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Winter Quarter Essay — December 2002

Art is Not a Horserace
by Andrew Rush   ©2002

 

One of my students recently asked me about an expression I often use when calming someone's impatience with the slow or uneven progress of their art studies. 'What do you mean, when you say that art is not a horserace?', she asked. Here is my reply:

One of the most important distinctions to be mastered in order to become a competent artist is to understand the relationship between the content of an image and the context in which it is has its existence. It is a very difficult concept to teach, because while the context in which we live shapes our every movement, it tends to be invisible. A common analogy is that birds don't know about air, even though air is the transparent context that allows them to be birds.

I have a very intelligent black border collie who loves to ride beside me in the passenger seat of my truck, to the great annoyance of my grandchildren ("why does she get to ride in front without a seat belt and I don't"?). However when we drive by another dog alongside the road, she leaps up and paws at the window, barking furiously until we are well past. Bright as she may be, I have determined that she perceives herself as fixed in her personal space. She is not moving — rather, the road is moving toward her. Thus the road dog is an 'intruder' that has entered her territory as if she were at home on her front step.

You and I live in the same world as our dogs and birds. But because we human beings have a time/space context, we can move about the world in ways unavailable to our animal colleagues. In the domain of making art, however, there is a cultural context we work within that is as transparent to us as air is to birds, water is to fish, or time/space is to dogs — and I propose it is the invisible source of a lot of confusion about the role of art in our lives.

The cultural context in which we make our art is under our nose, of course. In general terms, it is the social/cultural conditions particular to one's time and place in the long stream of history. More specifically, our contemporary cultural context can be defined as: 1) industrial, i.e. producing goods, services and information for sale, based upon mechanical and mass-reproductive processes; 2) urbanized, i.e. living closely together without much contact with nature nor much awareness of biological rhythms, which makes us restless and easily indoctrinated by ideas and symbols from media-managers; 3) consumer-oriented, i.e. people encouraged by the media to seek fulfillment by 'buying and consuming' as our main avenue of creative expression.

Because everyone is born into this same culture, it seems natural, even to an artist, to seek validation by achieving success in the market. In order to be recognized in this system, an artist, like everyone else, must figure out how to produce and offer his/her work as a commodity for sale. Trying to gain recognition in this context can feel like being in a horserace — with 'winners' (grants or prizes, sales, fame) and 'losers' (incompetent, irrelevant, boring, amateur). It can even be a rather heady and exciting race.

But it's a mad horserace, fiercely competitive, with no finish line! It is also subject to capricious changes of fashion and to the manipulations of advertising. Artists may well feel confused or even crazy, because not to understand the context of the game is like being a basketball player on a football field. Someone keeps knocking you down but you can't figure out why.

I am not suggesting that producing art objects for sale to the commodity culture is to be either avoided or embraced, because it is in fact the context we live within, actually are infused with from birth. If one purposefully chooses to work 'for the market', there is power in that choice.

Working for the market, however, will always have a personal price — in stress from the competition, in the never-ending pursuit for approval, and in losing touch with one's inner life. Hopefully, by taking notice of the powerful influence of the commodity market culture and how it penetrates even the hidden recesses of our thinking, we may be able to recover some personal clarity about our original life purpose and the role that the practice of art plays in expressing that purpose.

In the context of life's deeper purposes, art is not a horserace.

©2002 Andrew Rush. May not be copied or reprinted in any form without permission