Liam Gillick: How Does Society Produce Artists?

Together with ...ment Journal we had a sound piece by Liam Gillick in which he posed the question: How does society produce artists? Federica Bueti of ...ment invited various artists and curators to respond with a statement to this question, using like a form of manifesto, personal or artist statement. An interesting discussion ensued! People who gave statements were: Brandon La Belle, Elke Falat, Mark Soo, Federica Bueti and Alan Cunningham. The evening also had a great spatial intervention by Riccardo Benassi. (image to the left)

I had a statement prepared but read only parts of it in response to the fluid open discussion. I reprint it below.

How Does Society Produce Artists? - John Holten

1. Let’s remember that society, for good or ill, spends a lot of time thinking about the production of artists. Education of course is a way of measuring any given society’s commitment to its future as well as to its present. But education aside, I think what is interesting when considering the question How does society produce artists? is the very form that society takes itself. How is society itself produced, and how does it see itself.

2. It can come down to a reformulation of the question: how should society produce artists? And I think, even Liam Gillick asking this question shows us the very interesting historical context we have found ourselves in during the last twenty years. Twenty years we can now see as being a historised present.

3. After all the contemporary artist working and living today comes out of the history of modern art. A history that has always pited the artist against society, or outside it. Or at the very least, on its fringe.

4. What interests me are those moments when a society sees itself so clearly, in absolute terms, that it becomes hardened, leaving no room for the artist, or forcing the artist to move outside of it. Since the Dadaists cried against the bourgouis international degeneracy of their Euro-centric, nationalist and morally redundant societies, modern art sided considerably with the left field of the world it finds itself producing in. The avant garde gesture was never about a two way exchange between the artist and the society, but rather a forced hand dealt unknowingly by a society that had made itself fat and disgusting by over indulgence.

5. I think war, that terrific, horrific act of society is adept at producing artists, for it’s this collective endpoint that often allows artists to grow in opposition to society.

6. The last twenty years much of the globalised artworld has acted in centres that have known a longer timespan of peace than most of their forebears ever did. With the collapse of the Soviet experiment the apparent homogenous forces of pluralistic, capitalist democracy seemed to be the hardened societal edges artists had to fight against.

7. They did this by embracing globalised technological networks and created a relational aesthetics that one can apply, it seems to me, as much to early 20^th century avant gardes as to artists from the 1990s or early 2000s.

8. They also embraced the market, the commercial gallery, the endless rounds of art fairs and speculation. They joined in the fun that ended during the same week equally for both sides in Sotheby’s with Herr Hirsts auction and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

9. It’s always the same problem: do we live in flat times? Visual artists have always studied in the academy, unlike say the novelist or poet.

10. State funding is crucial, vital, to be fought for. But it should be taken as a payment for a service: a critical chorus, a nostalgic Caberat Voltaire that reminds everyone that history is not over, that our days may well be numbered and it’s the artist’s job to remind the rest of her society that this is no time for hubris or condescension.

11. So in answer to the question: Society seems to produce artists best, precisely when it has no interest in producing artists.