Being a Working Artist Doesn't Always Work

I'm really proud of the work that I've done and all that I'm learning every day. I'm also proud to be part of networks of people who are creative. However, as I try right now to really take myself and my work seriously and move forward and somehow scratch out a living, I'm struggling struggling struggling, and it totally makes me get why so many creative people go into advertising.

It also makes me feel really defensive and frustrated and sensitive about the ways that we do go about making our money. There is a teeny tiny fraction of us who become art stars who become fabulously wealthy through selling, producing, or directing our work. Another slightly larger group make a living through our work, though not an especially fabulous one, working a variety of performance, gallery, or publishing or DIY sales circuits. The rest of us have a variety of day jobs as teachers, food service workers, academics, programmers, sex workers, homemakers, advertisers, craftspeople, retailers, and on and on. We apply for grants, fellowships, residencies; We sell prints, solicit donations, get fiscal sponsors, rent cheap space and take classes to keep the work constantly moving. We all hustle, whether or class status tells us that's what we're doing or not. We're trying to find a way to beat the system.

I feel so protective of my fellow artists and the things that they do to make it work. I feel protective of those who appear "sell out" when they finally start to actually make money for their work. I feel protective of those who toil away in obscurity, unwilling or unable to make commercially viable work, but equally unwilling to give up on their ideas. I feel protective of those who are unschooled by choice or by circumstance, and who may or may not even call themselves artists. And I am protective of those who spend years and years in artist finishing schools trying get experiences and credentials that might help them in the future. I feel protective of artists who have no idea if they are any good, and especially of those who just keep at it anyway.

I feel protective of artists because of the risks that they take that are so often considered worthless (unless they can be easily co-opted or branded) by capitalists and anti-capitalists alike.

As I write this I'm feeling privileged to be among the ranks of this hugely varied group of people in the world, and that knowledge is helping me understand how to be ok with being broke for a little while longer until I figure out the next scheme... And the next...

For Some Reason This Has Become Pink

In a flurry of "creativity" I decided to make this blog pink. Not sure why.

I have also started work on something new, hinted at in my previous post from a million years ago.

Also, I've been thinking a lot about this whole concept of productivity as an artist. Obviously the fact that I haven't "produced" anything to my own satisfaction in quite a while means that I have already come to some serious conclusions about what this means. The project above is something of an ongoing experiment, and one that is going very slowly. Or maybe it is actually fast. Not sure.

I do think that it reflects a certain charming combination of humor, nostalgia, and laziness.

Teaser

After some months of dismal over-commitment, under-heating, and uber-blah, I think I have a new project on my hands. Wanna see it? Yeah? Ok, here's a little itty bitty taste.

Very Rough Documentation of "Mary and Sarah and You and Me"

Click to Play

This is a 45 minute documentation video of the August 1-2, 2008 work-in-progress "Mary and Sarah and You and Me" made by Naima Lowe and Emmy Bean.

I think this is real...

I wrote this today as a statement of artists intentions for a job that I'm applying for. It is longish (perhaps too long for a job application), and I'm not sure that it is what I'm suppose to do. But I think I really really mean it. So here it is.

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Naima Lowe

Statement of Artists Intentions and Recent Work

Statement of Artists Intentions

I have a really good work ethic. For some, a good work ethic means waking up every day and getting straight to the drawing board. For others, it means feverishly toiling in front of a screen or on set at all hours of the night. My work ethic comes from a deep desire to treat everyone who takes part in my art work; collaborators, audience and myself; with deepest respect and care.

I live in a world that feeds on fears of scarcity, pushes allies into competition, and is fueled by consumption rather than creation. As the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter of jazz musicians, teachers, social workers, dress makers and field hands, I have the profound privilege of being reminded daily that I am nothing without my collaborators in the creation of joy and abstraction in the every day. In my work I push back against scarcity by being devilishly baroque, undermine competition by teaming with those who challenge me most, and treat all of my work (even the consumable parts) as lived aesthetic experiences in which process is barely distinct from product.

Recent and Ongoing Works

My work usually revolves around the strange complexity of identity formation, especially the way that we are both utterly fixed by our bodies and completely free to make it all up as we go along. My 2007 film Birthmarks explored the physical and psychic scars of violence through the ever morphing relationship between a father and daughter. In addition to collecting archival material and creating original writing and installation works to be filmed, I made a series of intentional spaces in which my father and I could challenge ourselves to look closely at the series of dark scars on his back that he received by being beat up by the Newark Police in 1967. The collaboration with my father largely revolved around a jazz improvisational model during which we agreed to a key and tempo (Newark, the riots, 1967), felt confident in each others’ knowledge of our instruments (him-Bass Trombone and storytelling, me-16mm camera and poetics), and then challenged each other to play our best. There were moments in the two year process of creating this film when I wanted to scream at my father for being inconsistent, or untrue to myself by pretending not to feel the pain brought about by the work, but I chose to remain present and accountable to my work ethic. I choose to remain true to my aesthetic vision while being kind to myself and my father. The experience was as unwaveringly honest, complex and affirming as I believe the film turned out to be. .

My more recent work has me delving more fully into the relationship between identity and historicity. In addition to research on the film work of Kara Walker and her status as a black post-modernist within the institutional fine art world, I have considered my own power as an artist to shape and mold the images of fictional and real subjects. In my work Mary and Sarah and You and Me: A Series of Tiny Spectacles, I have created a densely theatrical and spectacle driven world based on the lives of real life 19^th century women. Stagecoach Mary Fields was a black cowgirl, and Mother Sarah Amadeus Dunne was the white nun whose story is entwined with Mary’s in the small white Montana town in which they lived. In creating this work I sought the help of a friend (Emmy Bean) and fellow alumna of a musical theater camp, whose life as a queer, white radical Christian echoed mine as a queer, black, artist brought up in mostly white central Connecticut. I knew that in order for us to go about writing, rehearsing, making music and videos, and researching 19^th century pioneer life, we would have to deal confront ourselves pretty head on. Our joint work ethic included intensive weeklong sessions that were always punctuated with trips to the beach, time to see our families, and space to breathe and cry as needed. We warmed up by singing show tunes, and always made sure to have good food available for ourselves and anyone working around us. The resulting work is a layered experience for spectator and artist alike that includes storytelling, video installation, song, over-head projected photographs, and puppetry. We utilize some aspects of a stripped bare gallery aesthetic in order to situate our audience in a familiar mode of art consumption that gives the audience space to consider their own place and implication in the work. We also tell rich, detailed, visually dynamic stories about forbidden love, racial injustice, and religious fervor. These tales shift and evolve before the audiences’ eyes as we interrogate the integrity of our own project, and ask ourselves why we feel that these women’s lives are ours to reshape.

The mundane aspects of my creative practice may seem too vulgar to state as an part of my artistic intentions, but I have found it useful to remind myself and anyone I collaborate with of them. Too often I find that experimental filmmakers, video artists and performance artists, like myself, have given themselves over to solitary, auteur, obsessive, and self involved practices that ignore the pleasure and collectivity that comes along with our transgressions. I work very very hard, and I care a great deal about craft, make no mistake. But I have chosen this artists life for myself, and I intend on enjoying it.

A Strange White Box

I have rented and currently inhabit a 520 sq foot studio in a converted warehouse in an industrial/residential neighborhood in NE Philadelphia. This is by no means a strange state of affairs. I am like many other young (and older) artists, craftspeople, filmmakers, t-shirt makers, musicians, and entrepreneurs who take up residence in these spaces, working to fulfill our creative dreams, to fulfill our landlords dreams of gentrification, to fill these weird empty boxes that once housed industry.

I like the imagine that they still house industry. I suppose in the case of some of my neighbors, this is true. There's the recording studio next door and the paper maker downstairs and the jewelry designer down the hall.

I do something else entirely, and I've somehow decided that the best thing to do with this THING that I do is house it in a big cube that I've painted white and filled with equipment and paper and paint and brushes and books and fabric and other shit that I've collected over the years.

That is the magic potion, right? Mix collected shit, good ideas, ambitious new MFA holder in a nice big asbestos filled container and WHAM, BANG POOF! You get art.

eh.
Not so much.
It is an interesting trick to train myself to to do my art in this space. My practice is so much in my head. I read books, I have conversations, I pace up and down, and watch TV. I apply to things, and then I read more books. And cull video footage on occasion, and then I hatch this gigantic plans that do, in fact, require space and junk... But in the meantime, its that other stuff. I'm making art RIGHT NOW (said the girl about to drink some Ting and watch Bravo), and I'm not in my studio. What does that mean? Will it be lost forever because I haven't hatched it in the place where it will be best nurtured? Will it die on the way to its nursery?

But, this is what discipline is shaped of, and I think that discipline isn't such a bad thing. I sit there for 2-3 hours at a time, and I read, write, apply for things, organize things, look at videos, and pace up and down. I give myself a break. I read some more. Those 2-3 hours started out as nothing but fear of even showing up in that place. And then it was 1 hour, and now its 2, and in a while I'll probably stand to be there for days and days at a time.

In my cauldron, my cube, my asbestos box, my obligatory art cubicle with its total lack of heat and shitty ventilation.

EE Miller is Cool

http://eemiller.wordpress.com/death-jewel-radio/