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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The latest Goodreads bulletin is on artist-run culture. Timothy Comeau has posted a very interesting article by AA Bronson of General Idea, first published in 1983, Andrew J. Patterson's preface to our book Money Value Art, and a link to the discussion on this blog in September. I'm really glad to see artist-run culture under the bell-jar right now. There is an article on the topic in the current C Magazine by Emily Vey Duke, and a piece on Art Metropole coming soon in Art On Paper magazine by Micah Toub.
AA Bronson's essay is a good history, delivered with a tongue-in-cheek biblical tone:
...it was natural to call upon our national attributes - the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic - and working together, and working sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle from the messy post-Sixties spaghetti of our minds, artist-run galleries, artists' video, and artist-run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did.Throughout the essay he returns again and again to the refrain of Canadian engagement with bureaucracy and protestant work ethic. I can relate, being endowed with a does of both of those traits. But AA was writing in 1983, which is starting to seem like a long time ago. I wonder what he would say now to the question: what engine fuels artist-run culture today? As anyone currently involved with ARCs (like Bronson) is keenly aware, there is a massive difference between doing the tedious grunt work to make your own project happen, and managing to inspire a team of young, creative employees.
Emily Vey Duke's essay is fabulous. I'm tempted to keyboard the whole thing and post it, but of course that would be stealing. She and partner Cooper Battersby are video artists who made their name speaking poetically to the youthful state of "Being Fucked Up." (I love this video.) Vey Duke is now an arts administrator, the new director of a Halifax artist-run centre called the Khyber Centre for the Arts. This represents a shift:
When I first decided to be an artist, I had an incredible sense of urgency about my work. I had to express myself to others because I felt unbearably alone. It worked. People understood. Now I don't feel alone as often or with as much intensity. Instead, I spend my time trying to re-conceptualize my job as director of a "regional" Artist-Run Centre...to make it feel even a tiny bit pressing.And she succeeds! Halifax is a raw city when it comes to interracial politics. The catastrophic demolition of Africville hangs over everyone, and there is a constant tension in the "shady" neighbourhoods of the North End between emerging art-types and established poor and working class. The racial divide is not absolute, but it is visible. Vey Duke draws out this urban friction through a personal incident, and ends her article with a call:
There is urgency here. It is an urgent matter that I find ways to be white that don't contribute to ... rage and alienation...The Khyber may flounder and fail; I may never make another experimental art video. Both those things would sadden but not ruin me. In this other area, there is no margin for error. I have to act different in a way that keeps Black teens out of jail.I'm grateful to Goodreads for posting Bronson's article and furthering this discussion. I have been thinking that the onus for inspiring young artists-as-bureaucrats lies with the older generation. After all, they need employees who will put in extra hours and excited, fresh, young board members to administer the institutions they created. But of course I've got it backwards. It is the job of people like Vey Duke, who see where urgency lies, to push the institutions into the shapes that can apply to the pressing Canadian art needs of today. Mabye the way to revitalise artist-run culture is to start by asking, what's missing?...and bring the very people who are missing it on board. And nobody has to toss out the great Canadian legacies of bureaucratic tendency and protestant work ethic.