What Are Some of the Problems with Travelling Artists?
An Artist Travelling in Wales. 1799. By Henri Merke Swiss. Via Metmuseum.org
Artists, like anyone, travel. But then there is a breed of artists who make travel the subject of their art: going to new places and doing work. On its face, there is nothing remarkable or wrong with this, except when it comes to the artist making claims about a culture that he or she knows nothing about. Or when he or she searches at breakneck speed to find some affinity, some instant point of connection that he or she can plug into. The travelling artists is just another, less conspicuous breed of cultural imperialist: making comments, even passing judgments, then returning to the comfort of home.
The Artist-in-Residence
When scrutinised, many idioms and epithets reveal an uneasy relation to what they are meant to denote, usually because the resonances within the term are antiquated. A 'master of ceremonies' doesn't admit women, while a ‘slide’ in a Powerpoint presentation is a melancholy reminder of out-of-date technology.
'Artist-in-Residence' reads like a superficial descriptor which is so bland as to suggest some ulterior meaning.
After all, everyone lives somewhere: bums sleep under bridges, even nomads have to reside somewhere when they rest for the night. Like anyone else, artists also reside, live, are housed, have homes.
But taken as a portmanteau term, 'Artist-in-Residence' implies something rather unusual: through application or invitation, the artist has graced us with his or her presence.
Rooted in romantic traditions, as a cultural phenomenon, the ‘Artist-in-Residence’ presumes that the artist is an embodiment of a desirable code or quality that is new, novel and not readily available in every town or city.
Therefore, the peregrinating artist is a kind of cultural performer who brings insights and talents that may add to the cultural quantities in which he or she is placed. In turn, the artist, at least in present time, is expected to respond to the place in question: to do a work with a certain flavour of Berlin-ness, Birminghamness, Belgiumness or Beijingness. Familiar? The artist as caricaturist, and caricature; a performing cultural monkey also makes a monkey of the culture.
After the Age of Patronage
The artist resident is a phenomenon after the age of patronage. The artist had to sell himself as a special agent with a very particular set of values worth paying for and accommodating.
At the end of the eighteenth century the artist still retained aspects of the itinerant artist, although as populations grew and as noblemen vied for prominence, it was common to seek out perceived geniuses that might augment the image of a court as a platform of talent and originality, as someplace worth contributing to and visiting.
The eighteenth-century also saw the birth of the social salon. Run by women, it was typically the gathering place for socialites, wits, roués and of course artists. An artist in the know or at the centre of the scandal was de rigueur.
More specifically, artist-in-residence programs arose in the late 70s with the relaxing of notions of social boundaries within the arts, no doubt bolstered by conceptual practices, including happenings and performance art in which the artist’s gesture no longer needed to be registered in a tangible and could operate within a much more aesthetically promiscuous and heterogeneous field.
With the so-called opening up of Europe symbolised by the Berlin Wall's demolition in 1989-90, the residency programs began to flourish. It soon became evident that major cities expected to have one or more residency programs. In contrast, smaller cities and towns created initiatives to bring culture, personified in the artist, their way.
Like the individual salonnières of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, now the cities in Europe and the USA sought to reflect their openness to culture by extending to overseas artists opportunities to stay there, 'reside', and make art but most importantly just to 'be' there.
The Artist as Traveller and Performer
There are, of course, more than one means by which different institutions allow entry for their Artist-Residents, but whether invited or having arrived under the artist's behest, the artist is placed in a position of being needy of guidance and support.
It is a frequent narrative that upon arriving in a new place, the artist experiences uncommon anxiety caused by a combination of disorientation and pressure to perform, not to mention the isolation brought about by language difference, remoteness from loved ones so on.
But there is yet another factor that enters into this equation, which is as potent to disable the artist as unexpected: boredom.
When the artist is without a predetermined project such as an exhibition, and where the residency is not conducted along fairly tight boundaries aligned to the exhibition’s realisation, then the artist is less like a focused professional and more like a piece of driftwood floating on an unfamiliar sea.
After the original high in the artist's country of origin and all the preparation before departure, the letdown upon arrival is dramatic and abrupt.
If the residency is within a larger house, centre, or network with some infrastructure, the artist responds to the person in charge of the residency as a newborn baby responds to a wet nurse.
The first stages of acclimatisation are filled with the most basic requests such as where s/he might find the organic market if there is a nearby centre for remedial massage, or where one can buy the best incense (no doubt for those long nights spent in profound contemplation and self-communion).
The artist also relies heavily on the residency co-ordinator to introduce him/her to other artists, curators, galleries, and gallerists.
Due usually to inflated self-importance and unrealistic expectations, by the assumption made still while in the country of origin that s/he will take the city of residency by storm, by the dream that s/he will be swept inexorably from one opportunity to another, the artist invariably ends up crestfallen, blaming their unrealised goals on the residency manager or the curator or both.
The artist takes the institution’s curator’s or director’s preoccupation with other matters for indifference or even contempt – such is the artist's temperament's self-centredness. (‘Why did organise a show for her and not me?’ Why did that curator visit his studio and not mine?’)
Between Anti-Climax and Contemplation
The next phase is often that of morose reflection, the artist is seen less frequently, has an affair with someone down the hall, but that doesn't lead to anything. The artist breaks off contact with the residency staff. Feeling that the breast is not yielding enough milk, the artist stops sucking, leaves the nipple, and begins to cry.
When scanning the mission statements of a variety of residency programs, two goals emerge with tenacious regularity.
The first is that the residency provides the artist time to contemplate, the second is to promote 'cultural exchange'. While the purpose of the Artist-Resident as an injection of cultural capital to an institution or place is consistent with the incipient incarnations in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, these two objectives are relatively recent, by-products of post-industrial society and globalisation.
But where it is consistent with the Romantic myth of the artist is in indulging the view that artists are like prophets who seek out periods of silence for profound reflection that leads to creative gestation and spiritual recovery.
Seen less ironically and more sympathetically, there is a grain of truth to this, since it is a rare artist (e.g., Warhol) who is always in others' physical company and reaches decisions adventitiously and on the spur of the moment.
Nonetheless, the belief in the artist's need for vast tracts of time for the generation of artistic knowledge has been the source of bestowing on the artist the privilege of the houses and spaces for precisely such a purpose. Such opportunities are available to writers as well, but they are not to other disciplines in the same way.
Philosophers, for example, must seek out fellowships in universities. They are less likely to get the accommodation in remote and picturesque settings available to artists, the kind of which was enormously helpful to one such as Wittgenstein who was able to accommodate for himself a retreat in northern Norway due to access to his sizeable family fortune (which he ultimately gave away).
Yet this must not lead to the presumption that all artists are emotionally equipped for long intervals of time without structure or responsibility.
In residencies of over three months, and particularly for artists who have travelled a long distance (and thus are less in a position to make a quick visit back home), the limitations of space (the kinds of work that can be done with regard to what can be shipped back), and the relative lack of limitations on time can be demanding.
Lengthier Time Away
For some artists, the void that opens up from the prospect of infinite possibility can be crushing. Placed with limited demands and with extended time, one gets to understand the extent to which all of us acquire habits and surround ourselves with tasks, all in the effort to escape the more authentic questions about ourselves.
For when placed in an unfamiliar place without the usual obligations of work and domestic routine, where no-one is telling us what to do, that is, when thrust into a situation of seemingly limitless freedom, the artist, like anyone else, is liable to behave in extreme and adverse ways. So we are now back once again to the bugbear of boredom.
Many residencies are extraordinarily remote (I recall reading about a residency in Oregon or Colorado, which is a solitary hut situated in the middle of a nature reserve with no electricity or telephone), which seem like paradise when considering them while looking at your computer late one night, in a city, and after a long day’s work, but in reality, the residency is more like voluntary imprisonment.
Without the ability to cope with loneliness, one is ill-equipped for such ‘fulfilling opportunities’; space for blissful contemplation becomes thwarted by the tedium. Suppose the residency is in a city with other residents. In that case, the cultural experience is directed towards nightclubs and the opening nights in which more beers are exchanged than debates about the surrounding art.
Because of its overarching presumptions, the case of cultural exchange that an Artist-in-Residence program is meant to foster is more problematic. On the most basic level, it assumes that the artist derives inspiration and stimulus from a new set of social, linguistic, and aesthetic conditions.
These are presumably apt to open up possibilities unavailable in the country of origin; they will discharge the flow of new creative juices to result in a branch of work hitherto unseen. This reasoning all sounds logical enough, but the practicalities are markedly different.
Some artists, particularly those imported via invitation, are expected to respond to the new environment without sacrificing the characteristics that mark them as an attractive press option.
There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, and asking an artist to make or install a new work in situ is but one remove from borrowing his or her work for an exhibition. By and large, it is not unusual for artists to bring their habits, norms, and signature style with them and set up shop in the new surroundings, and to continue working as if they hadn’t decamped from home. Some projects do crave insulated attention, and some artists are skilled disassociators. Some are just chronically incurious.
When the artist is enthusiastic about responding to a new set of cultural circumstances, it has the potential to open Pandora's box, especially in cities rich with conflicting historical residues.
Berlin is a particular case in point, where artists from other countries think it is the right thing to dredge up a reference to some great-great uncle twice removed who was an SS officer, or the Jewish grandmother (whom the artist didn’t much like and hardly ever spoke to), who was an internee at Bergen-Belsen.
The reflex to respond culturally is also relatively chronic in Sydney when artists try to weigh into the delicate debates surrounding indigenous ownership of the land or the convict past (the latter is but a small point of interest in a diverse, multicultural society).
When we turn to Paris, the problem is compounded or reversed, depending on how you look at it: a city of émigrés and transients, its cultural history is to some extent built on outside responses. One either need not respond to the city or somehow join the chorus of others and try to identify effectively, originally, with what has been done before.
The requirement that an artist respond to the new environment is not flawed if taken up with intelligence and subtlety. These qualities are, sadly, however, in short supply in any field of endeavour. It is often advisable to identify with what might be insurmountable differences in cultures through irony or self-critique.
(A recent unsuccessful proposal I made to a residency in Jordan involved a performance in which I was unsuccessfully trying to surf on the Dead Sea – hence sending up the gormless Australian or US tourist whose more privileged background makes him insensitive to foreign cultural differences – which I guess was a bit too grand Guignol and lacking I gravitas for their taste.)
On the other hand, it is this urge for artists to travel and respond to external cultures which have made a new breed of artist who hops from residency hotel to residency hotel and practice a form of micro-imperialism that mirrors that of their touristic counterparts.
Since the 1980s, much has been made in theoretical circles of the touristic gaze, particularly its passive politics mixed with aggressively crass voyeurism. Mutatis mutandis, the travelling artist becomes an adept in finding points of interest or weakness which are then troped within the work, or which the work of art uses as a touchstone. (In the interests of decorum, I have resisted mentioning any names here, but the seasoned artist and curator can readily, I am sure, come up with a handful.)
We might recall a decade or two ago. The verve with which the words revived or coined by Deleuze and Guattari were intoned by artists and theorists: ‘schizo-analysis’, ‘nomad’, ‘rhizome’, ‘haecceity’, and the like. The artist who seeks the comfort of an Artist-in-Residency may be looking for a ‘line of flight’ in a ‘nomadic’ diversion to a new ‘underground’ far from the ‘Oedipal’ home.
Well it might, but the artist’s ‘expressions’ may also be just those of the ‘European erotomanic’ (their quote from Ezra Pound), the prowling conservative, the cultural vampire, a revival of just another ‘striated space’, an over-reliance on the Oedipal mother of the curator or residency organiser, a ‘paranoid’ economy masquerading as something ‘schizo’ and radical – amounting to little more than a holiday and waste of time with a few works of strained artworks thrown in to seal the bargain.
