My Inner World: The Daytime Edition
Another day at the coal-face.
This is a photo of the internals of some computer I was working on at my day-job. This is the kind of stuff I’ll often see daily, weekly etc. I can’t remember what this repair was specifically, it might’ve been a faulty power supply (though as you can see, that fan needs a clean too).
I see nothing wrong with artists having day-jobs irrelevant to their art. That probably describes the majority of practicing artists, and I would say the information that reality provides can feed-back into your work (first pun of the article). You’ll have a set of experiences that feed back into your work, or maybe one feeds the other?
A lot of people say they hate art and artists. I think they really hate the idea that someone is being self-indulgent on their own hard-earned dollar, which the government has taxed off them in an exhorbitant and excessive fashion.
I’ve always tried to not be that person. I’m very passionately against the government-grants system they have for the arts in Australia, and always have been. Ive hated it ever since I fully realised that’s how the curent governing elite think it oughta be, when they basically presented it as the only viable pathway to be an artist in this country to me in uni, under a final year unit called “professional practice”.
It seemed more like dealer-and-junkie to me.
With that recommended pathway came a lot of bureaucratic hoop-jumping, form-filling, applications, justifying yourself before boards of government-funded staffers. All that to me was antithetical and soul-destroying. I also wasn’t sure how long it would take me to do work that I would be proud to put my name to, and had to do some soul-searching on that. I ran a blog on Tumblr for a while and tried a couple of other online platforms and didn’t like the imposition of fast-scale production that was almost designed into those processes.
I decided the way forward was to find a day job irrelevant to art, that I could tolerate, and just practice and study at home when I could. Art-School wasn’t a complete waste of time, I do appreciate it now, but it’s another example of credentialization in our modern society. The degree doesn’t signify knowledge or competence at all, as the educational process is flawed and limited, and will always fail to fully anticipate market forces and social/technological change, try as the well-meaning members of the faculty might to prepare you for that.
I always had a fascination for electronics. The habit started young with 16-bit video gaming, but also it was my Mum trying to get me to program the VCR for her favourite shows, my half-brothers obsession with electronic music (which carried on to me, though I had much better taste), my Dad working as a professional IT guy for Quest software, and being an early adopter for home PCs and the internet. And broadly the general upswing of electronics, technology and the internet into modern mainstream culture, especially all the Japanese culture that was flooding in. I basically rode that wave as I grew up. But the hardware “and how it all worked” fascinated me more than the software. The software and media can be a bit of a nuisance, and a psychological prison if you aren’t careful. So it was always important for me to try and keep myself somewhat in reality if I could. If I sensed I was synching (geddit) too much into the matrix, some kind of self-imposed rehab was necessary.
But the technology would change too, and I got enough of a view to be close to, but not too much in, the fire. (at least in my view). I could see the changes, compared it to what came before, see how it altered people and society and our world, and learned to tread wearily.
Going back to what modern artists need, I would say its a supporting industry around visual art that is not dependent on government taxpayer funding. Private galleries, private patrons, magazines, podcasts, publishers, framers. A better network too of other entertainment industries and media. A supporting network of people who are trying to pitch to a different audience, an audience who isn’t government career-bureaucrats with government agendas that they demand you must satisfy.
In short, a free-market.
Nothing kills creativity like bureaucracy and box-ticking quotas.
One last thing to mention to round this all out is that in both electronics and painting I consider myself self-taught. well, sorta…
I never did an electronics degree, and in Art-School I didn’t take a single practical-painting course. My major was photomedia, ironically the most electronic-oriented of the major disciplines. It was right at the transition-phase from the film and darkroom eras to the digital era (2006-09). I got a rough and scattered… exposure… to both (hah!). There were compulsory life-drawing and history/theory units, and I chose as my electives mainly extra art-history/theory (like Baroque, movie studies) and also ventured beyond the fine-art faculty to do electives with web-design, 2d/3d animation and automotive modelling. It’s really weird how the interests were all still consistent, even though my main job and chosen professional medium ended up being outside what my studies were.