a very brief brainstorm on the nature of art, both in commercial and activist settings.
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It doesn’t calm down. It does calm down. It doesn’t calm down.
Yarnbombing is a form of fibre based installation art. It is both sculptural and painterly. There is a line and a form. It is not a genre of art, it is a technique. It can be used as a form of graffiti and street tagging, it can be used in huge installations for international ad campaigns.
Knitta please has been yarnbombing for x amount of years, and being a grown woman, a professional artist, she can do as she damn well pleases. Her installation in the gap campaign was executed very well and looked fabulous. Commercial art, albeit commercial, remains art.
I, for one, am apolitical. Call me a dirty capitalist [which I suppose has less credibility than a dirty communist, or whatever you people are calling yourselves now] but as the ‘occupy’ ‘movements’ were happening, I was pretty ambivalent to the ‘activists’, maybe even a little angry with them. Was I ‘anti-occupy’? maybe – not that I’m against the need to change our backwards society, but since nobody stood up and took any kind of control or desire to make any kind of actual change, the whole effort seemed to fall flat. I don’t think people can realistically visualize what ‘99%’ really looks like, and I sure don’t align myself with these ‘99%ers’. Thank god I moved out of montreal – or the non-philosophy of OM would have been shoved down my throat, or being shamed for not partaking.
But this is just part of the problem – if the occupiers are so upset about not having jobs, then why shame an artist who took on a commercial gig? Why did they instead waste their time sitting around viger square and become vocally enraged at their own lack of employment? Why not join the forces of the city of montreal and get paid to clean up the mess they made? Is their a pride in remaining poor and bitter to fellow artists who have truly said ‘enough!’ and put their skills to real use? To me, the life of the starving artist has less credibility than the working artist. It is indeed a tough world for the visual artists – but we are creative people by nature. Surely we can be creative, stay creative, not have to compromise our vision, AND get paid for it? Our lives do not have to be mutually exclusive from one another. This is a very very very old topic, one that has been covered countless times, both by myself and other artists who have the capacity to think beyond their own stinking ego.
This is where yarn bombing sets in. the artists of graffiti movement of the 80s and 90s were confronted with the same dilemma. Do I ‘sell-out’ or remain underground? Both have their cons, both have their pros, I suppose. But as I’m growing older, into a more adult form, the less I want to work some silly job full-time [even tho I really quite enjoy my jobs and are very flexible] and wish to focus more on my art and my farm and my husband – the things that are most valuable to me. I’m not going to kid myself, I know that deep down I’m a Warholian. I believe in the power of mass art – be it produced or propagated.
Art can be used as a form of protest against being sold something; art can be used to sell you something. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO. In both cases, once it leaves the artist, it ceases to have anything to do with the artist. In either cases, once it leaves the artist, it belongs to the people. Either left to the elements on a street post or encased in plastic on a billboard. Just because I’m open to working commercially doesn’t ever mean that I’ll stop street tagging. The purposes of both are so different that one should not have to choose! The Artist has the right to exercise as many functions of art as they so desire without being castigated by those who choose to exercise as few as their ego allows.
Let’s not be hipsters about this – irony is no longer a valid argument. Let’s push things forward and rebuild. Is mercury in retrograde? No. there is no point in refusing to expand one’s art.
I put too much effort into remaining active to be an activist – too much effort into my own evolution and change to stand around and demand someone else to do it for me.
now that this is all said and done i can get on with my post about Sharpay Evans
