I would like to use this journal more often as I started to realise that my thoughts keep turning into either a series of unresolved conversations or unfinished projects. I am sharing these thoughts here on the prospect of them to disseminate in space; in doubt.
Since I have finished my Master’s degree studies I have been advised to teach at a university, or make a living by selling art and making art classes and workshops. I have put together some ideas for workshops and courses, but there is something in me that tells me that it is not fair. Being an artist is a job that is very vague and illusive that artists and people in general feel the need to have another job in order to do it, like teaching, editing or selling work.
What to do to preserve the artist from decaying into another institutional behaviour or becoming a bureaucratic machine, filling forms and analysing data. Or is this part of the artistic process? If it is, then it has to register into the actual art we are doing. For example, shall I hang all my IELTS exams in an art gallery? Well, it is what I have been doing in the studio the entire summer before attending my MFA until I started doubting my English.
I know that I am isolating myself with these thoughts. I love the local community of artists here and I do engage with it, but I don’t like the institutional manifestation of support that mainly focuses on international facade and disregards the artists’ urgent most direct needs. The only way I can get funding from the national cultural institute in Kuwait is by applying for their annual very generous award centered around national identity, or presenting a project that is connected to their current international agenda. The only support that has been easy to acquire is approval of using their venues for my exhibitions without charge.
Local galleries -except Sultan because they offer their space and marketing for free but don’t handle sales and shipping- expect a percentage of the artist’s sale in return for marketing, installation and venue use. Galleries here do not invest in the initial stage of the artistic process, they don’t invest in material, work and research done by the artist, they don’t look for project funding.
This forces artists to work on art projects that can be sold, it conditions artists to work within a particular frame or theme. We have three residency programmes in Kuwait: 1) The Promenade Cultural Center, 2) SADI by Sadu House, 3) Dar FIKAR. Most of the experimental work happen through these three entities which is great, but still these are temporary residencies that will support you once and move on, it is not a long term relationship/representation unless it involves workshops/education or product design.
One would argue that there are opportunities outside the local sphere, but being a mother limits these possibilities. In order for artists to thrive, they have to accept being nomads hopping from one residency to another. I cannot do that with a family to care for, it doesn’t also suit my behavior of living and thinking which is more rooted and site/language specific.
Artists are trying to make a business of their craft, or have another job to be able to do their job as artists. I am an artist, a mother and I do commissions to sustain myself financially which is not working. I need to make more workshops or build a side business to sustain myself, or take in a full time teaching job which I know will limit my already limited time in the studio.
Art is a kind of job that challenges the capitalist organisation of the world, questions the very environment it exists in, thinks about it and responds to it. How can we preserve this independence? Another frustrating common conception about art is that it is a privilege for those who can afford it, and if you are an artist then you have a certain level of prestige, because your art is a commodity. For that I blame the ecosystem of the art industry.
Institutes, awards, residencies are entities that create opportunities for artists, however they also create hierarchy. There are winners, there are rejections, and there are collectors, gallerists, writers. The artists suddenly find themselves in a competitive field and if a gallery or a collector set an eye on one particular artist, then that person will most likely survive, and like hunger games, the struggle becomes part of their ‘legacy’. But isn’t the struggle to survive as an artist a deviation from the main story of their being, their presence and how they respond to their surrounding, or how they build and pose their own questions. Artists now feel the need to prove the urgency or relevance of their work to current politics, ideologies and social matters in order to be supported or recognised, while their sole urgency is their being. They are the politics, they are the ideologies and they are the social matters.
In consequence, artists are now conditioned to mimic cultural institutes in their desire for international recognition. As artists, do we really want that? Why? What is the point? Isn’t connecting with my immediate audience/environment fulfilling enough? Yes, it isn’t. Why? Because there isn’t many art critics who are able to turn your artistic explorations into a cultural discourse, if your work sells, it is financially fulfilling, but if no one talks about it or discusses it, excluding friends or interested individuals, an artist may desire intellectual or emotional fulfillment, may feel that what they shared with the world somehow have no closure.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe we never feel fulfilled as artists, maybe the work I have produced is enough to make me fulfilled. Otherwise there will not be artists who were hiding their work their entire life, because their artistic process was already fulfilling. But I am a sharer, a dialogue conductor, I am not monologue oriented.
Everyday, I have to work on two different sets of disciplines: 1) to make/perform/compose. 2) to share my work with the world, which at the moment feels more like convincing people that I exist. There needs to be systems in the world that allow artists to exist without the need to be fit or chosen, without the need to sell my knowledge to another artist who is also struggling to survive. I would like to survive as an independent artist without the need to serve an institutional agenda or be part of a national propaganda.
