Lillian Snortland | Sit on The Heart, and Art, of the Party
Lillian Snortland, photo courtesy of the author
Lillian Snortland, originally from Eugene, Oregon, is a self-taught writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. She has explored themes of fantasy, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine from a young age. At Carleton College, she studied storytelling and material culture of the past—Classical Studies, French literature and media, and art history, and continues to play with a multidisciplinary perspective in her analysis today. She currently works in the nonprofit arts sector to provide opportunities of capacity-building and cultural capital to those in need. Lillian was recently accepted into the Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, hosted by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company and Postscript Magazine. Further writing can be found at https://chaimihai.wordpress.com/
Sit on The Heart, and Art, of the Party
Let’s start with a question: Who needs who more, artists or institutions?
At the most basic level, it is institutions who need artists more. Artists will continue to be artists with or without institutions. There will always be others with whom they can share their work. Most institutions, on the other hand, cannot remain relevant or viable without artists’ work to guide them forward.
Despite needing artists more, institutions manipulate the perceived value of creative labor by implementing “the fugitive promise of commercial success...Exceptionality’s ‘cruel optimism’... [which] overlaps with the so-called ‘cultural discount,’ the budgetary assumption that the gratifications of art-making offset the sting of low pay” (de Peuter 5). This is a psychology that arts institutions wield to create competition and stratification among artists, manufacturing an economy that rewards only a few artists deemed “exceptional” enough to merit institutional support. These levers of reward and valuation simultaneously invisibilize the collective labor of artists working outside of institutional systems and that of countless arts workers—studio assistants, curators, educators, preparators, art handlers, etc.—to perpetuate the illusion of individual exceptionalism.
I’m fascinated by one undervalued and unrewarded lever in institutional presentation specifically: community. More to the point, I struggle with the idea that creating community in an institutional context has value only insofar as it can be commercialized for one-off events and spectacles. Institutions have historically flourished by implementing, enforcing, and encouraging modes of presentation and art consumption that are individualistic; modes that are at odds with creative intimacy. Even though many institutions promote a progressive politics of social and community engagement, individual viewing experiences, and individual fame, fortune, and prestige, are often modeled as more than, better than, and consequently ideal. When artists are viewed as atomized producers of content, the potential for communal experience diminishes.
The museum’s perception of artists as producers, not cultural staff and stewards of community, is glaringly apparent. “Gallery staff is on payroll while artists are compensated ad hoc, if paid at all; and art institutions’ ability to fulfill their missions depends on the contributions of artists whose sustainability is not necessarily a budgetary priority of those same institutions” (de Peuter 4). As disposable, interchangeable entities, artists are at the mercy of institutions. In this way, institutions push the market away from collectivism, and towards a market psychology based on individualism.
W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), an activist organization working to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and institutions, has identified the false promise of individual success, and attempts to counter it: “W.A.G.E.’s fee system is underpinned by a class analysis that stresses commonality over exceptionality” (de Peuter 8). Forcing institutions to care for the collective rather than the individual “allows artists to stake a claim on art institutions as also their institutions” (de Peuter 12). Currently, the relationship is fashioned the other way around and most institutions are slow to reassess their current models of assigning artists, and their work, value. The only way to upset business as usual is to rethink, rewrite, and expand those definitions. From there, manufactured economies are more easily dismantled and extricated from their individualistic origins.
W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) Membership Card
Transaction is a reality of our lived experience; but what we are transacting often gets muddled. When institutions seek to commodify or commercialize collective care by selling tickets to blockbuster exhibitions at $25 a pop, our hearts tend to discern what is authentic from the PR shams. We recognize, with our lasting memories and our hearts, when the vibe is good. When a room is warm. When a crowd is welcoming. When the party could go on all night long. I think back to casual parties and gatherings in my life centered in art, completely outside of an institution. The sheer joy of those experiences could never be confined to four cold white walls.
Last year, I attended a panel discussion called “Care and Tenderness” hosted by Common Field, a national network of independent arts organizations and organizers. One of the central questions the panel was asked is often overlooked in institutions contexts: “How can we create and sustain space for care and tenderness within cooperative work? How can we, as cultural organizers… make space for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations?” So, I asked myself: What moments in my own life, initiatives, and projects have I witnessed that illustrate an enriching alternative to individualism? What was the relationship between artists, viewers, and space?
While living in Omaha, I participated in a book group that dove into bell hooks’ Art on My Mind. At our meeting, someone offered up an anecdote. They mentioned making a gallery in their own home and sharing it with their loved ones. While this was not the first time I’d heard of a more intimate setting used as gallery space, this example stuck with me. Making a gallery for friends and family, in some ways, is the purest form of sharing because the “transaction” involves an exchange of emotional labor for emotional enrichment. The home-gallery is about the currency of intimacy, not commodity consumption. That authentic and vital exchange feels like an antidote to institutional systems; the balm you apply after a day the Guggenheim. I know where I’d rather be.
Let me take you back in time to a feverish hunt during which I found the apartment of my dreams: a one-bedroom next to an abysmally loud five-lane street, across from a Taco Bell. It had an enormous living area and high ceilings. I certainly didn’t have enough furniture to fill it, and I certainly did not make enough to afford the monthly rent long-term, but one of my best friends was searching for a studio space. We schemed. I proposed that half of the cavernous living room be her studio space. We researched paper room-dividers, the kind a wealthy lady might change clothes behind. We did the calculations, created the contract for her time use of the “studio,” appropriate noise levels from her speakers, and shot ideas back and forth about all the party themes we could put together with her work on our walls, our thrifted oddities, and my projector. It was going to be epic. While the apartment was snapped out from under me, I still think about that vision a lot.
Looking even further back in time to my years as a student at Carleton College, I was fortunate enough to know someone who lived in Memorial Hall, a quad-style dorm. It was occupied by mostly upperclassmen who had left behind recklessly wild beer games and were hoping to put their newfound cool headedness to good use on the party scene. This saw the birth of one of the most memorable parties of my college career: MeMoMa--a send-up gallery of assorted thrift finds, printed, donated, and collected images, crudely charming colored pencil drawings, and plaques written with so many fake details that any gallery might have been fooled. At face value, this irreverent event was an excuse to drink wine out of a plastic cup and sample a cheese plate from Econo-Foods. But just beneath the surface, it more importantly poked fun at the trappings of the art world while creating an authentic shared experience encompassed by art objects and creative spirits. How has the institutional art world gotten so far away from the party?
To place my experience of MeMoMa in stark relief, I think about Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, a ham-fisted and gaudy 2017 exhibition at the Punta della Dogana that explored themes and modes of presentation similar to MeMoMa, but in a perverse fashion. The antithesis of all I consider authentic, the exhibition displayed findings from a fake ship wreckage discovered off the coast of East Africa. Hirst proposed the legend of a freed slave whose ship of riches was submerged. This monumental work, placed squarely at the altar of artifice, cited true histories and then twisted them by tapping pop-culture references such as a barnacle-covered Mickey Mouse, a sword with “Sea World” written on it, a Transformer made entirely in gold, and a sculpture of Yolandi Visser in the piece Aspect of Katie Ishtar Yo-landi, the contemporary musician forcibly mutated into the likeness of a Mesopotamian goddess.
Rife with culturally appropriative histories, the exhibition toys with the irony of manufacturing meaning, and the power of storytelling. It comments on the ways in which museum and gallery goers come to know what they know and do what they do. But despite its tongue-in-cheek humor and self-aware commercial wink, it has no soul. The imposing scale of the work, made possible only by the status accorded to its creator by the institutions of art, makes viewers complicit in enacting stale art world stereotypes while, at the same time, crushing the potential for collectively making meaning through intimacy. You heard it here first, folks: MeMoMa did it better.
Sharing more in common with MeMoMa than “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” The Nook Gallery was a delightful space that unfortunately closed in 2019. I learned about it in the context of the “Care and Tenderness” panel discussion at Common Field. Essentially, the women of the Nook House Cultural Center, Shushan Tesfizigta and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, transformed their kitchen seating nook into a gallery space with the aim of holding an inclusive and accessible space for emerging underrepresented voices. They describe “Thinking about the importance of gathering around a table, what does it mean to come together for a meal or to cook together, for art, for critical discussion, for storytelling? Bringing community together is what we strive to do as artists, culture makers, curators, writers and performers in the world.”
What does it mean to push against soulless, lofty spaces that prop up the notion of individual exceptionalism with exhibitions like Hirst’s? What does it mean to exchange that notion of institutional success for new definitions of how we collectively value making meaning together?
Sydney Cohen’s work on view at Nook gallery. Photo by Sarah Burke
The Nook Gallery said it well: “The Nook Gallery offers a possibility for supporting and nurturing this gathering, telling and being together.” Making and supporting spaces that work toward validating collectivity and shared experiences will supplant an extractive arts economy that privileges a few, with a tender arts ecosystem that uplifts many. And perhaps, by building an arts ecosystem which emphasizes humanly scaled interactions, rather than the needs of institutions, a better reality for artists and their communities will bloom—one wherein value is determined more democratically. Institutions can be a part of that ecosystem too, but not without serious structural and ideological shifts away from leveraging institutional capital to “make or break” artists, as so often happens.
I’ll end with a passage from Art on My Mind:
“Life taught me that being an artist was dangerous… A distant relative of my father’s, cousin Shuyler was talked about as someone who had wasted his life dreaming about art. He was lonely, sad, and broke. At least that was how folks saw him. I do not know how he saw himself, only that he loved art” (hooks 1).
The reality that cousin Shuyler was broke is a failing of an individualistic arts economy. He was not “exceptional”, and so he fell through the cracks. The fact that he was perceived as lonely by others was a failing of the arts ecosystem to value creativity as a community, beyond material success, and beyond four white walls. Art must be shared and validated as a community, as a key to self-determination, as freedom. It is our work as individuals, and as institutions in this ecosystem, to ensure that creatives are supported along the way. Welcome to the party.
SOURCES/FURTHER READING:
1. Common Field “Care and Tenderness in Cooperative Cultural Work” panel: https://www.commonfield.org/convenings/3248/documentation/4262/care-and-tenderness-in-cooperative-cultural-work
2. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. 1995. Print.
3. de Peuter, Greig (forthcoming) “Organizing Dark Matter: W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization.” In J. Compton, N. Dyer-Witheford, A. Grzyb, and A. Hearn, eds. Organizing Equality: Global Struggles in an Age of Right-Wing Ascendancy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.