. I am a total sucker for internet lists about famous writers’ routines or clickbait pieces that offer formulas for how to achieve X by doing Y. But what I wish I’d known at 18 is that I should focus less on one-size-fits-all advice and more on cultivating my own intuition. Each individual is, after all, the expert on designing her own fulfilling life.


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

This question leads me back to the first one about fame. Success depends on a number of variables, including race, gender, and socioeconomics. We know this intellectually and yet we still don’t have enough transparency around this invisible privilege. We still persist in this ridiculous myth of the “self-made man.” There is no such thing.


]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXV with Rachel FriedmanWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXIV with Gundega EveloneInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 05 May 2020 08:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-24-gundega-evelone56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5ea8103266448b66c7357213Gundega Evelone - Artist, Riga (LAtvia)

Gundega Evelone (1988) is a multidisciplinary artist. Although she holds an MA in Sculpture from the Art Academy of Latvia, her practice spans various mediums that are called upon as required in order to create an ever more encompassing staged version of reality that strives to wholly involve and influence the viewer. Currently the artist is moving in two distinctly opposed directions – she explores the human element in different social and historical situations while working with such fundamental concepts as ‘space’, ‘matter’ and ‘existence – nonexistence’, trying to find connections in her work between the real, tangible world and each individual’s subjective perception.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

If it helps your work to gain momentum, why not? But if you think about art just as some kind of tool to reach fame you are not true artist, you are simply a trophy hunter with some visual skills and it soon will become visible to others.

What is your approach to rejection as a site of success?

If I have understood the question right- Immediate rejection (like for some idea or project) can help me to see my work from a different angle and I could benefit from it. If this is about sort of a general notion of rejection (like parts of a society that rejects you for what you are) it can be a very painful and heartbreaking experience. It is not healthy and I personally think that suffering won't make anybody better as artist or human being. But sometimes rejection can fuel you to continue your fight and improve your resilience - if you are stubborn. And I'm stubborn.

Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

Honestly, for me as for most struggling artists, it would be great to get paid some money for my art. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not, and sometimes I'm the one losing and my bank account shows it.

The art scene in Latvia is actually mostly funded through our State Cultural Capital Foundation (SCCF) but it is not enough for all causes. Sometimes, I have the feeling that I should be making projects that fit within the label of trending, fashioned art topics or that I should change my visual style (to make it more appealing for a general public?) in order to get some funding (as I asume some others do), but I just can't step on this path since it is not me, and I feel I would sell my integrity.

How do you define success in the arts?

  1. To be able to have freedom in you work work and with your beliefs.

  2. To have time and possibility to work and to carry out ideas in physical form.

  3. To have like-minded people around you.

  4. Getting some money back, so you dedicate yourself only to creation.

  5. To be a recognized artist and to use the possibilities this fame provides you with. (if you get famous, it will be easier to realize all previous points on the list.)

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

In the arts - no, I don't have any. Sometimes when it's tough I think about common successful people (like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Madonna and others) in abstract and symbolic ways to cheer me up. One think they seem to have in common is that they didn't give a shit about criticism or disbelief from others.

Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

"Don't doubt your qualification, ideas, and own meanings! If someone calls you crazy take it as a compliment! Those who criticize you may be on a different path as you are. You are great!"

Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender.

I haven't met anybody yet in Latvia who has been discriminated against in the arts because of their ethnic background, since we don't have many people from diverse backgrounds in the art scene in Latvia. That said, discrimination because of race or skin colour is a big thing in Lavia in general and I am truly deeply ashamed of it.

Speaking of gender, yes, I can see those "glass ceilings" in the profesional art world. You can see it when a woman becomes pregnant, suddenly you hear questions like "Will she calm down?", "Will she come back? Because it is considered normal to get absorbed in motherhood and leave the professional art world. In my experience, women with small children won't get so many offers for projects anymore. Some even think that there ist no place (physically or mentally) for children in the live of an artist (even at exhibition openings), and if you have a child, you better hide it! Honestly, I just know a few women artists who professionally work in the art world and proudly involve their children in their work as part of their life, because children are a meaningful part of their personality, at least I think so—I'm one of them.

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXIV with Gundega EveloneHow to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IIIFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezTue, 28 Apr 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/how-to-mend-the-brokenness-356f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e9d8ae18660e44c27678d49This is part III of an unfolding mini-series trying to provide some starting points to reimagine futures, provide solace and at least start somewhere. If you want to contribute find the form here>

WHAT GAVE YOU SOME SOLACE LATELY? SHARE BOOKS, POEMS, PODCAST EPISODES... SHARE RESOURCES YOU FOUND HELPFUL AND MIGHT HELP OTHERS

  • Michael Dooney: "Comedy has given me solace since before the pandemic and continues to do so throughout. Social distancing is obviously important but cognitively distancing from the news cycle and how much the art world/market has been impacted is helping me stay sane."

  • *As some of you know I’ve been curating the exhibition Mycelia where we’re looking into the metrics that shape artistic success (spoiler: it’s race, class and gender). Our society praises the belief in meritocracy, success as the fruit of hard labor, but if we look closer into the systemic conditions, success is not simply a linear progression. Artistic success depends on a healthy network. But what does this network look like in a society that puts competition over solidarity? What does artistic success require? What does a healthy artistic ecosystem need? The exhibition has been given me a lot of comfort and I’m grateful for all the conversations that took and are taking place. Due to the safety restriction in place the physical exhibition is accompanied by a digital program with artist conversation dealing with the glass ceiling, notions of success and more as well as two recorded panel discussion in German and English. You can find the videos on the YouTube channel of the exhibition.

  • *It’s very related to my research, so it might not surprise anyone that I absolutely love the podcast “How to fail” with Elizabeth Day. Her special episode where Listeners share their Coronavirus stories moved me to tears and the episode with Alain De Botton on embracing vulnerability in the age of Coronavirus might be among the most comforting things I’ve listened to during this strange time.


What or who is helping you to cope during these times?

  • Michael Dooney: My wife and daily exercise. We’ve managed to build a new routine around the restrictions, and when one of us is feeling overwhelmed the other is there for support. We’re being mindful not to put too much pressure on ourselves to be productive, so using the situation as an opportunity to slow down and appreciate what we still have.


What have you learned through this mess?

  • Michael Dooney: "How fragile everything really is. Society makes us feel as though we’re indestructible, that our actions have no consequences and as long as we don’t pay too much attention to the problems in the world, they eventually go away. This couldn’t be further from the truth and the outbreak really exemplifies this.

    On a more personal level I’ve learnt to better accept that which is outside of my control, and that it is ok to miss out on things."


How did this situation affect your work and what have you learned?

What have you been learning about community?

  • Michael Dooney: “The art world is notoriously competitive, and success, however it may be defined, hinges on so many factors that people can be reluctant to help one another. Yet during this pandemic people have been banding together online, sharing resources and helping one another get through the situation. So it has been reassuring seeing many people step up and support one another in this critical time."

—
* My answers

]]>How to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part III How to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IIFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezThu, 16 Apr 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/how-to-mend-the-brokenness-256f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e849f3cdffef2105982bd77This is part II of an unfolding mini-series trying to provide some starting points to reimagine futures, provide solace and at least start somewhere. If you want to contribute find the form here>

WHAT GAVE YOU SOME SOLACE LATELY? SHARE BOOKS, POEMS, PODCAST EPISODES... SHARE RESOURCES YOU FOUND HELPFUL AND MIGHT HELP OTHERS

  • *I absolutely loves this sort of exhibition “Die Balkone : Life, art, pandemic and proximity. Prenzlauer Berg windows and balconies” initiated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza in Berlin. The concepts is: “Die Balkone invites members of the artistic community living in Prenzlauer Berg to activate/inhabit their windows and balconies. With zero budget, no opening, and no crowds, the project proposes an intimate stroll (within current regulations) to search for signs of life, art, and points of kinship and connection. When some of us are cut off from our plans and our loved ones, we reach out to the balconies of the world, against isolation and individualization, not leaving everything in the hands of the virus and the fear it generates.” You can find lots of impressions and images on the facebook event page.

  • Sandra Coumans: "A cliché one: I took time to do some baking and cooking (have tried out new recipes for all sorts of bread, savory and sweet dishes); Technique critique on pandemics by Wired; and then also staying off the internet and also doing/ reading/ watching something completely unrelated to the virus and quarantine! Exhibitions, performances, etc are still experienced best in a live setting, so have not embarked much on that. Films and videos, however, yes! Have been listening to a Dutch-language podcast called 'Future shock', which explores current developments (not necessarily C19-related)."

What or who is helping you to cope during these times?

  • Elisa Bailey: “Physically, my boyfriend is here in confinement with me so I am endlessly grateful for that- I don't cope well alone.

    Mentally- knowing all my far-away friends are out there, even if we catch up properly only once during this period, it might be more than we do when caught-up in our old normal lives. Also knowing that my parents and loved ones are taking lockdown seriously and I don't have to worry constantly about them slipping up!

    Otherwise, having time to work on my own projects which means I wake up excited every day about realising some of the things I have dreamt about getting underway for a long time! It finally feels I have been given a moment to take my own path for a while, even though I am very aware that this 'chance' is nonetheless a by-product of what for so many people is a catastrophe."

  • Sandra Coumans: “It was important to me to have an idea about what was happening (how the virus functions and spreads), but also not to overload myself with information, statistics, articles. What also helped me cope is to realise that it is a completely natural thing, it is part of life, it has happened before and it will happen again (although hopefully NOT in the near future, haha..). And just thinking about what could be a good way to cope, especially in the long-term and more generally than just this specific situation, has been important to me. I've been thinking about resilience lately as I wrote here>”


What have you learned through this mess?

  • Elisa Bailey: “Everything should always and unequivocally be considered with regard to the people. Everything possible should be tried before all that is left is hope.

    Some people show their true colours in times of emergency, whether good or bad.”

  • Sandra Coumans: “As I have my own consultancy and I work transnationally, I know what it is like to work from home and at a distance. In that sense, it was not such a big switch (and the quarantine, also the comparison with colleagues/ practitioners have made me aware of that. What I do miss is traveling, being in direct touch with friends and practitioners, experiencing art. I actually feel worse for those living in tiny apartments, with many people, those that find themselves out of work from one day to the next; and I feel very grateful for all those people more or less obliged to continue working in at-risk circumstances: health care professionals, the police, public transport personnel, supermarket employees, etc.”


How did this situation affect your work and what have you learned?

  • Elisa Bailey: “I lost my job very early on in the crisis (I worked in cultural travel, and obviously nobody is moving very far these days!) so I am learning to think of ways I might be able one day to earn a proper living without having to rely on employers, and in the meantime looking into small bits of remote work that will help pay the rent, such as translation and research. I have recognised that I probably don't want to work for a small, family company again (unless it is my own!), as even if the good times are good, the bad times feel a lot worse.” [Update: Elisa has been offered a job in the meantime and I’m really happy for her]

  • *I really enjoy the podcast “In other words” hosted by Charotte Burns. In her latest episode #78 Covid-19 is Exposing the Fault Lines she talks to Allan Schwartzman (co-founder of AAP and a chairman of Sotheby’s) about the impact of Covid-19 on the art world: “Charlotte Burns: […] I was speaking to a dealer this weekend. He was saying, “The truth is that everyone has been miserable, and we just didn’t know how to talk about this. So, we talked about expand, expand, expand,” which is to your point. And another dealer was saying that they have like-minded friends, they want to work differently. They’re talking about doing things differently. Whether that’s extracting themselves from real estate in cities where the property market is going to be completely different after this. So, I think a lot of people are reevaluating their real estate decisions, too.

    To your point about artists, one dealer was saying to me that they actually are having a lot of people still asking for artists, but that with things being the way they are, that artists who have a larger production—they have studios and they employ people—they’re not working on those productions anymore. And so, even in the sense of what artists can do, if you’re running a major operation: that’s not running right now. You’re not an essential worker.

    And so, it’s also affecting the scale and scope of production: paintings for this biennale, for this art fair, for this museum exhibition. That pressure to produce all of that, the tap has turned off. And so, I wonder how that’s going to affect the art making itself, because the artists, like all of us, they’re in a different production cycle.”

  • Sandra Coumans: "I luckily have been able to continue working and earn money! What that taught me is that I have apparently made some right choices along the way. This is a completely individual assessment: I am not saying that if you're now not earning anything, you have made the wrong choices; I have just done some things that were right for me. It also looks like I will be able to continue working for the time being.

    The one advantage about conferences and meetings switching to online presence is that they are accessible without having to travel (and even at the moment you choose)."

  • Heather Havrilesky has shared shares some useful advice for working from home in this twitter thread. Like: “Use late afternoon for phone calls and texting with friends. Don’t underestimate how much random chatting and short periods of connecting with others will improve your overall well-being. If you can get out and walk while talking, all the better.”

  • Writer Austin Kleon shares from his book Keep Going in his blog post “Working from home manual in disguise” some really helpful additional advices like: “Demons hate fresh air. Walking is good for physical, spiritual, and mental health. 'No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk,' said director Ingmar Berman to his daughter, Linn Ullmann. 'The demons hate it when you get out of bed. Demons hate fresh air.'”

  • This twitter thread is something for the sad museum chronicles and important to archive to remember when these museums talk about community next time:

What have you been learning about community?

  • Elisa Bailey: "This is a big question I am thinking a lot about, and perhaps don't have immediately clear (and this could also have changed a lot by the time confinement ends!)...

    Simply, community has always been there- it's just a matter of finding it, participating in it and allowing/ helping it to be an incredible force for individual and collective good. But it shouldn't be abused- I think it's really easy to call someone just to be able to speak to 'someone' - anyone- out of loneliness or boredom (particularly the people who you think will always answer). Even if these are very different times, we should still respect one another --and one another's time, energy, emotion and affections --enough so that we make contact because we want to speak to/see/hear from that person specifically. In this way, some people I know have said they are overwhelmed and exhausted by the explosion of communications and people writing to them/phoning/inviting them to chat. Embracing and valuing your community is just as much about understanding how those members who are more shy, busy or introverted (or even extroverts wanting a quiet day!) may feel connected without wanting to communicate large amounts. Just because people might behave or process things differently, doesn't mean they are not part of a greater communal spirit.

    In terms of society and peripheral members of our social networks, this is another lesson that not everyone shares the same opinions as you and not everyone is dealing with things in the same way, or necessarily even always thinking of others in their actions. Eeven if we might think that our whole friendship group/city/country/world should surely be united as a greater community against something so undiscriminating in its victims as a virus pandemic... we have been proved wrong. Everything about the COVID-19 pandemic is political and socio-economic, and so I'm not sure that there are so many silver linings for communities in the larger sense of the word, and as for communities as networks of individuals, i think the feeling of community may simply have been accentuated briefly."

  • Sandra Coumans: “Radical change is possible, but we need to want to!”

—
* My answers

]]>How to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IIHow to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezFri, 03 Apr 2020 01:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/how-to-mend-the-brokenness-156f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e7dd377d5037c1157891c75

Graffiti in Hong Kong: Source Twitter

I reached out to friends, colleagues and put out a call to collect resources in an attempt to carry us through and beyond this time, because one thing is certain Corona has changed our world. Many structures that have not been working for a long time were suddenly revealed with pressing urgency.

This is part I of an unfolding mini-series tries to provide some starting points to reimagine futures, provide solace and at least start somewhere. If you want to contribute find the form here>

What Gave you some solace lately? Share books, poems, podcast episodes... share resources you found helpful and might help others

Adrienne Maree Brown came up with the idea of a collective writing group for the month of April:

Click on the image to see some of the BEAUTIFUL writing prompts in the replies <3

Follow Adrienne Maree Brown on Instagram to get the daily writing prompts for this “challenge”.
”Guidelines for Pandemic Wrimo

1. Each day I will offer a prompt from myself or someone in the community (some are poly-sourced - my additions in parentheses). Respond to the prompt if it generates creativity in you. There's no length or form goal. You may find one prompt needs a few days of writing. Or leads you to another inner prompt. Cool - it's a spark, you're the fire.

2. The goal of this is to harness our imaginations to help us survive this pandemic and generate the world we dream on the other side of it. To that end, please stay focused on/around the pandemic.

3. I'm posting prompts designed for short fiction. If you aren't a writer, or words aren't what come, let other ways of creating move through you.

4. Use the hashtags #pandemicwrimo or #pandowrimo if you share what you create online. I'll share some of these on my story. Sharing is not required - exercising your imaginative muscle is the heart of this practice.”

  • I find the free app inside timer great for guided meditations, I’m particularly enjoying Tara Brach’s meditations.*

  • Gretta Louw: “I attended an online lecture by Naomi Klein (with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Astra Taylor) that definitely galvanised my outrage and helped shift me out of mourning paralysis, but I wouldn't say it provided solace.”

  • Pau Quintanajornet: “A mantra that has been a big part of my daily routine over the last years is: ‘Allow yourself to surrender to the moment’. I try to learn to listen more mindfully to my inner drum and to find a calm dialogue within me. We often forget that our souls need a break to overcome strong circumstances. We need to learn to breathe again and practice stillness. I think our society is in such a rush most of the time that we often forget that we are part of a much bigger picture - a huge piece of art that just can show its full beauty when we all work together. To do so we need to practice more consciousness with ourselves and one another - this includes to value Empathy - Solidarity and Humanity.”

  • This "pandemic tool kit" crowdsourced by the Death, Sex, & Money podcast team providing suggestions of things to do, listen to, watch, read, cook, be grateful for, and more.

What or who is helping you to cope during these times?

  • Yoga with Adrienne to seek out some space in all the tightness of my body and the poems of Mary Oliver.*

  • Gretta Louw: “Honestly, nothing I've read or listened to has helped. The only thing that has is sunshine and looking at plants, laughing with my nearest and dearest.“

  • Pau Quintanajornet:“My circle of beautiful human beings all around the world. Internet makes it easy to stay connected and reach out to check in with each other. Besidse that I try to create daily routines. I am an introvert so dealing with long periods of being by my own is not really a big issue for me - as long as I know my loved ones are ok”

What have you learned through this mess?

  • Gretta Louw: “How hard it is to break out of habitual models of behaviour, priority-setting, production etc and how those flow-on to measuring self-worth. How much better the world feels when there aren't dozens of planes flying overhead every hour. How much I long for a proper garden. How wildly interconnected and interdependent we all are.”

  • Pau Quintanajornet: “That our human race has to relearn Empathy and that we need to find a more mindful way to navigate trough life all together.”

  • “What a lesson to live through: to slow down the velocity of this world; to see the broken structures revealed that we've constantly built and relied on but that have not been working for a long time; to appreciate the ordinary we overlooked because we were focused on striving for the extraordinary. May we never confuse the ordinary for the irrelevant again, may we see the wonder of the mundane: the infinite pleasure to hug one another, the stroll through the neighborhood, crowded cafes…”*

How did this situation affect your work and what have you learned?

Artist and curator Juan Duque

“In the midst of fast changes, how to think otherwise in relation to the immediacy of now? The interconnected nature of our world has become increasingly evident. Social, environmental, political, economic and technological structures are rapidly rearranging ideas, practices and meanings of identity, resistance, activism, togetherness and art. This moment demands from us a new vocabulary that gives new meanings to the word ‘crisis’.

What is the relevance of curating at this moment of sudden changes? Being cultural producers, what position are we taking? Which communities of care are we engaging with and supporting? What new specificities, strategies, formats are needed to be implemented? It becomes necessary to inquire into how collective cultural practices can foster inclusive, intersectional perspectives, encouraging new forms of solidarity and better social understandings of society and culture.”

My answer, Anabel Roque Rordríguez

"I wrote about this in my March newsletter. "Something I've been seeing right now, that I find incredibly heartwarming and problematic at the same time, is the rise of free content from colleagues. I'm not talking about institutions and people who are still employed by them (continue to share free and widely), I'm talking about freelance independent folks belonging to the creative economy. We all give away free labor for certain reasons: access, inclusion and it's a way to remain visible. It's how we live solidarity through our actions and it's our contribution to the creative ecosystem. I know it's hard to talk about money right now but I'm afraid many are going to learn the hard way that visibility will not necessarily translate into financial stability. It worries me that it won't be sustainable for many, and more people are going to leave the field. Money shame is one of the broken patterns that guilts people to do more in hopes that it will reward them in the future. Meritocracy promises that hard work will be met with a just reward but forgets to mention that success is shaped through class, race and gender. Meritocracy is a broken promise.

This message goes out to every museum worker, artist and creative who doesn't come from wealth and really took a risk going into this profession. I see your panic, I see your anger, I see your shame connected to asking for help. We need collective solutions for systemic problems and we need you. You are not alone!
If you have to change the format of your practice and you don't want to charge yet, try at least to include a way to collect tips. I know it's so hard right now because everything feels greedy and there is so much pain. But people are in different financial positions right now. Asking is something many of us need to relearn.
If you are employed or in a financial stabile position and like the circulation of the free content you see right now, help to keep it alive. Donate, pay, and help in the redistribution of resources.”

Artist and curator Gretta Louw

“Everything stopped. Things are cancelled months and months in advance. Complete uncertainty about the future is crippling. We are all even more precarious than we thought we were.”

Sieh dir diesen Beitrag auf Instagram an

Ein Beitrag geteilt von Justin McRoberts (@justinmcroberts) am

Seema Rao shared this in her blog post Museum Work Today: All the Feels All the Time:

“The best guidance I’ve seen is often "small act" guidance. It’s the person who answers your question about zoom or the person who passes on their work at home policy.

Our reserved sector is just telling truths these days. And that’s a form of guidance. It’s the way that people share their real feelings on social. I’ve seen a number of these, like a tweet reminding us it might be hard to fully pivot to digital while mourning the loss of society as we know it. Damn straight, it is. And another person stopping to share tough things on some crazy thread about movies. It’s pretty tough to speak up for your truth to the world and 48 people you don’t know. That’s the kind of ordinary bravery that will help us survive. And to the others who engaged with her, and didn’t ignore the feelings, that’s also bravery. Also, to all the people in that thread having some fun, that is another form of bravery. There are many ways we’ll survive this. And at the start, there is no need to say one is wrong or not. They’re probably all important.

Our collective has given me comfort, though it is interesting, our field hasn’t necessarily. Like so many in this work, I’ve seen the bootstrap to wedding rental dichotomy of budgeting. The last ten years saw our work move toward the service sector as rentals become a very real part of our business model. As with the service sector, so our fate. It was the choice we made with the best intentions. Diversifying income streams made sense, on a level. But that choice also exacerbated our situation. But hindsight and time turners are not useful now. What's useful is to keep going.

I’ve been thinking recently about a very late evening in grad school when a friend and I were arguing about the Renaissance that could have been if it were not for the Black Death. Sure, there could have been an earlier Renassaince. Sure, it could have looked different. We've morphed ourselves into an alternate history. The future of our past was something we will never know. We need to stand tall in this present and get to another future. The hypothetical is for graduate school; the actual is for now. I hope we are not in the Black Death, but our society will be fundamentally transformed, if not due to the economic factors alone. Eventually, we need to say to ourselves as a field, 'what is the Renaissance you’re planning?'

Maybe that’s not the question for today though. Because to go back to comfort, I’d say let that question wait for a few days. Let the tough days be. The days when you learn of loss. The days when an original future disappears. Let the anger and frustration come out. Attend to the loneliness and helplessness. Confront new emotions and situations. Make part of your work and life be about existing in the now and taking care of yourself. Be kind to yourself and to each other. Assume everyone is living in a blender of emotions. Expect they've had a challenge. Allow for their emotions. Listen and care. Be as human and humane as you can. Get to the real, because it's all we have.”
Visit Seema’s whole post, where she shares some helpful resources>

Independent feminist scholar and writer Sara Ahmed wrote in her blog post Complaint and Survival:

“If we lose our anchors, we don’t always know what will help us get through. For me, working as an independent scholar, writing is a handle that gives me something to hold onto; I know that is not true for everyone. I don’t write to be productive or because I think what I have to say is important. It is not; it is what it is. Continuing with my own projects such as my project on complaint, keeping myself going by keeping them going, is not about “carrying on” or “staying calm” or any of the other truisms that seem to circulate as national nostalgia for a time that never was. For me, writing is about holding on; how I stay in touch with myself as well as with others because some of my other handles are broken. It won’t necessarily always be that way. For me, now, writing is a lead, leading me to others; writing as hearing from others.

We are readers before we are writers. I find myself picking up Audre Lorde, again; her words again, guide me through. I think of Audre Lorde and I think of those moments when a life-line is thrown out to you. A life line: it can be a fragile rope, worn and tethered from the harshness of weather, but it is enough, just enough, to bear your weight, to pull you out, to help you survive a shattering experience.”

Artist and Artivist Pau Quintanajornet/ Project Wallflowers/ Stay with humanity

“Right now I am stranded in the United States until the end of April - my two art projects were postponed indefinitely. Luckily, I have a strong community here in Bethlehem, PA that are taking very good care of me. It is a bit challenging but we found a way to keep working on the mural project. As it is on parachute cloth I was able to take the supplies to anther spot were I can keep painting and engage with the teachers and students online. I feel that especially now a daily routine helps so much to stay in a creative workflow. As an Artivista its an interesting situation to experience this moment in a different country. I consider myself a world citizen so learning how other people around the world are dealing with our status quo is very inspiring and teaches you about vulnerability.”

What have you been learning about community?

  • There is transformational power in understanding that it’s an illusion that we are alone in our particular suffering and relate it to the wider systemic circumstances.*

  • Gretta Louw: “That I really care whether my colleagues, friends and strangers in my community are doing well, receiving the acknowledgement and opportunities that they need, that I worry endlessly for them.”

  • Pau Quintanajornet: “Community is Everything.”

  • Nina Simone wrote thoughtfully about “How Can I Contribute? Four Steps I’m Taking to Figure it Out”:

    “Here are the steps I’m taking to find a better answer to the question of how I can contribute.

    If you’re like me, holding privilege and wondering how you can be of service (whether as an individual or on behalf of your organization), I offer this process to you.

    • 1. SELECT A COMMUNITY OF FOCUS.

      You can’t help everyone. So ask yourself: what community especially matters to you right now? Who do you care about who might be particularly vulnerable or at risk? Maybe it’s elderly people in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s immigrants without a safety net. Maybe it’s nurses. I believe in targeted, community-centric approaches — and that starts with identifying specific communities to support.

      2. LISTEN TO THAT COMMUNITY.

      If you take a blind guess as to what a particular community might care most about, there’s a good chance you’ll guess wrong. But there’s an easy alternative: listen to them. Find ways to hear and learn directly from individuals and community organizations. You can search for information online. You can follow community leaders and activists on social media. Try to learn as much as possible by observation and listening (as opposed to asking people to give you their time) so you don’t add to burdens that struggling folks are already facing.

      3. MAP YOUR SKILLS AND ASSETS.

      At the same time as you learn what matters most to the communities you care most about, try to learn more about yourself. What can you uniquely offer? What existing assets and skills do you have that might be relevant? If you’re exploring this as an individual, you might have assets like your time, your bilingualism, or your ability to cook. As an organization, you might have assets like a building, a digital following, or the ear of the mayor.

      For me, the most important part of this step is creative dot-connecting. How can you use your creativity to make unexpected connections between what is desired and what you have? These connections don’t have to be huge to be meaningful. For example, my sister (who lives alone) was feeling socially isolated. She mentioned on the phone that she was going to see if she could foster a furry companion. When that didn’t work out, we gave her our dog for a few weeks.

      I probably never would have put my dog on a list of assets I have that can help right now. But he is, and he does.

      4. CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS.

      Once you have an idea that matches your assets to your perceived community interests, take a pause. Check in with community representatives before hitting go. You might think something’s a great idea, but value is in the eye of the community.” Read Nina Simone’s whole piece here>

—
*: My answers

]]>How to Mend the Brokenness? Some Solace during COVID-19 Part IWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXIII with Ruth CatlowInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezMon, 09 Mar 2020 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-23-ruth-catlow56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e620744bfeb8e41eaab282dRuth Catlow – Artistic director of Furtherfield, London

Artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Artistic director of Furtherfield, a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017); curator of the touring exhibition New World Order (2017-18); runs the award winning DAOWO arts and blockchain lab series with Ben Vickers, in collaboration with Goethe Institute; principal investigator for the blockchain research lab at Serpentine Galleries. Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies. 

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

Fame is a currency in the arts. Art workers can trade it to get stuff and others speculate upon it. This probably applies in other sectors that depend on the reputation in an attention economy. The drive for fame in the arts promotes a culture of competitive individualism, the myth of genius, and is a denial of the deep interdependence of a healthy cultural ecosystem. It does however make an excellent topic for critical play. By working with attention, fame, influence and speculation as a medium, artists like Amalia Ulman, Jeremy Bailey and Jonas Lund make visible the contortions that we must all (not just art workers) undergo in social media and crypto platforms - in order to participate and survive in daily life.

My early life as an artist in London coincided with the rise of the Young British Artist scene. This Saatchi & Saatchi-backed marketing-led supercharging of the art market functioned to create a few art stars and to promote them in order to manipulate, or to at least raise the value of those artists' work in the art market. A deliberate playing with the mechanisms of the market, the mechanisms of fame, the mechanisms of media (including a deliberate alienation of wider communities and audiences for arts) in order to give precedence to arts’ status as a commodity. It was an effective take over of the art world ecology by extractive forces and it limited the scope of what artists could address. So while I think it is possible to make fascinating works of art dealing with questions of fame, that period saw a limitation and a clipping of wings of artists who wanted to deal with social or political questions. Furtherfield’s Do It With Others (DIWO) campaign was partly a response to this experience - a desire to work with other art workers around the world to create more meaningful artworlds together.

Image by Furtherfield (2017) base on 2006 original. Don’t Just Do It Yourself, Do It With Others - DIWO!

What is your approach to rejection?

It depends how much my survival and that of collaborators and communities depends on the outcome. In ideal circumstances we commit fully to imagining projects that are the right mix of enchantment and necessity; throw everything at them; and then detach from the results. The process of thinking through the pragmatic details required to realise imaginaries is an important process of discovery and also for connecting with others. Creating proposals is about finding out whether what you have to offer is a good fit. A rejection is sometimes just good information. Sometimes the good information is still painful if it tells you that your needs, drives, values and visions are deemed to have no place in the world.

It is also very easy to misinterpret this approach as meritocracy narrative about flexibility, tenacity, success, all as signs of personal merit. It's not a level playing field out there and if we care about the life of the arts, we need to attend better to the damage done by the obstacles that strewn in the way of most people approaching the Artworld, rather than rewarding an evermore-homogenised group of people for producing elite experiences for boxes the Artworld has made for them but which have zero relevance to most people.

Any thoughts on income and financial stability in regards to success?

I think this connects to the previous question. When we talk about financial success in the art world, we need to think about what that looks like for those born into relative wealth and those trying to work from outside the walled garden to create some kind of stability in order to develop a sustained and disciplined practice. It depends on what your baseline is. The Artworld in 2020 comprises a much higher proportion of people who have some kind of safety net than it did in 2000. They come from families who can provide them with homes in global cities, who can help them out when they fall into debt, who can pay for their studios and who already have powerful cultural connections.

Many people needed by art are not able to take the same risks that I can take. I can take risks partly because of my class (eccentric middle), and my age (I'm in my early fifties), and many people younger than mid-forties didn't benefit like I did from a free arts education or from welfare support in the first 5 or 6 years after leaving art college. (Now in the UK there are lots of children who are receiving no art, music, drama education at all even at school!) These things provided the soil for a shared culture, networks of exchange, knowledge, resources, and community practice with a lot of other people. These aren’t in place anymore. As a result we’re seeing a reduction in the variety and number of people who can contribute to the co-creation of more experimental, investigatory non-mass culture that are so needed at this time. This is why money, finance and access to the arts are interconnected and such a big issue.

How do you define success in the arts?

I look for art actions that reveal the material, political and social conditions of the moment and expand a sense of freedom, solidarity and agency for and between people and different living systems.

I’m currently most interested in new ways of working with environmental and climate crisis and biodiversity collapse, the things that are urgent and deal with existential questions and that use all means necessary to extend expressive range and increase the potency of connections across differences.

It will take decades at least for humans to get to grips with the philosophical, social and political consequences unleashed by strangeness and wonder of the Internet. It's not surprising I guess, given our history growing up with the web, and now running a gallery and commons space in a London park, that at Furtherfield the things that especially fascinate us are artistic practices that engage with questions of translocality- the social and cultural effects of network flows, migrant flows, travelling, and high-speed digital networks. These produce a phenomenon in which most people now identify personally, simultaneously with a number of spaces and places, both physically and digitally. The most successful artworks acknowledge this moment and respond by asking what artworlds might spring from this new environment for decentralised cooperation and communication.

Playbour: Work, Pleasure and Survival, curated by Dani Admiss at Furtherfield Gallery (2018). Photo by Pau Ros

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

Because Furtherfield has grown up over 25 years as a network of people - artists, techies, activists, and thinkers - I have a community of peers who model a different kinds of success, as well as difficulties and failures of artistry and survival. I am inspired by and learn from them all. Success makes complex power structures visible in a way that makes it possible for people to take hold of them and then cooperate to create new ways of being, feeling and knowing for more solidarity.


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

I do wonder how life would be different now if my 18 year old self had understood more about different approaches to getting organised, was better informed by history, and had the tools to do it. This is very crucial to being able to collaborate well with people. And I definitely spent the first 20 years after leaving art college improvising all of those things and learning for the first time every time I was involved in a new adventure, but honestly, that’s not the advice I would give. You know, I think I’ve done it right. The advice would be, do what you did, follow your curiosity and work with good people (and constantly reevaluate what “good” means).


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/gender

I would add class into that as the third category. I guess I've already touched a little on this in my answers on financial stability and success. I mean again it's about questions of access, voice, and the ability to create opportunities for all people to be involved in experimenting with expressive meaning making processes in relation to real life experience. I think that the art world is structured against these things happening well. We struggle because the dominant art world is made up of very old institutions that developed during imperialism and colonialism. They reproduce patriarchal, colonial systems of selection, organisation and ideas about what is good. This is one of the reasons why it has always felt important to constantly reconsider what an organisation is, and to make the creation of the “art worlds that we want” a collective activity. This is one of the spurs for our three-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme, “crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.” This was inspired by Octavia’s Brood (2015), an anthology that supports new sci-fi imaginaries for social justice in the States, by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha.

We are consciously trying to build the art context for our work in a way that connects with the life ground (not just an international fantasy world) not just thinking about artworks or projects as discrete things that could go anywhere. We want to be part of a mic check or amplification system for the important voices that are present but excluded, and that we need to learn from.

Artists Elsa James, with her work Circle of Blackness at Furtherfield Gallery (2019). Photo by Pau Ros.

Last year for instance we commissioned an artwork called “Circle of Blackness” by Elsa James which connected with the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park where our gallery is based. She worked with an historian who works with black histories to discover more about the lives of women who had lived in the 1870s. She made a holographic piece which honoured one of these women and imagined their same character 150 years in the future as a way to envision the emancipation of black bodies and the power of black voices in the place. Another example would be the interview with Ingrid LaFleur, curator of  Manifest Destiny (2019) in Detroit, that explored her experience as the first woman in the US to stand on an Afrofuturist platform in order to stand for mayor.

We are connecting practices on the ground with international examples of artistic and political figures who are making crossovers between culture and politics, so this is an example of us trying to address race in this context. We are focused on the power relation between margins and centres. It seems a natural thing to do if you’re working with network cultures.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.comWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXIII with Ruth CatlowWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXII with Merle RadtkeInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 18 Feb 2020 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-22-merle-radtke56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e3ed3c85af4111d70d95638Merle Radtke - Director Kunsthalle Münster (Germany)

Merle Radtke (*1986) is an art historian, curator, and author. She worked as a curator for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Jürgen Becker Gallery, and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, amongst others. From 2015 to 2017, she was a member of the graduate program “Aesthetics of the Virtual“ at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK Hamburg). Her work focuses on the practice and theory of the internet, (post-)digital art practices, feminism, simulation, film and video. She publishes regularly texts about contemporary art and culture in magazines and catalogs. Since July 2018, she has been the director of the Kunsthalle Münster.

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What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?
Fame in the arts has a lot to do with visibility and often depends on your network – where are you exhibiting, who is writing about you, who has written about you, who published the latest review, who is following you on Instagram. And if you are good in this “attention game” it helps you a lot to create a visibility for your work and your thoughts. But at the same time, it is interesting to question what “fame in the arts” actually means. The art scene describes a closed circle and I would love to reach with my work and my programme people outside of this bubble.


What is your approach to rejection?

Rejection never feels quite nice and I guess everyone prefers success to rejection, but at the same time they are probably two sides of the same coin. Even if rejection or sharp criticism is tough and not always easy to endure, it might be also an opportunity to reflect on your work, your thoughts, and your decisions. And I think it is important to question your own position from time to time: Which will inevitably lead you to the question why things didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to. This could either guide you to the realization to do things differently the next time or result in a strengthened self-confidence, because there were good reasons for your decisions.

Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

Financial stability and success in the arts are not congruent, often unfortunately quite the opposite. Even if you are “successful” because you are curating an exhibition in a museum, running a small institution, publishing in magazines, writing for publications, exhibiting in art institutions, giving lectures at universities, it doesn’t mean you have a sufficient income to cover your living expenses. So, what you might call “fame” does not necessarily translate into financial stability. And to talk about financial success is probably way too euphemistic as the reality is often about practical everyday issues like how to make a living, how to pay the rent for your apartment, for your studio, or how to pay your health insurance. You often don’t even get a chance to think about something like retirement arrangements when you work as a freelancer in the art scene. And I think it is significant that you acknowledge labour and wage labour as two simultaneously existing categories of work, both are mutually dependent. To be frank, in the art world more than in other fields, there is this huge disproportion between creating content and payment and that includes nearly everyone who is involved: artist, curators, researchers, institutions, magazines.

Merle Radtke, Director Kunsthalle Münster
Photo © Volker Renner

How do you define success in the arts?

A lot of this has already been mentioned in my answer to the first question. Of course, success in the arts means that you have huge visibility as an institution with your collection or through the projects you are realizing, as a curator, as a writer, or as an artist. And, if that means also financial success, even better, at least that means that you can really focus on your work and don’t have to take dissatisfying jobs to finance your life. But there is also a more personal answer to this question which gives at the same time an impression of the various facets of the term “success”. First, success means to me to be satisfied with what I am doing. And as a curator it feels great when an artist is happy with the presentation we worked on together. And then the moment comes when the public sees what you have been working on for the last months and of course positive reactions are a huge success. Or if people just start a diverse discussion in front of an exhibited piece, cause there is an immediate reaction–I love to see that; however, an exhibition success does not just mean necessarily that the visitors reactions are just positive about what they are seeing but that they are engaging with what they see and share their impressions.


Do you have role models for success and who are they?

This is difficult to answer as there is not “one person” but more a mixture of people with whom I have worked with in the past, especially as there are so many ways of defining it. But I would like to mention at least one person, I had to think about quite a lot, since I took over the position as director of Kunsthalle Münster. It is Gregor J. M. Weber who is Head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a few years now. Back in 2007, he was director of the Gemäldegalerie in Kassel and I did my first internship in his department. I have to say, I was more involved with old masters when I started to study. Now and then, he took all the interns and trainees to the gallery after lunch. We had a little tour with him through the collection and picked three or four pieces to talk about. I was impressed by his art historical knowledge, and one could sense his passion for art. It was great that he just took the time to share his knowledge, especially as nobody had to ask for it and he certainly had a lot of other things to do. But for him personally it was an actual part of his job and important to him to take the time for these gatherings in the collection with the interns and trainees. And he conveyed the feeling that it is a huge privilege to be surrounded by such beautiful objects, which is super important for students who know at this point in their career art often solely from the books. This commitment is a rare gift as time is really scarce when you have a position like that. I experience that myself now as the director of Kunsthalle Münster. It is often not a given these days to just spend some time with your interns and trainees looking at art interested to hear their thoughts, but it is incredibly important.


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Don’t give up too soon and give yourself some time, if you really want something and especially if things don’t work out the way you want them to. If something is not going as expected, there might be another way. Try out different things to gain experiences and to learn about yourself. And travel a lot because there is nothing better.


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/gender

I think we are lucky to be living in a time where more attention is being paid to questions of race and gender, but I think it still has to become more of a lived experience and not only an interesting and important theoretical topic. There should really be more honesty and transparency when it comes to the question of who really gets the job as a director, the solo exhibition, discussions about the funding, about equal pay or thoughts about equality in a space–which goes beyond including a lot of artists with different nationalities and different sexes and asks questions of hierarchies within the space: who has the best position in a space, who shows a large series of works, who just a small drawing instead. This is the reason why you have to get really deep into the structure to answer these questions with facts as it is much more complicated then it seems at first glance. Currently, it has become quite fashionable to work on topics like race and gender, but I see a risk of cultural appropriation through the privileged white (male)-centred institutions, which do not reflect their own role within the system, it provides visibility for important topics but unfortunately no real change behind the scenes or of the structure.

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXII with Merle RadtkeWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXI with Tehmina GoskarInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 21 Jan 2020 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-21-tehmina-goskar56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5e25b2e5f068c869fe6e8ac4Tehmina Goskar - Curator

Tehmina Goskar is the Curator and Director of the Curatorial Research Centre, a company she founded in 2018, following 18 years of experience as a curator and academic in large and small organisations, and as a freelancer. She is a Fellow of the Museums Association, an Accredited Facilitator and Research Associate at Swansea University. She is a material culture and collections specialist and holds a PhD in History. The culmination of her curatorial and academic experiences led to the development of the philosophy and methodology of the Curatorial Research Centre which champions the equality of knowledge generation and communication in all curatorial work. She co-founded and continues to help organise #MuseumHour on Twitter, now in its sixth year. In her spare time she is immersed in the world of Cornish traditional music and plays the fiddle (violin) in a folk band.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

I am naturally suspicious of fame, a beautifully decorated but nonetheless empty box. Short-term headline grabbing is not something I value, although even my ego enjoys a bit of attention from time to time. The increasing involvement and influence of corporate marketing and brand in the arts has in part woken up the museum world to the benefits of communicating with a much broader audience than previously self-selecting aficionados. However, it has also fuelled a boasting culture, particularly amongst larger, older institutions who naturally assume the role of “world-leading” or “biggest” or “best” and then others try and copy them and the expectation often falls short of the reality. Nowadays, fame trumps real achievement such as committing to creating and sharing knowledge, democratising decision-making and genuinely becoming a valuable member of communities.


What is your approach to rejection?

My nature expects rejection but experience has helped me to cope much better with it than I used to. Certainly, the skills I have learned as a trained facilitator have opened my mind to the importance of removing the rejection from the self and seeing it for what it really is. Looking back, I have managed to use each rejection as a time to reassess, often courting ideas of leaving the sector entirely, but somehow still getting attracted back into it—I now treat rejection as a reboot opportunity and try not to dwell or over-analyse. A couple of years ago I undertook a leadership course with people from many different sectors including law, IT, corporate business, science, health and HR. It made me realise that many of the problems I perceived as specific in our sector—prejudice, diversity, inequality, lack of value in expertise—also existed in other sectors and in some cases we do actually a lot better than we think we do.


Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

Income is less important to me than financial stability, although I say this with the constant worry that I now own and run a company that regularly employs two people and contracts more. For me, financial stability means I know our mortgage and bills will be paid on time, we can eat well and if there are funds left over to save or enjoy it’s now a bonus rather than an expectation. Real time, my income has plummeted over the last 10 years and this occasionally gets me down. The first couple of years of starting a brand-new business is notoriously difficult particularly when you are based in a place like Cornwall which is dominated by retirees and obsessed with volunteerism. I am proud that although the profit was very modest, we sailed past our first-year milestone. I recognise we work in a tough economic environment which is compounded by the routine under-pricing (and therefore under-valuing) of labour in the arts. When you see invitations to tender for architectural or construction work the budgets are 5-10 times higher than those made available to designers, curators, educators and interpreters. When capital development projects are funded why are budgets relating to facilities and content a small fraction of building costs? What does this really say about the values of the people procuring services in the arts sector?


How do you define success in the arts?

For me my personal success is defined very much on whether I feel I have made a difference, either to a situation, to people or if I have improved something to be better than it once was. I am my harshest critic so when I feel pleased about an outcome, I really celebrate it. Good feedback from colleagues I value is also tremendously heartening, and important to my sense of purpose. As so much of my work is teaching and training my ultimate feeling of success is when I see my students thrive, use the wisdom and skills I have taught them, and when you get that message saying, “look what I’ve done, it’s thanks to you!” Nurturing #MuseumHour by letting go of control has been a particular success I continue to enjoy, even though my general enjoyment of social media has eroded considerably in the last few years. I don’t have a view on how we view success in the sector more generally except I would say that I wish we produced less and attended to getting the basics right first: training, recruitment, decision-making, greater self-awareness.


Do you have role models for success and who are they?

This is a really hard question for me to answer without sounding ungrateful for the very many people I have met in my career who have supported me and my work, but I don’t have any named role models for success. This might also be connected to incidents in the past where I have felt deeply let down by those who I did look up to but who abandoned me at critical points in my career. I regularly mentally honour the people from whom I have learned something new or who have shown me a new way of looking at things. My role models are composites, I suppose, a mixture of people with whom I have worked and those I observe from afar, whose achievements and ways of thinking have inspired me to trust my originality. I think if I had not got involved in museums and history, I would have enjoyed being an entrepreneur.


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Other people don’t know more, or better, than you. Trust yourself and take risks (I’m still trying to persuade myself of that last piece of advice).


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

Injustice has always affected my view on the world and issues of race and gender are no different. However, I find myself conflicted with the growing groups, networks and movements of people in the arts centred on race. On the one hand, it brings incredible and well overdue creativity and originality into our museums, and on the other hand, it highlights for me an issue that I have thankfully not had to face, at least not consciously—and maybe I am now re-examining past experiences through this lens. I have been much more concerned that I may be being invited to roundtables, working groups and conference panels because of what/who others think I represent, rather than my knowledge, expertise and way of thinking. Regarding gender, I certainly recognise discrimination more clearly. I spend much of my time with older men on the music scene and perhaps I have developed a thick skin when it comes to the routinely different manner in which I am treated compared to my male friends. As for how this relates to success, we need to give ourselves less of a hard time, not wait for permission to go for the things we want to achieve, and just do the things we think are right. This is hard when you have a living to make, but I think if enough of us like-minded people got together, the privileged white male-centred institutions we are trying to change will soon become obsolete anyway.



]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXI with Tehmina GoskarAn Ecosystem of Museum ActivismArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezWed, 05 Jun 2019 22:12:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/book-review-museum-activism56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5cebfee9b208fc0bb1645848There is a danger when activism gets theorized in an academic context to develop a sterile language that is removed from the people engaged in the cause. The book* Museum Activism, edited by Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell, tries to challenge that by valuing both academic and lived experience through their three chapters: Nurturing activism, activism in practice and assessing activism, and gives insights in the many facets of the museum activism ecosystem.

My initial thought when I heard about this book was that activism is a really broad term and has a complicated relationship with institutions like museums that are grounded in power. People bring about change and institutions can be supportive in the initiatives but institutions do have their own politics. The introduction states the kind of activism they are referring to: “We have chosen to describe this work as museum activism, in the sense of museum practice, shaped out of ethically-informed values, that is intended to bring about political, social and environmental change.” [p. 1].

Their selection of authors for the book was carefully based on the values:

  • inclusive, non-hierarchical ways of working

  • a commitment to dismantling inequalities and advancing justice

  • respect for expertise derived from lived experience

  • support human rights for all

  • acknowledgment for collective responsibility for environmental stewardship

I’ve been revisiting the work of artist Cauleen Smith lately, and her words made me think a lot about how often people/ artists/ institutions are labeled activist:

“I sometimes get tagged as activist because I pay attention to the world, but I’m not an activist. You need a certitude for that which I don’t have anymore. That’s for the young. Their agenda is social change and that requires power, but art is about destabilizing power. I’m all for change, but my work, it doesn’t serve it. I want to undermine power.”

I find Smith’s artistic practice transformational as it is rooted in the power of speculative fiction, imagining a liberated world, but she doesn’t claim authoritarian certainty of her imagination. It made me wonder if museums are able to undermine their power or if their power in the context of activism is about being a vehicle for imagination that envisions alternatives for the narrative of dominance. This role is strongly connected to the question of whose imagination and stories are valued.

Mike Murawski live tweeted his impressions about the book and shared this sentiment:

On a side note, the other day I came across Deepa Lyer's article My Role in a Social Change Ecosystem: A Mid-Year Check-In (really worth reading) and her beautiful graphic about the social change ecosystem:

(c) Deepa Lyer

Museums have changed over the centuries, adapting to the changes in society and the way knowledge is presented. In an age where we have so many information sources at hand we are asked to be critical about the sources and the conclusions they point to. Museums are part of the educational realm and more and more people are being critical about the kind of assumptions museums allow with the discourse they provide: Who gets represented in the museum discourse? How do museums respond to issues of inclusion, dominant narratives and access? What background does the staff have and which impact does it have on decision-making? How much power do board members hold and how do they get to shape the programming? These are just a few of the questions museum activists work on and why Museums are not neutral (For more information follow: La Tanya Autry, Teressa Raiford, Mike Murawski).

The statement that museum work is deeply political comes often with a lot of push back. As I stated in The Myth of Museum Neutrality or Business over Education? “It seems that people relate neutrality to a wider truth that museums need to protect at whatever cost necessary, even if the cost is producing inaccurate assumptions.  The arguments pretending Museum Neutrality exists are connected to a wider narrative where cause and effect lead to problematic assumptions . To argue that Museum Neutrality exists and to silence museums means that museums aren't allowed to correct the hetero normative view and deal with colonial heritage.“

The book acknowledges the problematic situation museums face within the neo liberal system as “Socio-environmental conditions are changing rapidly and the museum as mall is the latest trajectory. The museum as mall, although more audience-focused, embodies the dead end of materialism—over-merchandised and devoted to consumption and entertainment. It is the museum as mall that underlies our commitment to museum activism, as we believe that the relentless focus on money, consumption, and the marketplace ideology continues to diminish the museum as social institution and a key civic resource.” [p.1-2]. The museum as mall analogy is very powerful as museums need to balance growth under neo liberal terms but also work with the resources they have. While reading this the problem at the Louvre Museum came to mind where exploding visitor numbers lead to a strike by the museum employees, in particular the visitor services staff, because of the poor working conditions.

If we concentrate for a moment on the business side it is very interesting to see how we assess institutional success. In many museums visitor numbers are still one of the dominant metrics taken into account and influence as a consequence programming decisions. Art Agency Partner has been asking Museum Directors, Artists and Critics on metrics of success. Okwui Enwezor—who died recently and whose valuable thoughts are missed—gave a response that resonated with me:

I am not in principle against large numbers—who doesn’t want loads of people to come to an exhibition you create? Of course, that is always a desire. But the mission of the museum is not about attendance figures and a mass of visitors—it is to show the complexity of the field of operation, exhibiting both artists who are very well recognized and popular and also artists who are deserving of critical attention. We always have to parse the difference between loved, admired and respected. Each of these play a major role in decision making.

I am not opposed to popular exhibitions: I have made them—my Documenta was visited by hundreds of thousands, as was Venice and others. But, for me, visitor numbers are only one measure and I think we need to be careful that we don’t make them the only measure of success. This is what museums are struggling with. During my tenure at Haus Der Kunst, I was willing to risk that fundamental misunderstanding in order to champion what I believed was the central mission of our institution, which was to engage with the field in as broad and complex a way as is possible for the public to grasp.

Continuing with the business aspect and money, I stumbled when I read in the introduction of the book “Museums already have a boundless capacity to act with intelligence and sensitivity—money is not required to do this. Museum workers also know intuitively that money is not a measure of their worth” (p. 2). While I am aware that money cannot be an excuse to not do the necessary work, the people who are under financial pressure are often the people doing the work. The longer I work in the museum field and am engaged in topics around labor issues and diversity in the arts, the stronger the connection between money and privilege appears. If we want to see activist or diversity work from underrepresented groups, institutions have to make sure they get compensated for their work. There are many talented people leaving the field or in a vulnerable place of burnout because the necessary work they do does not get compensated accordingly. We cannot talk about topics of agency, diversity, inclusion and access without talking about labor issues in the arts. I was very relieved to read later throughout the first part how the editors acknowledged the financial challenges of museums and the staff as well as the need to rethink leadership and the influence of museum boards.

There were two parts in the introduction that positioned the idea of the book within the current museum discourse: 1) The notion that museums are often forced through board members to work based on neo liberal principles of indefinite growth: “Business literacy is about methods, however, not values. Values are enduring beliefs and guiding beacons about the purpose of the museum and how it will conduct itself, as well as how it will treat others. There is persistent confusion in many museums between business imperatives and values, as exemplified by preoccupation with quantitative measure—based on more revenue, more collections and more visitors. Sensitivity to the environment, cohesion, inclusion, tolerance and decentralization are values, and have nothing to do with commercial dogma and business literacy.” [p. 12]
2) The rethinking of museums in reaction to the world we’re living in where we have to “consider what the work of museums should be in the early 21st century. Culture is not about leisure, entertainment, and the overwhelming distractions of social media. Culture is about how we lead our lives. Culture is also about organizations and individuals thinking critically and assuming responsibility […].” [p. 15]

Many ideas and strategies in the book reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Emergent Strategy”.

 

Adrienne Maree Brown: Emergent Strategy, p. 15.

 

In a concept as broad as activism there is a sense of interconnectedness among different causes that are rooted in social justice work: liberation, sustainability and well-being. The museum activism portrayed in this books shares these core values. The 53 authors involved in this book did a fabulous job in translating their engagement and research into language for an academic publication that is understandable and able to convey the reasons behind their personal engagement. As the editors stated in the introduction, a book with such a big topic can only be “partial and particular” but the book is an valuable orientation within the discourse and will provide many points of reference for future research. I found this book comforting as I resonated with many of the frustrations shared in the chapters and it did make me hopeful to be reminded that there is a whole community out there doing important work.

When I read academic books that deal with activism I am always interested in their own politics and which other knowledge sources are referenced. Sara Ahmed wrote in her book Living a feminist life about citation as a commitment to challenge the reproduction of dominant knowledge.

In this book, I adopt a strict citation policy: I do not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution, as I explain in chapter 6. Instead, I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism, including work that has been too quickly (in my view) cast aside or left behind, work that lays out other paths, paths we can call desire lines, created by not following the official paths laid out by disciplines.9 These paths might have become fainter from not being traveled upon; so we might work harder to find them; we might be willful just to keep them going by not going the way we have been directed.

My citation policy has given me more room to attend to those feminists who came before me. Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.

— Sara Ahmed: Living a feminist life p. 15-16.

I am very aware that academia is not neutral and plays on its own dominant narratives, that said, I noticed that 23 out of 34 chapters referenced books and articles by the two editors Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell. Both are without a doubt excellent academics and did a lot for the topic in the field, I just think it is worth mentioning that our citation practice is part of its own diversity practice.

The contributors of the book are able to draw a very wide picture of museum activism but it would be incorrect to argue that this is the state of a global museum activism as such a thing does not exist. First of all, activism is not a linear rigid force, it has a cyclical nature adapting to its circumstances. It is always shaped by concrete local realities and so is the work of museum activism as well. Several chapters talked about the emotional labor institutional activism requires and I wish that at least one chapter would have gone deeper into the well-being of museum activists and the challenge it can represent do bring about institutional change and the professional consequences “complaint work” can have (Sara Ahmed is extensively working on a pedagogy of complaint). Another topic I hope to see in future editions is the precarious compensation of many museum workers that work on topics around engagement, diversity and activism. Museum activism is not just about outward change but needs to reflect on internal institutional structures as well.

That said, the book weaves many connection points together and is able to show that museum activism is not a flat term but holds multitudes. Here are a few chapters that I found particularly meaningful:

  • Chapter 2: Sara Wajid & Rachel Minott on “Detoxing and Decolonising Museums. If you’re not aware of the work of Museum Detox get to know them. I resonated deeply with the dilemma of money and diversity work. The emotional work that is required and the challenge to be expected to spark institutional change “like some sort of Black museum superhero” (p. 26). They elaborated on their views on insider (working on an institutional payroll) and outsider activists (with less insides into the institutional process but “with the potential to be loud, uncensored and unrelenting” and the role of Allies (a support network).

  • Chapter 4: Maria Vlachou gave some really interesting examples of museum initiatives and stated her skepticism towards museums as safe spaces and argued for the concept of museums as “empathetic spaces” (p. 54) . A concept that I’ve been thinking a lot about myself.

  • Chapter 5: Catherine Kudlick & Edward M. Luby argue in this chapter about the need to include people with disabilities in leadership positions for a true transformation in museum policies. They stated something really important: “nearly all efforts related to bringing disability into museums are done for disabled people rather than by disabled people in leadership positions.” (p. 59)

  • Chapter 6: Paula Serafini & Chris Garrad talk in their chapter about the the challenges of arts activism on agency and accountability through an analysis of BP or not BP? and the Art not Oil coalition. These networks, among many others, have been vital in their efforts to raise awareness around the topic of ethical sponsorship. The chapter focuses on the relationship of BP and the British museum. I found their thoughts around the challenges of the “ethics of activism” (p. 71) particularly interesting such as: “the politics of introducing the perspectives of frontline communities into protest actions” (p. 71); the potential “interfer[ence] with the creative work and cultural diplomacy of other Aboriginal communities who were actively liaising with the British museum” for the repatriation of stolen objects (p. 73); the “presentation and representation of frontline communities” (p. 73) with taking into account that frontline communities do not have a homogeneous voice (p. 70) and the BP or not BP? activists are a “predominantly white, middle class British activists based in the UK” (p. 71).

  • Chapter 7: Victoria Hollows’ reflections on the activist role of museums staff are a valuable dive into why many museum workers chose the work they do: values. “Values are a way to understand common ground in the principles of how people engage socially.” (p. 81) She references a larger study (Schwarz 1994) that identifies ten common value sets and divides them into “extrinsic values (self-oriented, status and wealth concerns) and intrinsic values (care for others, the environment, and concern for social justice).” (p. 81) and compares it to her own findings that revealed “that people working in museums associated closely with intrinsic values, but often perceived their museum organisations to have more connection with extrinsic concerns.” (p. 81). Hollows reflects on how values shape the way we work, and ultimately bring about change in institutions through the people working within them.

  • Chapter 9: Julie McNamara starts her chapter with a quote by Mia Mangus that I printed and hang next to my desk: “We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live—past survival; past isolation.”. Her text weaves personal experiences with works of other artists that challenged the dominant museum narrative and that influenced her own practice. I loved how this text, and many of the others in this book, is an evidence for what many of us feel “The personal is political”. Throughout the text she reflects on works that shaped her views and left her with an impact. She ends her exploration with ““It will take a great tidal force to reverse the image of the museum as an oppressive monument to a colonial past, and acknowledge the museum as a central contributor to building a just and equitable society but there are enough energetic activists and artists up for the challenge. Let’s do it.” (p. 113)

  • Chapter 11: I really appreciated Viv Golding’s chapter on Feminism and the politics of friendship in museums “Leadership and a collaborative ethos are critical to the politics of friendship and the activist museum” (p. 129).

  • Chapter 14: Njabulo Chipangura & Happinos Marufu talk about the colonial legacies in African Museums and show in their example of the Mutare Museum in Zimbabwe that “a degree of museum homogeneity amongst museums in Africa […] has […] tended to constrain, rather then encourage efforts to engage with and respond to the shifting demands of 21st century societies” (p. 166).

  • Chapter 15: Steve Lyons & Kai Bosworth’s great chapter talks about role and responsibility of museums in a time of climate emergency. “In the climate emergency museum relevance should be linked to the struggle to secure the common good” (p. 175.) which is ultimately linked to “taking a stand against the system which enables this plunder” (p. 178) and acknowledging that “the roots of the ongoing climate emergency lie in the privatization of the commons” (p.178)

  • Chapter 17: Selina Ho & Vivan Ting write about “civil-led museological activism” (p.197) during the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. Raising important questions about how a methodology of collecting changes when objects are not collected through an institution but through citizens, and what it means for the establishment of an archive when a social movement is still ongoing but there is simultaneously a need to preserve the political moment.

  • Chapter 20: Marcelo Lages Murta does a fabulous job in describing the complicated relationship between museum initiatives and political developments in Brazil. “The unequal urbanization in big cities throughout the country is also revealed in its public policies. Historically excluded from the decision-making centres, the favelas were also excluded from what used to be called ‘the city’” (p. 241). He uses the example of community centered museums in Favelas as a means to “amplify community voices in the struggle for their rights, some with the assistance of the State, others inspired by other actions” p. 241) .

  • Chapter 22: Moya McFadzen, Liza Dale-Hallett, Tatiana Mauri & Kimberley Moulton write in their chapter about the roles of museums when it comes to activism, sometimes being a “change agent” (p. 256) through a “responsive programming in collaboration with communities” (p. 266), and other times through being a “change recipient” (p. 256) where the institution needs to step back “and empower communities to identify and give voice and space to issues of public importance” (p. 266). There are many interesting resources and ways to assess the impact of projects within this chapter but I think it is particularly important to emphasize the point that institutions need to make an effort to listen to the needs of communities and be open to change their own internal structure when it is required. Activism is both “inside out” and “outside in” as the authors wrote.

  • Chapter 23: Åshild Andrea Brekke talks about the social role of museums fertilizing “social trust” (p. 274) and uses the regional Ryfylke Museum as an example. In her chapter she talks about the mission statement as a commitment to actively engage with a community and how this commitment translates into the attraction of museum workers interested in this work. “For museums to succeed in embracing a socially engaged practice over time, there needs to be congruence between the institution’s motivations and values and those of the individual museum professional, as well as an organisational culture and structure conductive to such an alignment” (p. 271). She also talks about the need for room to experiment and the willingness to build trust through honest vulnerability (p. 271-272).

  • Chapter: 27: Lynn Wray’s thought-provoking chapter explores if curating can actually ever be anti-authorial. I do not agree with all of her arguments, in particular with her arguments that curation is largely exhibition making and “primarily, a visual and spatial medium which is experienced multi-sensorily” (p. 319). I think that the curatorial practice goes beyond exhibition making and can indeed be rooted in other media to shape the discourse. I’ve been influenced by the curatorial practice of Okwui Enwezor, whose practice was deeply connected to writing (his exhibitions were always accompanied by extensive exhibition catalogues as a form of intentional memory making), there are curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist who use conversation as part of their practice or curators like Kimberly Drew (MuseumMammy) who uses social media, lecturing and other formats to extend the notion of curation.
    However, Wray is able to emphasize that curatorial practice that is supposed to connect to others has to be personal (political and values based), and she makes it very personal by sharing her experience of being the curator of the exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 and shares very openly what she’s learned.

  • Chapter 30: Jennifer Bergevin talks in her chapter about the narratives of transformation and how difficult it is to assess the impact museum visits have for visitors as “that impact is a highly individualised phenomenon which relies upon emotional commitment and critical reflection” (p. 356). Transformation is deeply connected to reflection and needs often time to take concrete form. I think her point that museums should “facilitate personalised critical reflection” (p. 356) space is very valuable. The question is how we can engage with visitors over time and to not limit it to the exhibition space.

*Disclaimer: Routledge provided me kindly with a free review copy. The opinions stated in this review are my own.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com]]>An Ecosystem of Museum ActivismWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XX with Carla GannisInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 26 Mar 2019 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-20-carla-gannis56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c91086371c10b6e3004cd1fCarla Gannis - Artist, NYC

Carla Gannis is a New York-based artist fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of physical and virtual. She received an MFA in painting from Boston University, and is faculty and the assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Upon her arrival to New York in the 1990s, Gannis began incorporating digital elements into her painting-based practice. Since then she has eclectically explored the domains of “Internet Gothic,” cutting and pasting from the threads of networked communication, online art history, and speculative fiction to produce dark and often humorous explorations of the human condition. She received widespread attention in 2013 for her emoji version of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and screenings, nationally and internationally. Recent projects include “Portraits in Landscape” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY; “Sunrise/Sunset” Whitney Museum of Art, Artport; and “Until the End of the World,” DAM Gallery, Berlin. Gannis’s work has been featured in press and publications including, ARTnews, The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The LA Times, among others.


***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

It is a beguiling and seductive premise, art fame, but there are certain varieties that can become increasingly lackluster when viewed from a distance. On the outermost ring of concentric circles orbiting the elite art world nucleus, even Damien Hirst’s diamonds shine less brightly.

I grew up in a small town where only few people knew the names of any “famous” living artists. This was pre-World Wide Web, but if I were to return there now, I doubt contemporary artist recognition would be significantly improved. Recording artists and performing artists have mass populist appeal, but the arts I’m referring to, where artists garner success through museum acquisitions and auction house sales, still resides in a more rarified domain.

Let me think about the art world by referencing the planet Saturn: there are seven rings made up of an exponential number of smaller rings representing in my metaphor the numerous art worlds that exist. Multiply the number of satellite art fairs at Art Basel Miami times ten thousand and you get the picture. Of course MoMA, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Saatchi, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, etc, etc…have real estate on Saturn, but on each of the surrounding rings, there are galleries and non-profits and apartments and garages that support the plethora of creative disciplines that fit under arts’ ample umbrella. There are famous performance artists, landscape painters, media artists, potato sculptors and traffic cone artists (I’m not making up those last two genres) residing on their small slice of a ring. Amongst their art clan, they have achieved fame and recognition.

In other words, getting back down to earth, in this atomized world, fame in the arts is relative. One’s fame can seem macrocosmic or microscopic to you, depending on your own coordinates within the system.




What is your approach to rejection as a site of success?

I’ve been a college professor for over a decade, and in that time I’ve taught professional practices courses to emerging artists. Rejection is always a topic of conversation. My maxim to students is “if you’re not receiving some rejection, you’re quite likely not pursuing enough opportunity.” Also, having participated as an artist in the marketplace program myself during my emerging art years, I learned then how important it is to develop a thick skin and an elastic ego. Rejection should fuel you to move forward, not stop you in your tracks. As every aspiring artist learns, in one art history survey or another, the art geniuses of bygone days received countless rejections during their life times. Despite it all, they became FAMOUS.

“The End”

Well, not quite the end. Here’s a confession, each time I receive a rejection I am “wounded,” I feel, against my better judgment, like a failure. This feeling may only last a few seconds, but I still feel the sting, even twenty-four years into an art career —particularly every few years when I complete the art applications marathon. My feelings of failure are illogical. (That’s my inner Spock talking). Having participated on a few award panel juries and knowing statistically that my odds —any artists’ odds— are low, to take rejection personally; or as a sign that I’m not good enough, not bright enough, not in the know enough, nor in the now enough, to be considered at least a legitimate artist, if not always a winning one; is absurd. Still, my inner Vulcan logic flies out the starship window when I read the words “We regret to inform you…”

I get “really human” over rejection.

Some of us more than others are plagued by humiliation, disappointment, low self esteem, and certainly some resentment in the face of rejection, and I doubt any artist takes every rejection in perfect stride. That said I think a heuristic over hubristic approach to not getting the grant, or winning the award, or getting picked up by the gallery is important. By heuristic, I mean being practical and open to self discovery in the face of rejection. Was the opportunity actually the best fit for your work? Was it the right time in your life or your works’ progress for this particular accolade? Is this opportunity worth applying to again and again, thus increasing the odds that one day you might reap its benefits? I ask myself those and other questions, avoiding the sour grapes mentality as much as I can. The “I’ll have the last laugh some day, when I’m famous and ‘you’ (organization, jury, gallerist) will feel humiliated in not recognizing my talent” fuels some people (and certainly on occasion I have harbored these feelings too), but that mantra rings hollow after a couple of years, and certainly after a few decades, when you find more and more that you’re incredibly thankful and hopefully humbled by the fact that circumstances still exist that allow you to make art —whether they include an economy that doesn’t require you to labor 16 hour days to subsist, or a government that doesn’t imprison you because of non-conforming themes in your creative output, or a group of friends and family who believe in you— you’re still making art. This doesn’t mean you lose ambition for your art, you just let go of some of the ambition for your ego.

Back in the snail mail era, one could usually tell when their awaited parcel was a rejection, based on how light the envelope was. Now rarely do we get to weigh our rejection parcels delivered in electronic form, and I no longer keep a pile of rejection letters in a corner to goad myself on. I don’t need to anymore. Rejection is real, it is palpable, but it can be weightless in the grand scheme of your art career, if you let it be, if you let it go.

From “Until the End of the World” HD 3D animated video, 6 min, 2017

Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

I’m going to be frank here. Yes, I know I’m Carla, but when I’m Frank I’m more candid, (sorry, I’ll probably commit a pun or two again in this interview). Frankly, I got quite pissed off at the world, at my lot in life, at my humble origins, after I moved, at 24 years old, to New York City. I was from proverbial Podunk, USA. I had a small income. I had no family within a 500 mile radius. I knew two people in the city, and I had very little financial stability. It was here, in New York, where I have lived ever since, that I truly discovered that income and financial stability equals success like two plus two equals four. It’s not the only equation by any means, but it’s the default equation for the most generic definition of success.


One of my early day jobs in New York was as a decorative painter working in the Hamptons. Our wealthy clients preferred “artists” who painted, over “workers” who glued, patterns onto their walls. I suppose even painted wallpaper fits into the aura of scarcity, the pretense that fuels so much of the high finance art world. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy for the work, because that meant I could continue to live in the city, and to maintain my capital A art practice in the evenings and on weekends —well, that is, when I wasn’t assisting other artists, waiting tables, doing temporary office work, working at a gallery, managing an art bookstore, interning for free to learn video editing, or teaching myself computing, to finally elevate myself out of the low wage status that an MFA in painting had provided me. Of course, because the story I’m sharing with you is not unique, on top of rent and art supplies, I had student loans. By the way, last year at 47 years old I finally paid off all of my student debt.🎉

Now, back to being pissed off. Through working jobs in the arts and “distinguished” crafts, and in going to gallery openings and their after parties, I soon discovered that a large percentage of the successful artists and art aficionados I was meeting, or more often, getting in close proximity to, had come from wealthy, or at least, significantly upper middle class backgrounds. I was meeting “go-getters” who’d never had to go or get after their dreams like I felt I had. Good goddess, I’m sure they were sent to the “right” pre-schools in preparation for joining the New York, and world, art elite. They’d traveled extensively, been schooled “ivy-leaguedly,” and had formed friendships strategically. Their parents and their parents’ parents had done, or made, or purchased significant, if not historic, things. They were, and I suppose they still are (who am I kidding using past tense?), the winners that history favors —in the positions of privilege where the “luck of success” occurs far less randomly than to those in the lower echelons. So yes, I was pissed off, but not at any one of these people, “luck” really was bestowed to them upon birth I rationalized. I was furious with a system perpetuating cavernous gaps between the haves and the have-nots. Simultaneously I was furious at my not being on the right side of the gap in the very system I found inequitable and shallow. It’s cognitive dissonance, and I think it’s something many artists grapple with in pursuing the American (or the French, Japanese, South African, British, German, United Arab Emirates, Mexican, Canadian, etc…) Art Dream, i.e. an “anti-capitalist” capitalist dream of success.

I’m not pissed off anymore, well not in my twenty-four year old vehement, unaware of my own privilege, thinking the world owes me something, and by the time I’m thirty I’ll be “discovered,” kind of way. After a few years in New York, I recognized that if I was going to survive as a person with the “I cannot not make stuff” impulse, the impulse that had been driving me towards a career int the arts since my childhood —back when I was free to just revel in the joy of making, because my parents provided me with shelter and food and safety, and that thing even higher on Maslow’s pyramid, encouragement— well, for that “me” to prevail as an adult, I needed to reassess my definition of success in the arts. So, I threw away all of my paintings, the medium that I had defined myself by; I was a painter before I was an artist. I destroyed the objects that I once believed would provide me entrée into the glamorous world of fine art. I wasn’t enjoying making paintings anymore, particularly as my thoughts on class and gender in relation to artistic success were evolving.

As humanity was approaching the end of the twentieth century, I discovered I had a proclivity for working with digital technologies. I found joy in this work, in this play. I could build worlds in my computer, that I could never afford to build in a physical space; and regarding income and financial stability, with computer skills I could earn a better wage at my day job. Letting go of the mythology, instilled in me throughout art school, that earning a living through commercial means is “selling out,” I made new negotiations with myself, not through received knowledge, but through looking critically and honestly at the art world I’d had blind faith in. After several years working in the commercial world, which I admit can be soul-sucking, while maintaining my practice as a digital artist (by now I should just say artist), in 2005 I re-entered academia, as a teacher this time. I love teaching, and it is the esteemed day job a mid-career artist will admit to having at an art opening. Few people, I’ve found, like to talk about their day jobs at openings, but if you’re a professor, your job garners respect —if only more professorships provided stability along with prestige. The exploitation of adjuncts working in art schools too often perpetuates the vicious cycle of financial instability so many artists face throughout their lives. The inattention paid to the working artists’ plight I see as a hindrance to humanities’ success.

The Garden of Emoji Delights, digital C-print, 13ft x 7ft, 2014 © Courtesy of the Artist

How do you define success in the arts?

These are examples of success to me:

  1. When you’re compelled to get to your studio, to make something—even if your studio also functions as the bed you sleep in and the laptop you use for paying bills with— you’re setting aside the mental space and the time for art to be conjured.

  2. If you’re finding some kind of fulfillment in the process —first beginning in the studio that is your mind, then sifted, translated, remapped and reconfigured into a representation: an object, an experience, or event; one that exists outside of just you, beyond your innermost core—you are “succeeding” as an artist.

  3. If this translative act feels deeply personal to you, no matter how philosophical or academic or farcical or absurd the content may be, but you are equally compelled to share it in such a way that another person experiences it with recognition, as if its part of a pattern, to which you both belong, in the expression of human, earthly and cosmological conditions, I’d say you are succeeding in art. Art is communication, and art is a gift.

  4. After feeling the grief, love, anger, happiness, forlornness, redemption, empathy, hostility, fact, and/or curiosity that sparks you to create a work of art, you recognize that there is still a long distance to travel from inspiration to manifestation. The process through which you make art requires your time, commitment, and steadfast belief in its intrinsic value and role as a progenitor for your art. Devotion to your practice leads to success.



Do you have role models for success and who are they?

Yes, I cannot imagine navigating an art life without having my mentors and role models, many of whom, through their struggles for inclusion and recognition, have provided a path for myself and so many others to actualize our practices.

The artist Lynn Hershman Leeson is very significant to me. She is one of my sheroes. I saw her film “Conceiving Ada” in the late 1990s. It was my first introduction to her work, and I was blown away. Lynn’s commitment to a future vision, that has extended far beyond the more myopic preoccupations of many in the mainstream art world, has continued to provide me with inspiration and fortitude. It’s fascinating that curators and critics are only now truly recognizing how prescient her work has been all along. With screenings and exhibitions at MoMA, the Whitney and ZKM, she is successful in the eyes of a much larger art audience today, however she’s been recognized as a pioneering and successful artist by colleagues, art students and new media artists for well over 30 years.

Artists Claudia Hart, Lorna Mills, Michael Rees, Will Pappenheimer, and Tamiko Thiel [who also participated in this interview series-Ed.] are all artists who I look to as models for success, particularly in their contributions to emerging media forms. Like Lynn, they were the people doing the astonishingly cool things before everyone else realized they were cool.

That spirit of innovativeness, tenacity and generosity lives on in the practices of several young artists who I respect a great deal, including Gretta Louw [also part of this series-Ed.], Angela Washko, RAFiA Santana, Faith Holland, Lajuné McMillian, Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Cao Fei, and Alfredo Salazar-Caro.


My final listicle is of an art historical flavor. It includes Philip Guston, Suzanne Valadon, Artemisia Gentileschi, Louise Bourgeois, Hieronymus Bosch and Giotto di Bondone – I studied painting at a school where Guston had taught (many years before I arrived there), and coincidentally we share the same birthday. I have always felt a very strong connection to his work, particularly to his late work, where he resisted the art establishment and made pictures that he felt truly represented his time. Valadon, an autodidact, likewise bucked the conventions of nineteenth century “lady painting” focusing on the female nude throughout her oeuvre. Gentileschi in the seventeenth century established herself as an artist who painted historical and mythological paintings, rendering women with more agency and strength than her male contemporaries. Bourgeois’ work, the rawness of her drawings particularly, were quite significant to me as a young artist. I got to attend her Sunday Salons twice in New York, providing me with the opportunity to share my work with her. She was a tough critic by the way. Bosch and Giotto have long been favorites, for the enigmatic and eccentric quality of Bosch’s painting, and the amalgam of Medieval and Renaissance perspectives colliding in the fresco cycles by Giotto.



Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Slow down and speed up.

A caveat, when I was eighteen I was still far, far away from any kind of art world we’re having a conversation about. As I mentioned earlier, I was coming from a small town. I was attending an in-state school, because that was all I could afford, making paintings far more illuminated by the past than the present. Still, in the context of all the different art worlds one can inhabit (there are many outside of the mainstream contemporary art world, although none on Saturn yet to my knowledge), I would tell myself “slow down Carla, on your outward fascination with all that seems to glitter about the art life: success, fame, fortune and notoriety. Speed up on your inner investigation of what you have to say and how you can instantiate it as form." I’d also say to myself, find a community of peers who you share passion (not just ambition, and certainly not just “interest”) with. Art that is truly responsive to its time does not, cannot, arise from a vacuum. I say this because I allow for the existence of a collective conscious that we are connected to through an array of frequencies. This is not something I believe in, it’s something I intuit to be true. So the idea that art pops out of a single individual’s head, fully formed and autonomous, like Athena from the head of Zeus, is preposterous to me. It’s a great myth, but a tired explanation for artistic genius. We are social creatures. We are storytellers. Art arises out of our communal experiences, and it stays alive through our gifting it to one another.

There’s one more reminder I’d give to 18-year-old me. I am an only child and was told early on, perhaps even before I exhibited such tendencies, that I was an over-achiever and highly success-oriented, so hey young Carla listen up, “to have self worth you don’t need to be the shiniest star in the art community, or to continue with the metaphor, the shiniest star in the constellation you’ve formed a bond with. A cohort of bright, empathetic people who feel creatively akin to each other, can form a constellation far more radiant and symbolic than a single gaseous spheroidal body (i.e. a star). You all may one day be the “Big Dipper” that guides others along their creative paths. Just as likely, your constellation may only be perceived by a few human eyes, instead of millions. You may not be picked up collectively, or individually, by the “Hubble Art Telescope.” Either alternative is possible, and a million others, if you recognize the possibilities of forking paths. Continue Carla, continue to be mystified by the universe and remain grateful for your coordinates within it. Recognize that success comes to you every time you choose to actively and compassionately engage with your senses, releasing the particles of your inspiration into the atmosphere of this curious and wondrous thing called life.

Origins of the Universe, 2017-2018 3D printed polyamide with copper plating, smart phone, fixed video, pedestal, plexi vitrine 5 x 10 x 13.4 in, sculpture 54.75 x 14 x 17.5 in © Courtesy of the artist

Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

As I began answering this question, the United Colours of Benetton advertising campaign, from the early 90s, popped into my head (and no Athena popped out). I remember thinking at the time in looking at those ads that we were well on our way to achieving multicultural harmony in a globalized world. I was young and naive and obviously could not have been more mistaken. By the mid 2000s I was finding myself in conversations with other Gen X female artists who refused to, or were afraid to call themselves feminists. They feared it would hurt their chances of success in the art world. At this time, around 2005, the representation of people of color and female identified artists in the art world was still very small compared to the number of white male artists represented in museum exhibitions, galleries and in auction houses.

Today, I am encouraged that many artists have once again taken up the feminist mantle, expanded by its intersectional dimensions, due in large part to the efforts and activism of Millennial and Gen Z generations. Also there has been a sea change in the arts over the past few years, in response to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. Curators, administrators and trustees representing major art institutions are waking up to the realization that their programming, acquisitions and funding structures need to support a much more diverse population of artists. Indeed museums and galleries across the United States (I don’t have statistics on other countries but it seems to be global) are stepping up, and providing platforms for artists fighting for equity, inclusion and justice.

I’m not sure if the art pool is altogether public yet, but as private pools go, it has taken steps in the right direction towards opening up its membership. Thankfully some intolerable art world miscreants have had their passes revoked too. They didn’t seem to get the memo that their abuses of power would no longer be tolerated —or, at least, would no longer be tolerated in certain sectors of the arts. Unfortunately there’s another memo circulating too, in the heavy winds following along the tidal wave that is Donald Trump’s presidency. Across the planet a swell of authoritarian leaders, supported by a populist surge, have taken control. These violent waves are crested with white supremacist and men’s rights groups spewing hate-filled messages that I once believed had all been plastered over by Benetton ads promoting diversity.

Artists, activists, intellectuals, professors, we are currently swimming in dangerous geopolitical waters. Now more than ever we need to strengthen our creative communities, and in the face of dangerous opposition, to celebrate our individual and communal artistic successes.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.comWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XX with Carla GannisWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XIX with Tina SauerlaenderInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 19 Mar 2019 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-19-tina-sauerlaender56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c825852e5e5f06832a6235fTina SauerlAender - Curator, Berlin

Tina Sauerlaender is a curator and writer based in Berlin. She focuses on the impact of the digital and the internet on individual environments and society. With her exhibition hub »peer to space« she has been organizing and curating international group exhibitions in various institutions, e.g. Pendoran Vinci. Art and Artificial Intelligence Today (curated with Peggy Schoenegge, NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, 2018), Deep Water Cultures (Goethe-Institut Montréal, 2018), The Unframed World. Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century (HeK Basel, 2017), Sometimes You See Your City Differently (Feinberg Projects, Tel Aviv, 2016), PORN TO PIZZA—Domestic Clichés (DAM Gallery, Berlin, 2015). She is the co-founder of »Radiance«, an international online platform for artistic Virtual Reality experiences. And she is the founder of the SALOON, a network for women working in the art field in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris and Vienna as curators, artists or journalists, as well as in galleries, museums or universities.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

Fame in the sense of public visibility is important for me, because it means that people see what we are doing and become interested in it. They want to know what our shows and the artists’ works are about. This is the key for communicating and conveying our exhibitions to an audience as broadly as possible.


What is your approach to rejection?

When I was a child, my mom used to say “Who knows what it's good for,” or "When one door closes, another one opens." I found this quite annoying and frustrating at the time, but today I often think about it when things don’t work out the way I want them to. And, I have to admit, it helps. Rejection, failure or setbacks are part of life, in every realm. You can’t always win. It is all about not surrendering, it is about getting up again to pursue what you really believe in and what you think makes the world and the society you live in a better place.


Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

I traded financial stability for a very self-determined life style. It is OK. But sometimes I wish that there would be more understanding in society that a curator, or any other cultural worker, should be paid properly in order to pay for living, taxes and a pension plan – just like any employee. Further I wish that all employees at institutions who are responsible for processing fees, would do so in the agreed upon time frame, because they respect the financial situation of freelancers.

Tina Sauerlaender and Peggy Schoenegge, peer to space. Photo: © Jonas Blume, 2018

How do you define success in the arts?

Success is defined as the achievement of set goals or a positive outcome of an effort. To me, there are many big and small successes every day. It can be an exhibition review in a renowned newspaper or the packed opening of the first big show in New York, but it can also be the new update on one of our websites or an inbox that is finally empty, even just for a few minutes. I also consider it a success whenever I can bring people together and help to create awesome new projects. To me it is very important to take time every day to appreciate these successes and be thankful for and proud of them.



Do you have role models for success and who are they?

I chose my role models because of their mindset, their approach towards life and human living conditions. There is Chris Dercon who showed me how unconventional thinking and networking brings people together and those are crucial keys to meaningful and successful exhibitions. There are the books by Sherry Turkle which encouraged me in my belief that my ways of working, thinking and seeing the world are ok, the way they are, and ultimately my key to success. And there is the artist Thomas Schütte with his wonderful works on paper entitled Deprinotes that taught me that failure and crisis are a part of the game and can also lead to success and happiness. There is the psychologist Verena Kast with her books about understanding and embracing the so-called dark sides of a human being. And of course, there is Sailor Moon, who made me understand that I can be a hero, even if I am clumsy and bad at math, as long as I trust in myself and I am surrounded by awesome friends aka. Sailor warriors. Together we fight for love and justice, two truly important values for me.

Installation shot, Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition (2019), curated by Tina Sauerlaender, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School. Photo: Marc Tatti

Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

In terms of success: Learn to state your opinion and to fight for yourself and your own value. Ask for help, if you need some. More general: Learn about feminism, gender, race (things that are not at all taught at school in a patriarch country like Germany); learn about histories and languages of non-Western cultures; travel; interrogate your grandparents about their past.



Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

Success in arts for non-white-males is harder to achieve, facts and figures prove that. Just now the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, that opened in 1994, presents their acquisitions in a show called NOW IS THE TIME with 76% male and 24% female artists. And in my field the situation is very similar. In 2018, of 6 group shows in Germany and Austria on the topic of Virtual Reality or Immersion, 30% of the artists were female and 70% male. And of course, there are great VR women artists out there, if you take a look at our equally balanced platform RadianceVR.co.

However, there are many reasons for this imbalance, but one crucial one, which derives from history of inequality and is still palpable today: Society puts more trust in men than in women, which happens mostly unconsciously. By asking ourselves every day in different situations “Would I have reacted/judged/decided the same way, if this person was a male/ female/ POC/ LGBTQ?”, we can foster change in ourselves and society. In terms of success in the arts for women another reason for the imbalance is evident. Women, due to their inherited social role, are not as good as men in making themselves visible and advocate for their value. Women should be much more confident and practice that. Success for artists with diverse backgrounds in the Western realm seems in particular short term, rather than structural. For example, I can see that non-Western artists are invited to Western biennials or the Documenta, but then I don’t see so many shows with them afterwards. It seems like just a fleeting performance. I wish for more institutional shows of non-Western artists. Museum curators, google art museums in different continents and send an email and start establishing a new network for structural change, please.

Links for more information on the projects of Tina Sauerlaender

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XIX with Tina SauerlaenderWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XVIII with Katie WestInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 12 Mar 2019 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-18-katie-west56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c7ceacbf4e1fc6a4a8d3848Katie West - Artist and Writer, Edinburgh

Katie West is a writer, photographer, editor, director, and executive assistant. Katie West is the owner of Fiction & Feeling publishing company that published Becoming Dangerous [btw. one of my favorite books 2018-Ed.] that has been picked up by Weiser books for worldwide release in April 2019. She also edits and writes comics.

Find more about Katie on her website.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?

Fame in the arts seems like a subjective thing. What constitutes fame? Is it having a hundred thousand Instagram followers? Or is it having a gallery show in a big city? Is it the same as success? I don’t think it is. Fame seems to be a sliding scale of how well-known an artist is. When I think of contemporary famous artists, the first one who came to my mind was Banksy. He’s the sort of artist that my dad would know of, that idea of a ‘household name.’ But he’s also an interesting example because he doesn’t suffer from any of the pitfalls of fame, as no one knows who he is. Being famous would be nice because you’d be able to make a living from your art, and I think that’s an ideal situation for most artists. But fame is definitely not in my definition of success, and it doesn’t seem like an enjoyable thing.


What is your approach to rejection?

If you believe your work is good and has value, than rejection can just be a sign that you haven’t found the right place or person to show your art. And if that rejection comes with feedback that you find useful (because not all feedback is deserving of your time!) than you can take that and learn from it to hopefully lead to success in the future. Rejection is definitely not a sign to stop creating though, or even to change direction. Keep doing you despite rejection and I think any success will feel more sweet as you’ve stayed true to your self. Rejection also proves you tried. You created the thing and you took a chance and put it out into the world. Even if you failed, it’s better than not having ever put yourself and your art out there at all.



Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

I don’t necessarily think that income or financial stability define success, but they are definitely good things to have. It can feel like a sign of success when you can live off of your art--when you can quit your ‘day job’. But that thinking can be damaging as well, because financial stability is often fickle, and it shouldn’t be tied into our worth and whether or not we consider ourselves successful. One of the most difficult things in life I’ve ever had to deal with is being poor. There’s stress, and then there’s money stress, and it’s a whole other beast. Being able to escape those stresses is usually the goal, and however we’re able to do that feels good, whether it’s from our art efforts or not. I know some people don’t like to tie their financial stability to their art, and this makes sense too. If an artist creates to relieve stress or to express themselves, that intimate nature of the art can feel pressure to be compromised by having to create in order to pay bills and pay rent. So maybe it’s helpful for the definition of success to not be tied to financial stability for those artists.


How do you define success in the arts?

I definitely believe each artist needs to individually define success for themselves. The factors that affect this definition can range from their upbringing, to their surroundings, to their identity, to their education, to their family life, to their relationships, to the country and political systems they exist in.

For me personally, success in the arts is being able to create the work that really matters to me and that I see making a difference in others’ lives. If I can create a book that elevates underrepresented voices and ideas, and I didn’t have to compromise on my commitment to that, then I consider myself a success. I also see success as reaching a level where you can start giving back to creators just starting out in your industry, either financially, or with mentorships or internships, anything that gives opportunity to those who need and deserve them.



Do you have role models for success and who are they?

I think because the artistic industry I’m most familiar with is comics, I’m most inspired by Warren Ellis. He built a career on making smart, outrageous, thoughtful comics. And once he realised people were listening to what he had to say, he immediately started turning the spotlight on the emerging creators around him. I think a not insignificant amount of people owe their careers to him, and not just people in comics, but photographers, scientists, academics, novelists. This is such a simple, yet life-changing approach to success. I hope one day I have enough industry cred to launch the careers of others.



Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

I think like all young women, it would’ve helped to have someone tell me to trust myself. But I think part of figuring out who you are is to just kind of be messy for awhile? And figuring yourself out helps with success, or, I think it helps you recognise and appreciate it. And also I’d tell myself, there’s no rush. You don’t have to achieve everything by the time you’re 25. Or even 30. Oh, and please don’t measure your own success by comparing it to others’! That actually just makes you feel awful and results in you getting nothing done.


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

Throughout much of modern history, the arts, like most other facets of society, have operated under systems institutionally designed to be unfair to everyone but white men. Having success in the arts as anyone other than a white man has historically proved difficult. Today systems of race, gender, and class inequality continue to function; so in order to provide equal access to success, we have to work at dismantling those systems. And that’s why it’s the responsibility of anyone with white or male privilege to elevate and amplify people without those privileges. Art is better when it’s expansive and inclusive and when the voices and ideas of everyone have the opportunity to be heard and seen. But the responsibility is not on people of colour, or women, or LGBTQ artists to break down barriers, it’s for those of us with privilege to take those barriers down.

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XVIII with Katie WestWhat Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XVII with Tamiko ThielInterview Series: What does success in the Arts look like?Anabel Roque RodríguezTue, 05 Mar 2019 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/success-interview-17-tamiko-thiel56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c7baf610d9297297038e2c3Tamiko Thiel - ArTist, Munich

Tamiko Thiel is an internationally active American media artist who specializes in exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity. Her work is engaged in the dramatic and poetic capabilities of virtual and augmented realities as media for exploring social and cultural issues. Tamiko Thiel attended Stanford University and graduated with a B.S. in Product Design Engineering with an emphasis on human factors design in 1979. She later went on to receive her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1983 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, she studied human-machine design at the school's Biomechanics Lab and computer graphics at the precursors to the Media Lab. In 1991, Thiel received her Diploma in Applied Graphics, specializing in video installation art, from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany.

You can find more about her work on her website.

***

What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?
I can't find direct quotations right now, but a couple of examples have stayed with me over the years about the futility of trying to work for the market, if your work does not hit the trends of the time anyway:

From reading art history, I knew that many artists whom we consider famous now never achieved fame in their lifetime. Van Gogh is the prime example: in his letters to his brother Theo, I was surprised to read that he thought some of his paintings could please bourgeois customers, as this went against our view of him as a sworn outsider. The best these artists could hope for was respect from their fellow artists, and some did not even receive that, if they were not able to find a community that shared their interests and aesthetics.

I had also read of people who were successful - even legendary - in some other creative field, perhaps as comic book illustrators or graphic designers, but still felt they were failures because they wanted approval for their (unsuccessful) paintings from the high art mavens of the time. I have always hoped I would be able to understand what my strengths were and take pleasure in any recognition for them (I wouldn't call it fame), instead of always thirsting after recognition for something that the world wasn't interested in seeing from me.

Then there was the example of my life drawing teacher Derith Glover, who had been at MIT's famous Center for Advanced Visual Studies doing media art, but in 1982 told me that what she really wanted to do was figurative painting, even though for decades this had been scorned as old-fashioned and no real artist would ever want to do this. Well, a year later, after the art world had spent decades of proclaiming that figurative painting was dead, all of a sudden the young German Neo-Expressionists burst on the scene and became instantly famous because they had just started doing figurative painting and it was so avant-garde. So it was clear to me that the art world was as trend-driven as the fashion world. If you didn't surf the wave, your work wouldn't get shown. You had to decide whether you could adapt your art to the trends of the time, or do the work you were compelled internally to do and hope you lived to see the day when your body of work would be recognized as a contribution to some aspect of art history.

The final nail in the coffin of my concept of fame in the arts was my experience in 1985 as a new art student in Munich. I wanted to study in Europe, and heard that the (famous) Neo-Expressionist painter Jörg Immendorff was a guest professor in Munich. I sent slides of my work to him and he invited me to participate in a workshop near the end of the school year in June. One of his students, Gisela Hellinger, "adopted" me as her younger sister on my first day in Munich, two weeks later we were celebrating Immendorff's 40th birthday in his club on the Reeperbahn red light district in Hamburg, and a month after that we were all supposed to move into his studio. We would live together, paint together and we would all become instantly famous.

Well, he turned out to be a total jerk and by July the bubble had popped and we were all back in Munich as normal, lowly art students with no contact to the rich and famous. The other important realization that came out of this was that if being "successful" required becoming a total jerk and a very nasty human being, or licking the boots of such a person, I was not interested in selling my soul to this devil. I would rather look for other ways to support my "art habit" and create work that was meaningful to me, myself and I.

The good that came out of this was that I then had a community of art students and friends in Munich who helped me through all the details of being a foreigner in a foreign land, learn German, and get into art school the following year as a regular student. This community was my support structure through five years of art school (which was and is tuition free, like all Germany universities), despite often making comments like, "Why did you leave engineering? You're such a bad artist, but at least as an engineer you could make money." I could only fall back on the idea, best articulated by another art student Thomas Arnold, that "I have to make art because I can't do anything else." This was not because we had no other abilities, but on the contrary because all of us had had successful careers in other fields, but now had surrendered to an internal imperative and personal, emotional need to make art. This included making work that was incomprehensible even for my art friends, because I had given up my successful career as an engineer not to please them, but to answer an inner need of my own. My motto as an art student was, "Every artist makes a lot of bad art - I want to make all of mine NOW."


© Tamiko Thiel,Still from Golden Seed, 1991

What is Your approach to rejection?

My first video, The Golden Seed (also called The Golden Egg), which was the German equivalent of my Masters of Art graduation project, got shown around quite a bit and was a finalist in the Videonale in Bonn. My second piece, Totems of Heavenly Wisdom, got shown once in a gallery in San Francisco, and then never again. When I finally worked up the courage to ask a curator friend why, he said it didn't address any of the relevant issues for video art. I then went off and read anything I could find on video art, and they all said that video art should critique the technology of video, or of "looking," or surveillance cameras, or the sociology of television, etc. etc. I was totally uninterested in all these themes, but realized that I was not likely to become "successful" as a video artist because most curators would follow this consensus, at least until the current trends changed (see above). I realized I had to make work that interested me, and try to find curators who liked my work and wanted to show it, and go for the long run.

There were clear pathways to success also in the media art field, such as winning the Golden Nica at the Ars Electronica Festival, or getting a residency at the ZKM. I was offered a residency at the ZKM in the 1990s, but this verbal offer was rescinded before it could be finalized when a new director came on board. End of yet another dream of success. And the Ars Electronica Festival has never accepted any of my artworks. So any success I have had in the field is because there were other curators out there who did value my work, and who did mentor me and did exhibit my work (Itsuo Sakane, Kathy Rae Huffman, George Fifield, and Christiane Paul to name just a few with whom I have had the longest relationships). Over the 28 years since I got out of art school, these shows and the works I made turned into a "body of work" that is slowly gaining wider recognition.



Any thoughts on income and financial stability and success?

I have only cracked Alexis Clements' median income figures in years that I have had substantial full-time teaching or professional jobs - never by selling artworks or through commissions. It would be great if this were to change, but I am not counting on it.

I think it is very important to try to separate income and financial stability from any concept of "success" or desire for "fame." If you don't, the pursuit of "success" or "fame" will become so existentially important to your concept of self, that it will destroy you if you do not achieve or cannot maintain it. Financial success has to be separate from your measure of self-worth.

This was drilled into me as a child - my mother is an artist but was never able to support herself, so she emphasized that I should first learn a profession, and after that could always become and artist. As I was good at math and science, but also had an artistic bent, I ended up in the Stanford Product Design program. I worked as a packaging designer for computer terminals, was very successful at this (every product I ever worked on went to market, which is unusual), very well paid and highly respected and mentored by my (all male!) co-workers and bosses. Long term, this gave me an emotional stability that had helped me get through financial instabilities.

I left this all to go study art in Europe, as described, with just enough savings in the bank to survive 6 months without working and with the knowledge that if it didn't work out, I could always find work as an engineer back in the USA. What I didn't realize back then was that by the time I graduated from art school I was essentially too old for any grants, which at that time almost exclusively went to people under 30. That realization also made it clear to me that the artistic endeavor was going to be a long hard trudge, as I had completely missed the timeframe to become a young superstar, which has to happen ideally in your twens or at least before you are 35 years old.



How do you define success in the arts?

Choosing to work in the media arts in the early 1990s meant deciding from the beginning to ignore the art market and any hope for financial success, since even video was considered uncollectable. I'm still not sure if I will ever have financial success with my media art as an older woman, even though I know there are now young media artists who are earning a lot of money. I chose media art partly because it fascinated me, I enjoyed the challenge of working in a medium that was very undefined and I felt that with time-based work (unlike with my painting) that I could judge when I had created a "successful" work. (Note that this did not necessarily mean that other people judged my work to be successful!) The other reason, frankly, was that since there was no way to make money from media art, there was a really wonderful community of people who helped each other, and the nasty personalities that I had encountered in the world of painting were absent. I expect that nowadays some people can make money from media art, but the number of sharks in the tank will increase.

Tamiko Thiel's Unexpected Growth uses augmented reality (AR)-the overlay of virtual elements onto physical reality-to create a parallel dimension of organic growth for the Whitney's Floor 6 outdoor gallery. Thiel's virtual growth consists of plastic refuse and coral-like formations, and offers a playful yet ominous glimpse of a future where sea levels have risen to dangerous levels and ecosystems are irreversibly contaminated.

Augmented Reality Installation by Tamiko Thiel (with /p), Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art New York as part of the exhibition: "Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018" September 28, 2018 – April 14, 2019. Press release>

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

Lynn Hershman-Leeson is and always has been an amazing role model. The first time I saw her work in the 1990s I was completely blown away - and asked myself why she wasn't considered famous by the art world, as her work was introducing new ways of seeing things, a quality the art world seemed to be looking after. (This is of course the same question I asked myself when I first saw work in more "traditional" genres from Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, etc.) The way Hershman-Leeson endured despite not having commercial success was heroic - she mentions that she didn't sell a work of art until she was 72 years old, and when the ZKM held her big retrospective in 2014 many of the pieces were being exhibited for the very first time.

A tremendous inspiration for me as an art student was the amazing collection of paintings by Kandinsky at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, which had free entry on Sundays. I identified strongly with him, because he too switched careers at a late age: he was 30 when he turned down a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat in Estonia, and came to Munich as a very mediocre art student. I would go to the Lenbachhaus, look briefly at the truly awful muddy paintings that he did in his first years, repeat my mantra that I should make all my bad art NOW, and follow the steps of his development as his paintings became brilliant in both color, composition and concept, accompanied by his ideas of abstraction and meaning. If he could codify it for painting, I could codify it for time-based media, I thought, and this became the basis of my work initially with video, and then with interactive 3D virtual worlds.


Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Ask yourself the question: if I die in the next 30 seconds, will my last thoughts be, "At least I followed my dreams and stayed true to myself?" Or will you die thinking, "Damn, I never got around to trying to do X?" If the latter applies, change your life. (This question really did pop into my head at age 16, and I have used it as a touchstone ever since.)

A recent article on Artsy said - surprise surprise - it's not so much what you do, it's who you know that influences your success. The problem is that not everyone who you think that could benefit your success will like you or be good for your psychological and emotional state of being. So don't try to befriend anyone who clearly doesn't like you or respect you or treat you well, even if they can make you "famous" - you will despise yourself for doing it and they will drive you into ruin, psychologically if not financially. Don't lick anyone's boots. Don't look for the quick win - go for the long run. The curator who loves your work but is a "nobody" now might become really influential later. If you ignore her now because she's not famous, why should she show you later when she is? Search for people who like you and admire your work, who you can trust, and with whom you can work well. Return their admiration and their trust. Maybe in 7 - 20 years something will come of it - maybe not. But your sense of self-worth will be better than if you sell your soul.

Don't forget to read the biographies of artists you admire. That will help you understand more of the mechanisms at work in the art world, then and now, whether it helped them or they had to fight against it. (See below for more on this topic.)


Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

I think we are lucky to be living in a time when more attention is being paid to (especially older) women artists (and hopefully older male artists too) and artists of color of all genders, and that major museums are opening up to exhibit them in a way they haven't before. We should however recognize that the art world follows trends just like the fashion world does, so we should not expect this will necessarily go on - although we should all work damn hard to make sure it does. The best way to ensure a real systemic change is to keep up the pressure to move more women and people of color into positions of POWER.

If you read biographies of many women artists being "recognized" now in their 70s, 80s, 90s or 100s, you will find that when they were young, or middle aged, they had shown in the top galleries of the time, in the Whitney or Venice Biennials or Documenta, etc. What didn't happen is a transformation from this art world recognition into sales of their art work at high prices. So recognition and fame, especially for women or people of color, does not necessarily translate into financial success, which I guess is what this series is all about.

I'm reading "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan (1963) and was surprised to learn that the "message" sent out by women's magazines in the USA before World War II was actually one of women's empowerment, and that only after WWII occurred did the message change into "a woman's place is in the home." How did the message transform so significantly? To oversimplify her argument: when all the men came home from the war women were pressured to give up their work positions to men, and when men started writing and publishing most of the articles in women's magazines, they espoused a view of womanhood and "femininity" that could almost exclusively be fulfilled by taking care of men. So in the late 19th/early 20th century there was a move to (white, middle class) women's empowerment, the clock was turned back after WWII, and in the 1970s the Women's Liberation movement (for white, middle class, heterosexual college educated women) had to start again almost from scratch, out of a sense that despite all outward measures of comfort they still felt unfullfilled and empty inside.

I do hope that the wave of empowerment of women, LGBTQ‎ and people of color that we are currently experiencing will not just roil some beach sands and shift the sand dunes, but rather significantly shape the entire coastline - for good, and for the better.

]]>What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XVII with Tamiko ThielGenerosity is not a Substitute for JusticeFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezTue, 05 Feb 2019 12:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/generosity-is-not-a-substitute-for-justice56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c530c07562fa7e1faa21920Everyone who has ever done a project has had to answer the question “Where does the money come from?” and it seems pretty obvious that whoever contributes cash flow has a certain interest attached to the provided financial means. The funding of causes like education and culture, often desperately in search for strong partners, is complicated as institutions easily end up in fragile positions where it seems an expensive luxury to measure corporate interests of a sponsor against the future of a project.

For many institutions the relationship to their sponsors is benevolent and productive, for others however, the pleasing of sponsors becomes a delicate management of compromises. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, right? But what does this dependent position do to the autonomy of cultural institutions, education or journalism? How do we protect institutions that are critical, sometimes uncomfortable, providing essential research, from continuing to do so without having to fear to upset their funders? Is it really so difficult to understand that the ideas of what is important to a cultural or educational institution might not match cost-effectiveness considerations of some sponsors? And can we ultimately accept that our focus on measurable metrics in culture might not be what makes us valuable?

While public funding is facing cuts due to political or economic turmoil, institutions have to find new partners. These private or corporate sponsors often endanger institutional autonomy, making them vulnerable to be less critical or political in their programming. I’ve written in other parts about why Museums are not Neutral and why claiming that institutional neutrality exists is to ultimately value Business over Education. There are many cases where groups are raising awareness about the role of sponsors and pointing out that Sponsorship is not neutral, such as Liberate Tate who organized many protests and performances around the BP sponsorship of the institution. In 2016 BP ended the sponsorship after 26 years, it was emphasized by the museum that the break was not related to the pressure of the activist group. I guess we all understand the necessity of these sort of statements for the purpose to ensure future corporate sponsorship.

A few days ago Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize, lost its annual £1.6m backing from the MAN Group, the press release reads like the corporation had a specific idea in mind about how the sponsorship could have been more effectively communicated to the public.

I listened the other day to an episode on the Onbeing Podcast with guest Anand Giridharadas, who is a former columnist and foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. The topic was around his new book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” where he states that our assumption that philanthropy of the wealthy, the gig economy or new technology will save us comes actually with many moral compromises. I thought that some of his thoughts are actually really interesting for the cultural industry.

In his conversation with Krista Tippett he talked about the idea that generosity is based on a “win-win” assumption, both sides win. But the reality is much more complicated and generosity is, more often than not, attached to conditions. New foundations, scholarships, prizes, patronages are beneficial for the system, but we might have never asked in the first place if these philanthropic sponsors are really bringing about change for everyone. Or if they are actually interested in upholding the system where they are winning and that ensures they keep their power. In a nutshell, he is exploring and questioning the neoliberal myth that capitalism will benefit everyone.

“I actually think we’re now at a place where we are ripe, much as we were 100 years ago, when we were in the first Gilded Age, and you had these great inequalities and great new technologies and a lot of dislocated people and a lot of anger and a lot of philanthropy. What that gave way to was an age of reform. I think we are ripe for a new age of reform in American life, where these basic questions of, what is the relationship between work and health care? How do we do social mobility in an age of the gig economy and iPhones? What is our relationship to place as companies and as workers? These are some big questions that, in some ways,are almost spiritual questions about the economy and about our society.”

We Americans revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like "win-win" — and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us. Anand Giridharadas is a journalist and writer. He is a former columnist and foreign correspondent for "The New York Times" and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is the author of "India Calling," "The True American," and "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World." Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

In an earlier talk at the Aspen Institute in 2015 (linked below) he started to delve deeply into his thoughts around generosity and justice: “We are here sometimes at risk of confusing generosity toward the victims with justice for those victims. Generosity is a win-win but justice often is not. The winners of our age don’t enjoy the idea that some of them might actually have to lose a little bit. To sacrifice for justice to be done”. The presentation is fascinating and you should watch it for yourself, but one question of the many he raised left a deep impact on me: “Are we here to change the system or slowly being changed by it? Are we using our collective strength […] to challenge power or are we helping to make an unjust, unpalatable system feel a little more digestible?”

Henry Crown fellow Anand Giridharadas delivers his keynote address, "The Thriving World, The Wilting World, & You," at the 2015 Aspen Action Forum. Recorded Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at the Aspen Action Forum in Aspen, Colorado. http://www.aspenactionforum.org

His exploration on how neoliberal vocabulary shapes our believes is fascinating. He mentions several times the “win-win” equation:

[…] It’s language like the “win-win,” which sounds great, but in some deep way is actually about rich people saying, the only acceptable forms of social change are the forms of social change that also kick something back upstairs — language like “doing well by doing good,” which, again, is like, “The only conditions under which I’m willing to do good is under which I would also do well.”

In his thoughts around the role of education it seems very obvious that his thoughts connect to a systemic problem on how culture or education are evaluated:

"I think it’s very interesting that a lot of people, particularly in the [Silicon] Valley — there’s this thing of dropping out of college because one of the reasons these folks drop out is, they feel they have the technical knowledge they need to get started. And part of what they’re dropping out of, in many cases, is the liberal arts education that is precisely designed to give you these kinds of frameworks to understand things like, history is cyclical, and good things have bad effects, and things go ways that you couldn’t anticipate, and just this normal understanding of how the human condition, as you put it, works.

When you have people with that much power over humanity, that much power to decide more and more how children learn and how commerce works and how power functions, and they basically have a naïve, childlike understanding that any tool that they invent will inherently make things better, you go to a very dark place."

And it’s frightening to watch that school curricula do get “optimized” by declining subjects such as art, music and even languages, underestimating how valuable these subjects are for critical thinking, creative development and other skills.

I am not pretending to have connected the dots but I am a firm believer that education, culture and journalism should be protected from having to rely solely on corporate generosity. Cost efficiency believes in optimization and the attraction of many visitors - which can’t be the predominant reason to do projects in the cultural industry. And let me be clear, I’m not talking about accessibility here. I do firmly believe that culture should be inclusive for different groups and provide different entry points. That said, Blockbuster exhibitions, while attracting many, won’t soften the hierarchy of emphasizing always the same names. And what might come as a surprise to some sponsors, many names that are not linked to the “mainstream culture” (for lack of a better term) do have vivid fans that result in surprising numbers at the end of a project. Eyeballs (visitors, traffic etc.) shouldn’t become the only indicator we use to measure relevance.

Critical thinking is not a linear equation. We need more people understanding the power of sources, to see the interests behind of who paid for certain research and which information is used to form conclusions. We won’t find sustainable growth by letting others pay the money and not do the learning.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com]]>Generosity is not a Substitute for JusticeWho Are You Without The Doing?Food for ThoughtEmpowermentArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezWed, 09 Jan 2019 02:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/who-are-you-without-the-doing56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5bee89f2cd83668b2108529aI’ve been thinking about this question for a while now and first it felt a bit counterintuitive to put the musings on the question on this blog as it is home to so many of my Doings. But as I get deeper into my thinking around labor issues in the arts and redefining success, the thinking around intentional doing and doing less for the sake of business seems like a natural progression on the thinking.

The question appeared a few months ago when I was listeningto Jocelyn K. Glei’s Podcast “Hurry Slowly” (a great podcast if you haven’t listened to it yet, do so). In the solo episode she talks about the concept of “Tender Discipline”, a fascinating approach to link these opposing ideas and by doing so showing how beneficial both are for one another. She talks about “the ability to balance what’s being asked of you with what you’re asking of yourself”. I’ve been thinking myself a lot about discipline. Planning, figuring out systems and doing is pretty natural to me. I’d actually say that if you’re characterizing me with one noun I’m a MAKER.

So the question Jocelyn K. Glei was reflecting on made me pause (ironically I was commuting to work while listening to the podcast, my activity of choice for the long train rides): WHO ARE YOU WITHOUT THE DOING?

Over the past years I learned that consistency in any endeavor is just sustainable with breaks in order to process, review and find new perspectives. It is easy to get lost in our quest to pursuit our goals, to get stuck in our methods and to value the busy version more than the “becoming” version (a term lovingly borrowed from Michelle Obama who chose the title becoming for her memoir in a kind gesture to state that nobody has figured it out yet and that there is “no magic number of what age you’ll be when you’ll feel like a grown-up”, we are all different stages of becoming, a work in process, as she shared in her interview with Oprah.)

“By seeing yourself with tenderness, you can see your situation clearly, which is the first step in breaking out of this cycle of over-commitment that so many of us fall prey to.” - Jocelyn K. Glei

We could all use more compassion and tenderness in our evaluation of our actions or non-actions. I wonder what would happen if we take our non-doing as serious as we take our doing. What if we speak of a good night sleep proudly instead of wearing sleep deprivation like a batch of honor? Would it change our notion of success if it is deeply rooted in wellbeing? What if we would reconsider that productivity doesn’t need to feel like we’re being drained of our energy? What if we commit to fun activities without looking for a possible productive outcome?

“You have to completely conquer the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with your human nature, and that therefore you need discipline to correct your behavior. As long as you feel the discipline comes from the outside, there is still a feeling that something is lacking in you.” - Jocelyn K. Glei

The concept of “tender discipline” feels appropriate to remind ourselves that it’s all about the balance between allowing and pushing in order to live a good life. And that we all need to have look into where we are giving into the false promise of productivity by doing something without actually getting anything done. Like our boundaries with technology by questioning if replying or posting on default is actually a procrastination of doing the real work.

Discipline, for me, is also linked to the definition of what kind of work matters to me, what I do want to do more of. Having my priorities straight helps me to kindly decline unwanted commitments that are not aligned with my focus. The aspect of kindness comes in when the workload is once again too high, deadlines are becoming “zombielines” and my priorities are blurred with the priorities of others. A question that has changed a lot of my approach to work has been the simple question of “How can I make this easier for now?” It creates an instant space for choices when I feel overwhelmed, and we all know the feeling to lack options when we’re stressed out.

To eventually fail to hold everything together all time doesn’t mean you’re a failure, and that might be the biggest act of kindness we can give ourselves in order to continue the balance our doing and non-doing. We can always readjust our methods and try every day to get our recipe for balance right.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com]]>Who Are You Without The Doing?Learnings 2018: Life and BusinessFood for ThoughtArt as LaborAnabel Roque RodríguezFri, 04 Jan 2019 12:00:00 +0000https://www.anabelroro.com/blog/learnings-2018-life-and-business56f80d6cd210b8d37ef1df93:56f81a4c4c2f85720ce3ffa6:5c2f28c4cd8366ce52563a2dIn the tradition to review the past year, close chapters and start new ones here a few of the main learnings of 2018. If you’re curious there is also a list of lessons 2017.

Lots of my Year-End reflection happened This year in the South African Sun; here in the company of a curious ostrich

  • Context is the future

  • There is so much truth in this sentence "Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.” (based on John Waters) via Austin Kleon

  • If you don't ask for it, you're not going to get it.

  • Better means progress and that's good enough. Perfect is an illusion. Always go with better and work from there.

  • Progress is not linear.

  • A good leader is like a gardener and grows people as she is aware that monoculture brings problems.

  • Find your own definition of what success means to you. Have a look at my ongoing interview series where I ask art professionals about their notions.

  • The key to success is the balance of being adaptive and being intentional (My book highlight in this regard has been Adrienne Maree Brown’s: Emergent Strategy).

  • What you pay intention to grows (Adrienne Maree Brown).

  • You have to create space in order to welcome new possibilities.

  • Ambition has to be rooted in Self-Care.

  • Keep something to look forward to.

  • Stay close to nature as much as possible.

  • Honor and know your seasons.

  • My most valued questions when I’m overwhelmed: How can I see this differently? How can I make this easier for now?

  • Don’t wait for the fear to go away. You’ll have to figure the HOW during the process.

  • Putting pen to paper continues to be my best tool to think and plan.

  • Start a compliments or “little victories” folder that you can revisit when impostor syndrome hits you.

  • If you resonate with the work of somebody (books, articles, paintings etc.) share the sentiment, send them wine and chocolate, let them know. It's interesting that no matter how successful somebody seems to be, they too suffer from impostor syndrome. And on a related note: Clap for the success of others!

  • Nurture relationships

  • Value your time

  • If it costs your values it’s too expensive

  • Even if it seems inexplicable, trust your gut.

  • All oppression is connected (Staceyann Chin)

  • all that you touch
    you change
    all that you change
    changes you
    the only lasting truth
    is change
    god
    is change
    - Octavia Butler

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