This weeks articles really hit home in practice department for me because two of them I thought really addressed things that pertain to the young artist working in graduate school. The studio and the pressure to perform,

First on the issues of the studio… we don’t have any! If I could change one thing about this school it would be to give everyone individual studios. I agree pretty much with Buren that the studio is a important and special place for a work of art. There will always be a defining relationship between a work and where it was created and each space the work enters afterward will change its meaning and value. I’m not as hostile to the curator as Buren seems to be, I have no problem having my work be at their whim, but I’m young. I suppose part of the problem with this article is that he is writing about such a tiny percentage of artists here: those artists who have their ideal studios and sell work from them. My studio is my apartment. Really just a desk with a computer for editing video. If I had more space I would hang prints, install video projections, maybe a couch would be nice. The studio is important because I think most artists need a comfortable space to think and work in. Buren mentions the importance of having unsuccessful work and half finished sketches laying around. I think its important that work that works and work that fails be near to each other. This is the problem with the none-studio of Columbia, its hard to fail privately which leads to less risk taking. To me the artists studio and the artists career is much more about making due that theorizing what the studio means to maybe 1% of artists.

Then the pressure to perform! I really liked this article because I think for people in the creative economy performance its thesis is exactly right. Also while in graduate school you are under to perform as well as compete. Careerism, grades, reviews and the like can make me forget very quickly that I’m here to actually make art sometimes. This is what is most frustrating that we are always performing and always being judges by standards we have no control over. This is why I love the “I can’t in the key of I can”. It is a way to resist without giving up, to take back some power. To disrupt my judges by giving them what I don’t have and they don’t want. I think this takes the form for me of showing them work that I haven’t figured out yet, that I know they won’t like. This often takes the form of a really early edit of a video piece where I’m still not sure what I’m doing. I’m giving them what I don’t have a (finished piece, a complete thought, an idea of what I’m doing) and what they don’t want, a half baked work. I also love the latency argument, the idea that meaning can grown and change over time. I think there is a lot of pressure to get things all at once, right away and that if something doesn’t reveal itself right away, all at once, easily it is a kind if a failure. I also like the idea of failure as a way to resist performance pressure. Not to fail on purpose but to be open to failure as being valuable, important, and nothing to be ashamed of. Often it feels like the stakes are too high too quickly in performance culture and all failure is a referendum on personal worth.

Lastly I really like how the article talks about the I care. It reminded me of a David Foster Wallace quote I really like:

“If you can think of times in your life you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”