an artist's life
This Week in Reading:
Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
My first exposure to Patti Smith’s writing was Just Kids, which I read for the first time in 2011, and for a second time in 2015—each time seized with an overwhelming need to rush into the world and Make Art. In Year of the Monkey, time has passed since the events of that first memoir: Patti has adult children, a myriad of deceased loved one. But fifty years later, Patti’s daily life doesn’t look too different than it did in 1960s New York. Her suitcase contains little more than a camera, a notebook and a jacket. She hitchhikes across California, her cell phone permanently dead, contemplating the clouds of candy wrappers that cover the beach. She pays in cash. It’s 2016, but Patti only refers to it as the Year of the Monkey, her delineations of time forever dreamier than the corporate world’s.
It’s an artist life: quiet, a little languid. A life that consists primarily of introspection and observation— she has few obligations or concrete plans beyond seeing where the day takes her. Patti Smith can afford this life by being Patti Smith: record sales and art shows and National Book Award winning memoirs providing her with the monetary cushion to hole up in a motel in Santa Cruz and drink black coffee. In the 21st century, the artist’s life is one that has become exceedingly rare. With the exception of perhaps (forgive me) Caroline Calloway, very few people today exist free from traditional labor models.
This traditional artist’s life may slowly be going extinct, but there are still plenty of artists. Artists with day jobs that make their work after they clock out at 5 pm, artists who run enormous studios with full production teams, artists whose creative practice occurs within the boundaries of their salaried career. An art career is not what makes someone an artist; it is simply what allows artists to achieve financial success within capitalism. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about having an artistic practice vs. having an artistic profession. In an ideal world, these would be one and the same, but until you reach a certain level of professional success, they seem to be in diametric opposition. I have spent the last few months applying to MFA programs, a time consuming and emotionally draining process that I finally finished this past weekend. I have been writing statements of intent and editing essays and resizing photos, and haven’t been in my studio making work much at all. It’s a catch 22: the effort and time it takes to build a professional career that allows you to make art (cold emails, networking, grant applications), prevents you from actually having an art practice. Often it seems like being an emerging artist is spending eleven months saving money and applying to residencies in the hope that you can win one month of time to regain the practice that you sacrificed during the rest of the year.
The older I get, the more I struggle with the finite limitations of time. There are so few hours of the day, and so many things to fill them. My art practice is still one of the most satisfying aspects of my life. But other corners have grown increasingly substantial and fulfilling: my home space, love, occupying my physical body, friendship. All of those things require me to spend time away from my studio, and I can’t begrudge them of that, just as I can’t begrudge my art practice for keeping me from exercising or seeing my friends as much as I would like.
But those different parts of my life are feeling less segregated than they have in the past. The joy of planning a dinner party, rearranging my living room, organizing a group hang— that creative energy seems to stem from the same place as my studio work. In 2020 I’m interested in having a less limited definition of creativity. I think there will always be room in my life for a formal studio practice, but I want it to be a formal creative practice that fits within a broader creative life. I am no longer interested in denying myself exercises in creative joy out of a puritanical definition of what is and is not art. I want to make travel zines and throw themed parties and start knitting again. I want to write emails and postcards and essays. I want to spend my words! I may not have been afforded the luxury of a Patti Smith-style artist’s life, but observation and unstructured creativity are things I can still have in my current one.
Maybe an art career and an art practice don’t have to be in opposition. Perhaps an artistic career is merely a tiny subset of having an art practice, and having a practice is itself only a tiny subset of having a creative life. Perhaps is not even the making of art that makes you an artist—perhaps it is a life of languid observation that defines an artist, and the work is simply a manifestation of that contemplation, which may or may not lead to a professional career. I’ve always been drawn to a Russian nesting doll model. I think I’ve been putting them in the wrong order my whole life— constantly frustrated that I couldn’t fit the giant doll of life into the thimble sized doll of career. Unable to stack them together I kept them separate, side-by-side. Moving into this new year (a new decade!) I want to work on integrating my creative life, nestle each piece within each other to make whole.
Further Reading:
If you haven't read Just Kids, run don't walk. How To Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee also filled me with a similar kind of artistic urgency.