Un-Formal Currencies
DISCOURSE: David Tompkins (NYC) interrogates / in conversation with and Daniel Miller (New Orleans)
3700 Words Unedited
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Having spent several months on and off working together on this site and the prints I think your approach has the soul of a performance artist. For example you are emotionally quite impatient despite how you talk about deadlines, and more to the point: you are always searching for the way to be more direct in our interactions--with the project, with me, with the site, research, and in our writing. In fact this very format for writing was your idea (and I’m so glad we’re doing it). On the other side of our collaboration, however, there’s been some interesting contention that seems to be drifting toward one topic.
That topic is our favorite dirty word, money. As a result of my recent endeavors including this project I’ve built an interest in business planning and have openly digested related topics in conversation with you, trying to apply things I’ve learned about business practices to aspects of the project and website. Though I doubt the business development perspective is something I would need to discuss with the next artist collaborator, I do think it’s brought us to a useful angle from which to inspect your attitudes and learn about your work. Also I feel I might have it in me to address the topic of artists being personally put off by capitalism and the lifeless necessity of numerical valuation that is money.
One goal of this project was to understand how you (Daniel) could approach selling and sharing your art differently and hopefully more effectively, and to make some positive moves in that direction. So now I need those core art statements Dani. What is your relationship with money in the context of art, selling art, expectations and cultural mores, and the imperatives of direct artistic action? Does the word freedom have any relevance in your response?
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You bring up all these great topics, just to force me to lecture again about my discomfort with a capital based value system,oh well, ill humor you :p
In terms of my own prejudices, when i was age 8-13, my parents underwent a bitter divorce, and locked each other in a 5 year lawsuit over who gets what. Before that time, i had assumed and felt that i was part of a loving family, a team which stuck together. Then suddenly my family’s worth to each other was thrust into the cold calculus of a courtroom. Through snippets read from stray documentation around the house, conversations with court representatives, forced appointments with therapists and the loaded pleading of each parent individually, i became acquainted, traumatically, with the fact that my family wasn’t as important as i thought it was, or at least it wasn’t as important as the money that was holding it together. The court struggle ended when my father agreed to let my mom move out of state in search of work in exchange for her taking full custody and relinquishing his responsibility to pay child support or assist her in any way.
The job she moved across the country to seek fell out from underneath us when we arrived in Los Angeles. The owner of the startup that my mom had pinned her hope and family’s security on decided to steal the seed money for their company and flee the country. Again, money vs. community.
My mom was now in Los Angeles, alone, with two children and no help, and yet her energy didn’t falter. Through a miraculous twist of fate, she found a low paying job at a community center in south central LA, teaching music. From that low point, over the next few years, she devoted herself to that place, growing a small music room into a full music studio, and helping dozens of children start bands, create albums and eventually navigate the thorny world of recording contracts and fledgling musical careers. Our family had enough money, but more importantly I saw the effect of community without a binding of wealth on my mother and my life. My family grew a new form of communicating with each other, from our new experience of a lower level of wealth, but also from the other direction in direct and open communication with each other, sharing emotion, support and experience.
So, taking that baseline child’s disgust with money that he scapegoated on his absent father, ill switch gears to art. I ended up in the realm of “fine art” as a result of the type of work I make, but my roots have almost nothing to do with the gallery or the museum. I’m aware that revelatory experiences do happen in front of “great” impressionist paintings or some such, but the majority of truly valuable art experiences that I’ve had have been much more intimate, interconnected with my own life’s context, and have been entirely divorced from anyone in the room being famous or any work being worth some astronomical amount. Beyond myself, moving around the world i feel like I hear much more frustration with Rothko than adulation, many more deeply affecting stories from friends of artists than a desire that art be “deeper” or some unfavorable comparison to legendary artists. While culture implies that the most important art experience happens in front of the most “important” art, people are sketching quietly in their sketchbooks, writing poetry for each other, going to karaoke, spray painting walls and dancing with each other.
In this dichotomy, I’ve pondered what art’s purpose is to humanity, to mixed results, but i think a more important question is “how does a human being use an artwork?” The answer i think falls into two realms. On the one hand, a moneyed structure seems to use an artwork as an extension of the artist, a proof of the concept of “genius”. In this sense it is a commodity, supremely rare and exclusive, and thus serves as a certificate of authenticity for those who are lucky enough to witness it or control it, and must be kept away from sight and full understanding in order to justify the growth of the commodity and the power of those that control it. Ironic that this actively prevents those without education and wealth not only from viewing the work, but also prevents the work from sharing a context with it’s viewer’s lives.
On the other hand, a piece of art is used by viewing it, of course, and i see this as something that is better fostered by and better fosters a community or experiential value system. Let’s take a cliche in arguments about art, the child’s drawing versus Pollock. The comparison is used to establish the obtuseness of abstract art, so functionally speaking, there is no concrete difference in terms of quality of craft. However their respective circumstances of value couldn’t be more different. For every single person envied by all for being able to purchase and gaze at a Pollock, or for every admission paid to a museum to see one, there are a thousand parents and siblings brought to revelation and emotion by the discarded scraps that children leave behind. Per capital, Pollock is treasured in the realm of class, wealth and renown, and children’s drawings are treasured in the realm of experience and community. I would posit that this stark difference is a result of the ways that these types of artwork are popularly used. One is hidden inside of white cubes or collections, knowledge held by critics and historians, a prefigured and externally defined worth and meaning that requires no actual sight of the art itself. Whereas the other needs none of these things, as the viewer that approaches a child’s art not only was or is a child themself, but usually shares a context of life with the artist and moreover is encouraged to hold and touch the work, ask questions about it and discover meaning by viewing the work.
Other more pressing needs related to survival force us again and again into enforcing a connection between art and a moneyed valuation, but in the process we have cut out the middle class. Not only the art, but also the artist has been forced into a sort of a priest class; either an ascetic madman, creating undiscovered important work in obscurity and poverty, or a discovered genius, a power broker for society’s interests if not a dusty cliche of power. I have happened into a personal definition of art that is composed of four elements: medium, substrate, location and audience, and i often find difficulty explaining that when i use these latter two terms, I’m not engaging with “success”. Location to me is a reference to an interrelated context of life that results in the work, not which gallery or which museum, and audience represents any viewer and not an accounting of how many viewers.
I think its incredibly apt to see performance art in my approach. In many ways i see performance art as a more pure form of art, in terms of my personal definition. Performance art is ridiculed and is almost uncommodifiable (no one is making money off of videos.) Thus all that is left is the experience itself. When someone views a performance art piece, it is participatory, it occurs in the viewers eye, in the day that they had, and it consists entirely of that experience. Performance art cannot be hidden away from view in a warehouse or a mansion, it exists in memory shared with the artist and the other viewers. As a result, as popular culture likes to mock performance artists, those that share the lived experience of performance art often seem to me more deeply moved than other, more formal art audiences.
Okay this is getting long. I’ll coda with freedom. My opinion of freedom as a concept i think is a result of the time I’ve spent living in china and japan and my love of drawing, specifically the work I’ve done in pixel art. As a result of spending time outside of the American mind, and working in an art form with such a history of limitation, i no longer see freedom as an endpoint or a goal. Freedom does not seem to me like a permanent state of being as we’re expected to believe, and the same it seems for happiness, love, success or fulfillment. Rather all of these things are transient emotions that exist as a movement away from or in interaction with their opposite. Many died building the pyramids, the Spanish civil war led to Guernica, Michael Jackson was abused, the impressionists were outsiders, any revelatory work of art is certainly an expression of freedom but that expression is also composed of what one was being freed from, and the limitations and pain that the freedom acted against. I see both as not just necessary, but inseparably linked. On the flip side, i could offer any number of isolated, freedom obsessed Americans and the ultra wealthy who seem to live in a state of fear and insecurity.
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“ While culture implies that the most important art experience happens in front of the most “important” art, people are sketching quietly in their sketchbooks, writing poetry for each other, going to karaoke, spray painting walls and dancing with each other. “
It’s not particularly in terms of a spiritual form of culture is it though? Or any thing that is moral, as I feel you may have reacted. If people wear a certain kind of hat and the majority of people feel a warm beautiful cultural feeling about that style, or even if they don’t and the hats are just really really expensive… well, I think that’s just a hitching post for other things, functionally speaking. It doesn’t necessarily have any intimacy or anything more to discover about it, while perhaps those less-monolithic examples you gave do.
“ Location to me is a reference to an interrelated context of life that results in the work, not which gallery or which museum, and audience represents any viewer and not an accounting of how many viewers. … I think its incredibly apt to see performance art in my approach. In many ways i see performance art as a more pure form of art, in terms of my personal definition. … those that share the lived experience of performance art often seem to me more deeply moved than with other, more formal art audiences. “
So far as I just tried to feel-out your statements as being moralistic, I also feel that some notion of the absolute value and higher priority of an emotional and communicative experience is something that all artists relate to. It’s interesting that you claim performance art has a stronger potential for that.
Like you started to say somewhere above there’s some question here about whether you are even open to the idea of art at all. And my god I see contradictions everywhere with you haha. Not to be a complete ass but you are so “wrote” (predictable or common) in your criticisms, despite biographical connections, that you are almost automatically valuable in the arts simply by doing any art at all.
It’s maybe like breaking into an academic circle or a science research bubble (fields where sharing and self-criticism are important) and then announcing to everyone else “all this is wrong, you’ve all been ignoring these things, let me show you.” Everyone is going to want to listen to that. Criticism is seen as normal if you’re interested in participating in the work. Given that often is true in my experience it’s interesting that you seem to be frustrated when you don’t see criticisms being felt in your audience. That seems an interesting demand, and kind of an irrational one in my opinion. (Ok, on to freedom)
So to recap, I said that freedom in my question was about artistic freedom, yes, but more specifically it would also address freedom from money or freedom from imposed structures and the influence of power (another way to interpret money), and how those things are relevant to artistic freedom. I know it’s core to your experience and your art but I want to know how you deal with it, since you seem to disapprove of many ways people have responded to that. For example you could say money is a corrupting influence and you might perform your art in opposition to that, but very few engage with that statement even if it’s purported to be inside the art.
I would hazard a guess that your art doesn’t engage anyone about your criticisms, and that’s because you don’t engage with them either. The accusation I have for you then is that you see these topics as annoyances and impediments, but not literally as such, instead it’s how they affect your headspace and limit your space for creative leisure.
If you could comment on that, and I’m not too far off, my next question would be to ask you why that is. And also how do you see the way I thought of the word freedom? Maybe we can introduce artworks after your next response to find some more specific angles, and keep me from bullying you too haha.
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I should say here that these are my opinions, full of some combination of yes, emotion, and yes, prejudice, also maybe immaturity or a desire to be exceptional or big ego stuff, but I do believe and try to live as an artist this way, and so….
Your comment about “spiritual forms of culture”, or a culture worthy of intimacy or more to discover strikes me as elitist and reductive of both audience and craftsman, almost classist. Also this assumption you’ve made is a perfect example of how formalistic art practices have created a new “common sense” around what can and can’t be art. All art is a hitching post for other things, and hats fulfill my requirements to be art which then might become culture in retrospect. I believe that there are probably many milliners who involve their work in their spiritual practice, and there is absolutely an intimacy involved when some bald men wear hats, for example.
I suppose i am a moralist, or I obsess over the ethics of art. Really, for me, pursuing art is very wrapped up in the question of what purpose art actually serves, which is still a question, although i have hypotheses that I follow. I certainly believe that art has power, and even if it does not, art’s place in society is wrapped up in structures of power (political, emotional, historical.) Although I’m not much of an activist. I don’t tend to try to rebalance power with art, rather i try to expose and discuss these things, and ask questions.
I absolutely am open to art at all. What disgusts me is the idea that there is only one type of art or artist. I’m open to god, but I don’t believe in allah. I suppose within that “spiritual but not religious” attitude, there is a bit of a trumpianism, i do tend to rip everything up and start over rather than participating, although I don’t feel that i do it to make myself special. Funny that you take issue with “rote” criticisms, because the ubiquity of these criticisms is exactly why i take them so seriously. When i speak to people about their experiences with art, yourself included, there are what seems to me to be very obvious and common problems in the places and ways that art is presented. It is indeed “rote” for people to say that they feel alienated by the art world or that they don’t come in contact much with Art that speaks to them, and meanwhile almost everyone I ask about this topic expresses a desire for more art experience, creativity or inspiration and desire for community or conversation around meanings and feelings. Moreover, it seems that art movements for the last couple hundred years have been consistently grappling with these topics. The impressionists, abstract art, pop art, postmodernism, street art, the rise of the internet and now NFTs are all to me in part subversions or renewals of a viewing and creating public alienated by gatekept culture. I propose that the through line and downfall of all of them has been in embracing formalistic practice for the sake of wealth and fame, isolating their meanings away behind a new gate, like how one can be “not punk enough” to be embraced by a punk scene.
On freedom, i still feel like youre focusing on the attainment of freedom, and specifically money as topics, which are both indeed probably uninteresting to me. But I absolutely incorporate the criticisms I’m making about freedom vs restriction and questions around value in my artwork. And I constantly not only seek and welcome but receive reactions in viewers on these topics. Hell, in my response i specifically brought up pixel art, which represents 10 years of my life. In that example (which i guess might be invalid for being in a “hat” cultural category,) people constantly marvel at the capabilities of a small file size and resolution, the freedom and depth that results from that restriction. Also working in art in games is for me an exercise in reaching out of and expanding the systems of valuation around art, and gamers constantly face confusing and contradictory senses of being valued.
More relevant to us, both of the editions of my work that Short Comment is currently printing grapple with these topics. The drawing that the Subjective Presence edition used is an attempt to put the anticapitalist practice of T.T. Kooken into application. It was drawn as a result of a process of realizing the roles i was taking on in society as an artist, the limitations and speed placed on people in public space, the overbearing formalistic codification that we are forced into, and the life of a tree or the ontology of objects as completely irrelevant to society or human structures. A Real Vagrant is based on concepts i was working through while carving a DIY public art gallery space out of an abandoned building under strict police surveillance in a rural area near Beijing, and is directly informed by my observations and learning about freedom and restriction specifically as it related to the nebulous value of art in society, in direct conversation with the Chinese artists i was working with.
In my more regular artistic practice, I could also point to bricolage as an example of how I incorporate these criticisms into my work. Bricolage, or the use of spontaneous, local or found art media, for me, is a way of subverting limitations on artistic freedom placed on me by money based value systems. For me, it’s a constant demonstration that the “highest quality” material often has little to do with actual expression or meaning and often acts as a barrier not only to freedom but to a sense of value. In my experience, when a piece of art is made in embrace of the limitations of local materials, not only does artistic freedom appear, but the people that both view the art and share living space with the sourced materials often find specific contextual meaning and senses of value that completely subvert the idea of what constitutes “valuable art”.
I wonder if what seems to be frustrating you about my views is that I’m refusing to admit or accept money itself. I should say outright that artists need to eat, and money wields power in every society. The money made from selling art can indeed create freedom. But, I don’t personally see art as a source of direct power. Art seems to me to be a bit more passive. And when i say art here, I’m not talking about the gallery and the sale and the money and the life of the artist or viewer all at once, I’m only talking about the single moment when media, substrate, location and audience meet.
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[[expressing ego and problems of conflicts of ego, culture, identity (artist, manliness)
… people interrogate him, the artist, and are not concerned with seeing the artwork
the mundane, communal, existence - that version of success
versus the celebrity, power, control, intentions that people put onto you, and that are futile anyway
I don’t understand culture, I am an innocent baby child]]
A portion of the above has been edited for clarity and length
