Is DIY dead? Again?
I’ve coined another little term because I love to do that.
I went to a couple of events during an experimental music festival called Counterflows. I haven’t anything to say about that, I’m not a music critic. Not my bag, not my baby. I saw some things I liked. Whatever, I was at an event and I was thinking about production, scale, aesthetics and professionalism. Festivals are horrible, they don’t work for my brain. Programming fifty plus events for a weekend or week or two week period overwhelms my delicate, soft, smooth, thinking-bag and, either, I try to see everything or quit before it even starts and reject the idea entirely. Regardless, the festival is a professionalised site. It’s flashy, it’s big, it’s built on correspondence and meetings and contracts with artists. It’s for networking with like-minded professionals. Art-adjacent festivals are like business conferences for the funemployed artist. People don’t like professionals. I don’t like professionals. I can’t be bothered with it, businesspeople on computers? Emailing? I don’t like the look of it. A lot of people don’t. And yet, are we not all professionals? Of course, we’re all required to use the computer. Even for the least of professional tasks. I’m not writing, I’m word processing. I’m not watching YouTube videos, I’m depressed.
If everyone’s a depressed professional, and if everyone might not like the look of that, how do people feel good about themselves?
Faux Naive Professionalism is only the latest iteration of self-institutionalisation. And no, I didn’t write that graffiti on Sauchiehall Street. Love the institution, hate the institution, become the institution. Rinse, repeat, alopecia. A process that has taken place since the first single-cell organisms participated in alternative-education group workshops and gallery committees. F.N.P. rejects exploitation, working for free without benefit, and aluminium salts in deodorant. F.N.P. is making work to brief, making work to residency scheduling, and soft networking. It’s carefully constructed photo-dumps and being interviewed over email. Being on all the time and available for hire. F.N.P doesn’t look professional. The aesthetic isn’t office building, break-room small talk, ergonomic chair, repetitive strain. F.N.P. is the worst conversation you’ve ever had at a gallery preview, delivering workshops for the CV, wearing wide-legged trousers that don’t hit the floor, ELF bars and labouring.
Being an artist is being professional (duh). Somewhat by force, the artist is pushed into freelance self-employment; into tax returns, budget drafting, meetings, usage rights, sales deals and exploitative contracts. A businessperson, nothing new. Yet, like bad-on-purpose drawing, non-professional professionalism, the faux naive aesthetic, is a supportive crutch for engaging and/or disengaging with proficiency. Professionals trying to look cool by looking bad at their jobs. I’m not interested in saying that professional artists are a blight on the earth. That would be unfair and that would describe every artist as a blight on this earth. I’m interested in the conflicting aesthetic terms artists and art-adjacent workers define themselves. At the festival that may as well be a conference, rubbing shoulders, floating on a garbage barge, going to Venice. Have we agreed to these terms of engagement? Do we want to be professionals or are we strong-armed into it by every conversation in the pub that inevitably steers in the direction of ‘work’ rather than ‘artwork’?
I was on a residency, shocking I know, years ago with eleven other artists. We were all sitting on chairs, in a circle, in an extension built onto an old house, listening to two art professionals from an annual artist moving image festival talk about their programme. The topic of conversation turned to pay, and an unnamed professional in the room came out with, “So if you weren’t being paid you just wouldn’t do anything?” And then everyone said, “No.” And I agreed with everyone even though I had taken two weeks off to go on an unpaid residency. We all had. Largely because the benefits outweighed the costs. The residency is now funded (just FYI) which is good. Yet the image I believed in, about myself, was that of the professional; even though I was good with being nothing of the sort. On paper, I was the professional artist (thank you) and IRL I was a mess. Happy to go on holiday and eat a free meal.
The counter to professionalism and the faux naive variety is DIY. And those two binaries have smudged bad, like my lip line four years ago. DIY culture, doing it yourself, putting on shows, gigs, whatever, without institutional backing is totally out of favour. A DIY aesthetic is key to the F.N.P.’s self-image, except no one I know makes work unless there’s a Creative Scotland logo on the poster. And I mean ‘makes work’. Artists are designers for opportunity briefs from Gov and Non-Gov bodies. There are only so many opportunities, only so many galleries and institutions to work with. That’s why I know artists yet to show in the city they live in. No one is doing it themselves. Instead, they’re holding out for the space to free up in a local institution. In the meantime, showing work in cities no one lives in because the rent’s too high (see: Edinburgh). It’s all much too over-professionalised.
I can feel myself being misconstrued, it burns; ‘artists shouldn’t work for free’, ‘what do you expect me to do’, ‘I make art out of diamonds’, ‘I want to be famous’ or whatever. I just think some artists could stand to be a little more creative. That’s the job. Make cheap work. It doesn’t all have to be Jesmonite and EcoPoxy. Show work in all those empty shops that have closed down since the death of the high street. I’m being selfish, and I think that’s fine, I want to see more art. I want to see smaller artists too. Not only those on the Pipeline® (Graduate, Hospitalfield, Grad Job, Platform, Bothy Project, Freelands Foundation Resident, Satellites, Cove Park, Margaret Tait (Residency/Award), Glasgow International, Edinburgh Arts Festival, Berwick, and then like Representative for Scotland at the Venice Biennale). Where does everyone else show? There are only like eighteen galleries in Scotland.
I’m a hypocrite, that’s not news. I’m as faux naive professional as the rest of them. I’m just expressing my frustrations with a system that places too much significance on having boring conversations. One where opportunities for success are held in the hands of under-qualified and out of touch gallery curators and facilitators, where no other route appears viable than the stinking Pipeline®. I’m full of angst. I’m going to find my copy of the Rookie Mag Yearbook (2014), listen to Live Through This (1994), watch Ghost World (2001) with Scarlett Johansson and then get my nipples pierced.
—Andy x
Note: I don’t think artists should have to cough up all the money by themselves, given how hard paying for things is right now (although some of you have the money and I know it). I wish funding was more readily available outside of affiliations with institutions. I wish there was more of an appetite for independent exhibitions and art.
The Faux-Naive Professional