Hopefully, without sounding completely politically tone def, one could take black avant-garde and insert contemporary visual artist, and you have a 99% similarity. It takes so long to develop mastery. Academia is always staring at you-- come for the tenure, stay for the ego fluffing. The long days alone. The missing road map. The newness of what we do. The constant reinvention of the wheel.
It's tiring.
Without a supportive and active community to help guide you through the complications of art, you are sunk. If visual artists were to create more opportunities, (like x-initiative, IPCNY, Dieu Donne, Apex Art, and others) outside of just NY, we could come together more often and support each other.
We need each other.
You couldn't go down to 52nd St., NYC anymore to find and try to sit in with the greats. There were no more epic after-hour jam sessions. There were no more lofts where you had the time and the space to work out your ideas. Those of us on the ground who missed that era and didn't believe that the university could give us the keys to the new music were forced to solve the arcane equations on our own, without the proper information and guidance from our elders. For me, it became about following a faint trail of breadcrumbs through the rare magazine article, and obscure record stores and bookshops, then piecing the findings together as best I could to form a cogent history.
This is the same distance between those of us who make work, or try to put work up in public and those who teach. There has been cries of curator art, but I'd argue that those are misdirected. This trend may be university trained curator art.
Without just bashing the ivory tower, our chance to make our own world is now. Let's get working.
No comments:
Post a Comment