Hope & Dread, Episode 9: Artists: Players or Pawns?
In a series dedicated to tectonic shifts in power in art, why did we wait so long to devote a show to the artists themselves? Well, we wanted to paint a picture of the landscape in which those creators now live and work - and as you’ve heard, it is complex. In this episode we hear from artists who want to change the system with their own foundations, support networks and big ideas. These are stories of civic and artistic philanthropy that aren’t about engraving your name in granite but about changing the system—while making meaningful work. But when that big payday comes knocking, how do you stay true to your dream? Tune in to find out.
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Guests: Michael Armitage, Jackson Polys, Tiffany Sia, Hank Willis Thomas and Issy Wood
Image: Meek Gichugu, No Erotic Them Say (1992)
Courtesy: the artist and Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute; photograph: Haus der Kunst, Munich/Markus Tretter
Transcript:
Michael Armitage:
I've never been so excited by cement and sand in my life but seeing it kind of take form physically is, for me, it's a bit of a dream materializing.
Charlotte Burns:This is Hope & Dread. I’m Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We want to hear from people who are making change, and people who are resisting change. Artists today have more power than ever before, and in today’s episode, we’ll talk to some of them about how they’re using it.
Lots of artists are questioning the way the system works—and their roles within it. You’ll hear from artists who are using their power and their platform in different ways. From Michael Amitage, who’s expanding the canon and our understanding of art history, to Hank Willis Thomas and Jackson Polys, whose respective collaborations sit firmly at the center of American politics. Meanwhile, Tiffany Sia pushes back against the commodification of artists.
First—raising an important question— is the artist Issy Wood, reading from her book But Who’s Counting, which is a collection of her blog posts between 2019 and 2020.
Issy Wood:
I keep being told that the days of an artist remaining oblivious to their output as a monetizable commodity are long gone. An artist should know her prices in at least three currencies, should keep a tight grip on ideas of value and scarcity and long-term investment and brand. She should study the game, in as much as she is both player and pawn.
Charlotte Burns:
Player or pawn? Well, let’s dive in.
Allan Schwartzman:We heard from the painter Michael Armitage at the beginning of the show. Michael Armitage is one of the most exciting, dynamic and potentially transformative painters who have emerged in recent decades.
Charlotte Burns:
He founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in 2020. It’s a non-profit exhibition space and research center created with the intention of supporting contemporary art in the region, and of better preserving East African art history.
But, NCAI is not about Michael—purposefully so. Here he is with more detail about how the foundation came into existence.
Michael Armitage:
NCAI or Nairobi Contemporary Arts Institute began as an idea in 2017 with Mukami Kuria. We hosted The Gathering, which was an event where 52 artists from 12 different countries on the continent came together to talk about things that were similar or different about practicing within the arts all over the continent.
And in the lead up to that, I was talking to a lot of Kenyan artists and just asked them, what in their minds they felt would be a kind of beneficial addition to all of the things that are happening in Nairobi.
And the two things that kept coming up was a not-for-profit art space for doing exhibitions outside of the commercial sector. And secondly, was an educational institution that provided a different type of education to the ones that are already available on the ground. And that really was the beginning of NCAI.
Charlotte Burns:
How daunting is it as an artist to start dealing with the logistics of developing a non-profit space?
Michael Armitage:
[Laughs] I think for someone like me, where maybe my natural state is alone in a studio with a box of paints and a brush, The Gathering at first was already one step outside of my comfort zone. But then taking the next step and actually moving towards a physical space, it was clear that what was needed is an amazing team on the ground in Nairobi, and they really deserve the credit for bringing things together and for the way that our program is developing in very difficult times.
Charlotte Burns:The upcoming exhibition at NCAI will be called Mwili Akili na Roho, or Body, Mind and Spirit, which tracks the subtleties of the shifting history of East African figurative painting since the 1970s.
Michael Armitage:
For me, it was important to speak to a history that also had stylistic and conceptual shifts throughout it, because that's something that people really never talk about and think of. There's always this phrase, which drives me mad of ‘African Modernism’, that seems to bungle together every single idea that has been spoken about on the continent over a 50 year period—it's a little bit insane.
Allan Schwartzman:
So allow me to add a little bit to the madness created in Michael over this term, African Modernism. So, Modern art is something that is very definitively born in the West. It is born of industrialization and the development of a leisure class that that economy made possible. So, that created a room for a collector class and for an art that would be rooted in the issues of art rather than the interest and needs of the patrons who might have been commissioning works in the past.
If you look at one of the critical turning points in Modern art, it’s Cubism, where you see a total breakdown of pictorial space. And so much of that fractal shifting and deconstruction of space is directly linked to the interests of the Cubist in African sculpture.
And so you have the Western Modern artists looking to the traditional African sculptor, seeing what they see in that work—removed from the actual use, function and history of such objects—and objectifying them.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. So the phrase is not only incorrect, it's sort of an insult in many ways, because you take inspiration from a culture and don't even credit them in the footnotes.Allan Schwartzman:
It's all upside down. If you look closely at Michael's work, what you begin to see is this equal presence between the image in the foreground and the space in the background, or the figures and the environment. And this to me, I've always seen as being a result of his own way of experiencing experience itself, as kind of emanating energy, where every component is equally important. But you could also see that as sharing certain key qualities with what the Cubists sought to achieve.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also speaking between two different cultures, which Michael talks about really clearly in this next section. He grew up in Nairobi in the 1980s. He moved to boarding school in the UK when he was 16. And he recalls having his first, rather underwhelming, experience of seeing Western art in the flesh as a young student.
Michael Armitage:
I remember being taken around The National Gallery by a tutor of mine on my foundation course and being shown Titian's, I think it's Diana shooting Actaeon with a Bow, [The Death of Actaeon, 1559-1575] and being told that that was the greatest painting ever made. And at that time, I just, I was kind of, I was like, why this brown? It's not very good, it's not very well painted, the proportions are all wrong, it's a bit scuzzy. I know plenty of people who can use color better than this guy.
And that's because my experience of art was very different to the art that I was being introduced to. And there were elements of taste, and appreciation of what other artists were doing that I hadn't developed at all and hadn't been exposed to. And it took me a while, to be perfectly honest, to find anything in Western art that I related to strongly.Charlotte Burns:
More than 20 years later in the same city, Michael was himself the subject of a major exhibition, Paradise Edict at London’s Royal Academy of Arts last year.
Visiting the show was a little like seeing a magician lift the curtain, revealing his tricks. A section of the exhibition space was given over to a show-within-a-show—a smaller version of Mwili, Akili na Roho. Michael generously dedicated the space to showing some of the artists from East Africa who have influenced his own work.
Michael Armitage:
The guys that we were showing at the Academy, in Mwili Akili na Roho, in that room, I knew all of their work growing up. So that was my history that I was coming from. And quite frankly, it was a little bit difficult, wanting to speak to that while making work within a Western art education, just simply because that history wasn't available.
And so when thinking of work in its context, in the way it was used by someone like Meek Gichugu. But when you then come up against a different culture with a different language, and thinking through socio-political things, through a different language that fits this other story told, it begins to be very difficult to see and appreciate the considerations of these artists and that history for what it is, as opposed to this other framework provided. So that was something that I went back and forward with, throughout education.
Charlotte Burns:
How did that make you feel? What emotions did that bring out in you?
Michael Armitage:
Sure, it was frustrating sometimes, but the things that were frustrating weren't the fact that people didn't know these artists. I mean, I was coming to a society with hundreds of years of art-making that I had no clue about. I recognized that there was something missing on both sides.
But the thing that was frustrating was, surprisingly, regularly, a reference that would come up for me to go back and look at was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), as if that spoke to something true or would provide me something to kind of work with or work against. And I only say that because it came up several times throughout my eight years of art education. And I remember first reading it and thinking, why on earth is anybody asking me to read this stuff? Like, it's beautifully written, but it's kind of horrendous.
Charlotte Burns:
Michael talks about the frameworks through which we understand history—and his conception of how much we miss. Part of what he’s drawing attention to now, though, is not just the shifts in styles that we’ve failed to see. He’s also positioning the foundation within a longer lineage of artists who create cultural initiatives within, and for, their communities
Michael Armitage:We're there to build on a lot of extraordinary other programs, and initiatives that have been started by artists like Elimo Njau at Paa Ya Paa, who started Paa Ya Paa in the 60s. And it's still ongoing today, where they've supported a phenomenal number of artists under their roof and done exhibitions and been a real cultural hub for the region.
Charlotte Burns:These traditions are not beyond society—they’re often a strategic part of its formation.
Michael Armitage:
Elimo Njau not only through his paintings, and thinking about ideas around Pan-Africanism and claiming language to an Indigenous culture, claiming a religious history to an Indigenous culture. Ideas of working together that were very prominent within the politics of these new emerging states around the continent. Those also permeated into their thinking and their work. And you really see that through the adoption of particular types of language and religious ideas, religious motifs, but also socio-political ideas.
Charlotte Burns:
In an industry where people have water fountains, wings and entire galleries named after their philanthropic contributions, it is notable that none of the artists we’ve interviewed really want their names attached.
These artists are quicker to credit the coalitions surrounding them.Allan Schwartzman:
This is nothing less than a pivot from me to we, which is radical within the field of art, particularly after coming off of so many recent decades of the market defining value—and value way beyond financial value, but of social importance, and stratification and so on. And so, sometimes with artists too, egos and the strengths of personality get in the way. This is a generation, not only of artists, but of curators and directors who also deflect away from themselves, referring to those who have preceded them, those who work with them and those who are helping to lead the way into the future.
Michael Armitage:
You can't create change by yourself. I mean, you can try but good luck to you
In many ways, I feel more like a kind of a facilitator in my role. And it's also not necessarily just about change, it's also about recognizing what's good that's there and amplifying that.
For me, I feel like the responsibility of having some form of success is that you have a community which you’re part of and indebted to, and maybe now because people from communities which have been underrepresented—and subsequently, are from communities that need more support—if more artists are being recognized and do have the means to support their own community, and that's more visible, that's just probably a consequence of the way that people are looking at things now.
Charlotte Burns:The growth of the art system is unprecedented and some of the artists who have benefitted from it are aware of how unusual this moment is, and yet, how limited, still.
There are artists within this generation who are recognizing their platform and their power as conveners: they’re clear-eyed about what it takes to create change.
Here’s the artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Hank Willis Thomas:
The reason I, and maybe others, don't want to be the heroes is because we see our own limitations. That's why it takes all of us to be the leaders, not an individual.
What we don't want to do is, once we get into the museum or institution, we don't want to be the monster, so to speak.
A lot has been lost in this kind of commercial obsession with “equity”, quote, unquote, that is not really about actual inclusion as much as it is the appearance of inclusion—and the inclusion of a limited elite class of Black people who can now have access.
We're in the club, but what about our cousins? What about our nieces and nephews or our family? Obviously the more people who have access to capital, the more that they can share it, if they choose to. But if the system discourages us from sharing it, then what?
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, we’ve heard in the museum episodes a lot of the problems with philanthropy and now we’re hearing more about ways in which artists are doing it themselves, focusing on community-building.
Why is this generation behaving so differently to previous “boom” generations—I’m thinking artists in New York in the 1980s, for instance, or the YBAs [Young British Artists] in London in the 1990s, many of whom just used their power to increase their property portfolios? What’s the difference?
Allan Schwartzman:
The 1980s was really the beginning of the rise of this massive consumption-driven market that we find ourselves in today. Amongst artists who emerged in the early ‘80s, there was the sense that they could have their cake and eat it too. They made work that was political, but they could also make money at it.
At a certain point, it seemed more like they were more driven by sitting at the table at the benefit than raising questions and doubts about the very financial system that was supporting them.
And so now, decades later, we find a very different generation emerging. I mean, you see this sense of collectivity and a sense of greater responsibility toward community, toward world, toward environment within a younger generation, whether they're involved in art or not. But within this generation of artists, we see countless instances in which artists have seen the creation of platforms for social and community engagement, empowerment and self-sustenance as central to their work.
So 1993, you had Rick Lowe in Houston create Project Row Houses, which has become a model for so many of the artists-driven entities that have been created since. He bought a whole city block of houses and turned them into arts and cultural community.
Candace Williams, Cassandra Press in Los Angeles, has probably the greatest reading list you could find regarding all different perspectives on social and political activism.
Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer founded Denniston Hill in upstate New York, which is a residency program that's all driven by a sense of community.
Mark Bradford in Los Angeles, created Art + Practice, which is all about bringing art and social services to artists.
It goes on. Lauren Halsey created Summaeverythang.
Titus Kaphar, a student freshly out of Yale created a community center. He moved his studio to the most blighted part of New Haven, and he created NXTHVN, which is one of the most compelling artist residencies and centers anywhere.
It's not coincidental that all of these are Black artists. All these are artists who did not see the same potential for themselves in the art world and the art market as they were going. So they seized control. They're of another generation. They have a different sense of empowerment. And each of these artists sees what they do in their activist work is directly linked to what they do within their artwork. I think the best example of that perhaps is Kevin Beasley, who is invited to be part of Prospect New Orleans. And instead of making an artwork, per se, he took the money, tripled it with some of his own money and bought a plot of land in the Ninth Ward. And he created a garden there. And he spent a lot of time in the community, looking at previous models of community-building that didn't succeed in order to have a clear understanding of how to build something that would be lasting.
Charlotte Burns:
Culture is central to a thriving democracy.
As we heard in episode three, “Controlling Culture”, governments quickly clamp down on it when they want to start bringing a population to heel. Lots of artists today are aware of that power.
Let’s go back to Hank Willis Thomas
Hank is an artist whose photographs examine the representation of Black bodies through American history and whose public sculptures are often uplifting symbols of Black Power. But he also works in collectives to try to create more nuanced political engagement across America.
Hank Willis Thomas:
Artists are always, and have always been doing civic work, but it's seen on the periphery. It's seen as something that's like, kind of on the side or even a bonus. We know that the arts are not really often very well supported, funded and there's no wonder that we wind up in situations where we have no new or good ideas for solving age-old problems, because we're not investing in the people who are actually doing the work and actually helping the stories of the research that artists are doing in their practices, come into the world and applying them to politics.
I believe that there's no culture without art, and you can't have a civil society without a culture. So, as we've seen, art has been impacting culture and therefore civil society is being impacted. I just think we should be more conscious of that kind of relationship.
Charlotte Burns:
Hank is one of the founding members of the artist-led group, For Freedoms, which was created in 2016 as a super-PAC in the run-up to the presidential election. Super-PACs are usually partisan political vehicles used to raise unlimited funds from donors.
For Freedoms registered as a political action committee and began raising funds for national advertising, especially throughout America’s heartlands. Most of the ads were original works created by contemporary artists to provide information on hot-button topics like gun control, reproductive rights, racism, gender equality and freedom of expression. The point was to move the conversation beyond soundbites.
Hank Willis Thomas:
Good art asks questions and good design answers them. But the quality of the questions do impact the quality of the answers. We don't think that we're asking enough good questions in mainstream society, and that's where we need to promote artists’ work more, so that we have these critical questions being asked.
Charlotte Burns:
It seemed radical to me that artists would form Super-PACs, which are often associated with political corruption, and turn them against politics by bringing a coalition of creative, artist-led views. But when I asked Hank about this, he responded by pointing out the obvious.
Hank Willis Thomas:
It's important to point out that artists are also easily corrupted. You know what, a lot of the same people who have the excess capital to impact the storytelling of politicians have the same capital to impact the storytelling of artists.
And so I was at the Aspen Institute and I was doing an artist talk. I was like, "Wait a minute, you're in the political world and you're also in the art world, and the two rarely meet except in your household," and I recognize that there is kind of ... I don't want to say a shadow-world, but there is a world where a lot of stuff happens with funny money and art. The same in politics.
And without villainizing anyone, how can we start to recognize the power that actually congeals around these worlds, which all ultimately come back to storytelling and how we frame the world through the stories we tell. How we frame what's important, who's important and what we should be investing in? So, that's really what got us to be excited about For Freedoms as an artist-led super-PAC.Charlotte Burns:
It’s really interesting to hear artists talk about power in this way, and be aware of the seats at the table.
The engine driving the growth of artistic power is often money—whether via the market or the money that’s swelled the museums and biennales, which in turn need more art to fill them.
In her book But Who’s Counting, the artist Issy Wood writes about the fact she’s “simply benefitting from a broken system”, so I asked her what she meant.
Issy Wood:
I imagine the broken system I was talking about is just capitalism. I suppose every now and then, I think about where my money comes from and that there's a lot of dirty money around. And though I pay my taxes and that feels like a kind of redemptive phenomenon, to pay taxes with money that may or may not come from weapons, or oil, or screwing the planet in a myriad of ways.
The art school I went to, which was Goldsmiths [University of London], was the kind of place that thought painting was trash for greedy people, and we were encouraged to become artists, but not to make money from our art.
Charlotte Burns:
Issy and I talked a bit about what Hank says, that artists are just as easily corrupted—and how slippery that might even be to define.
Issy Wood:
It's difficult because I think nobody is ever going to really flag the moment you've been corrupted. Only you know, and maybe a couple of close friends—in my case, my art dealer knows when I've betrayed myself—and so, I don't know. I may have already been corrupted. I've certainly betrayed myself. I try not to, but it's hard when, as I said before, when your kind of where your money comes from suspicious sources, it's hard to insist on integrity in certain zones and pay your studio rent in others.
Charlotte Burns:
It seemed really important to acknowledge power within this show and the different forms of it. How power works, how artists are being affected by it, how they’re using it.
Issy is a young artist who’s been in the full glare of the market frenzy and her writing really captures that weird power dynamic. What she said about players or pawns really jumped out at me, and she very kindly agreed to be interviewed, just last week. We’ll hear more from Issy in the next episode about the market, as well as later in the series.
But Allan, the question I wanted to ask you here was this idea of artists being inside systems, or consumed by systems, or beside them is a different kind of way of talking. Hearing artists talk about power in that way seems really interesting to me.
Allan Schwartzman:
For me, it's thrilling to envision the potential for art to guide how society can start to see worlds that we know really only through the lens of politicians and professional talking heads.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. I love Hank saying, "Wait, you're in this room and in this room, and so am I. So what does that say?" And it's a sort of behind-the -scenes look at things. We imagine these things are so separate, but they're often the same people in the same rooms.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I think what Hank is saying is “I recognize that I can have real power in this situation, and I want to be sensitive to it and I want to be able to use it as effectively as possible”.
Charlotte Burns:
What we’re talking about here are systems of power and how they overlap. Back in episode three we spoke to the artist Tiffany Sia who recently left Hong Kong for fear of her safety, reminding us that art never exists within a vacuum—especially during times of political flux and turmoil.
Even if artists aren’t making the kind of work you’ll see in an evening auction any time soon, there are still relentless demands on them to produce.
Tiffany Sia:
I think of it as more like surviving the systems and surviving these times, because I think that there's also a certain appetite for an artist who comes out of situations of political repression.
There's this strange desire I think to program artists to speak from political places like this and the axis of power, of course, where the museums are situated in terms of thinking about democracy and things and self determination and human rights, which are really important things.
But I see those projects as fundamentally separate from the project of what museums are doing; in the same way that I see political action as the center of political action is not in the cultural sector. The center of political action is within the streets.
Charlotte Burns:
A nice rebuttal to the overzealous production cycle of the art world can be found in the artist residency Tiffany set up, called Speculative Place. She says it’s all about a DIY grass-roots approach to creating art spaces.
Tiffany Sia:
Sometimes it's also about rest at Speculative Place, because there's so much of a pressure to constantly produce and make something profound for an artist. Sometimes it's more productive to be at rest. So a lot of building an alternative to the institution or alternative to a commercial art space was to de-incentivize the builder of such spaces to gain from the work that gets made.
I know that some residencies ask for, say, an artwork at the end of their stay, but we don't ask for that. The only thing that we ask for is a PDF, which is this thing that can be printed, but also can be immaterial. And it just documents the artist or writer or filmmaker was here during a specific time. And I joke that it can be a PDF of receipts that people accumulated during their time here.
We try to keep it really elastic in terms of a space and we're clandestine, maybe is the word. We don't really reveal too much about what happens in the residency, because not everything has to be done for the look of content or some appearance of productivity. And trying to thwart documentation in that way.Charlotte Burns:
The utter lack of efficiency is refreshing. We live in a world of hot takes, engulfed by an onslaught of content—but the artists in today’s show remind us that not only can art be a galvanizing civic force, it can also simply hold space for ambiguity and a certain slowing of thought.
Issy Wood:
I'm very suspicious in myself, and in others, of knee-jerk reactions to global phenomena. I'm always a little slow to take the temperature, which I attribute mainly to not having Twitter. But then Twitter also sounds like a hellscape, so I appreciate being spared the hottest takes in favor of feeling slightly safer with the more lukewarm takes.
I'm a solipsistic person who understands the world through my own feelings. Pretending otherwise feels grandiose and a lie.
It feels like sometimes I'm spending most of my weeks dealing with a trope from the 16th century, and that that's how delayed I am in my reactions to things. That I need 500 years breathing space between there's something happening in the world and then my reaction to it. But I also think that's okay.
Charlotte Burns:
Amidst the pressure to produce, create, be nice, show art, say yes, artists are doing well if they manage to stay true to their own practice and voice. I was aware in scripting this show of how easily we can turn art and artists into commodities: whether market or museums, or perhaps, a journalist’s agenda.
But, tidy narratives are beside the point: even when working in coalitions, most artists have an unusually close relationship with discomfort. A thread running through all of these artists' initiatives is that they each create more uncertainty, in a way; bringing light to what we don’t know or fully understand.
Here’s Hank Willis Thomas.
Hank Willis Thomas:
Exactly. And that's exactly why we feel like groups like For Freedoms and others should exist so that we can make space for these nuanced conversations; make space for being uncomfortable.
Charlotte Burns:
For Freedoms evolved into an even more inclusive group, called the Wide Awakes. What is so radical about this group is that anyone can join. You don’t need to be an artist. You can go to the website and download the starter pack right now.
Still focused on greater political engagement, the Wide Awakes is an “open-source network”. It wants to reimagine the future through creative collaboration.
But something so open-to-all and transparent must be difficult to control. Though perhaps that’s the point? It sounds a bit messy—perhaps like democracy.
Less judgment, more action: that’s what Hank is calling for.
Hank Willis Thomas:
While we are chasing the virtue train, we might be missing a lot of other very important life lessons along the way, because the virtues that we are often ascribing to, can go back to Puritanism. They definitely have a root in colonial values of purity, of a certain kind of virtue that must be kind of bestowed in order for one to be accepted in society. At some point, if we really played that out, no one would be welcome in our society, and that goes back to a lot of the basic Christian values around those of us who have sinned, being seen as human beings.
Charlotte Burns:
This brings us back to the artist Jackson Polys, who we spoke to in episode two, “American History, Axed”. He is a core collaborator of an artist-group called the New Red Order, or the NRO. Like the Wide Awakes, this group is radically inclusive - anyone can join this “public secret society” which operates ”with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures”.
Both groups takes their cue from past political movements: the WW is named after the abolitionist organization that, in 1860, helped elect Abraham Lincoln by staging an event of more than 10,000 people marching through the streets of Chicago. The NRO also takes its name from a historical group called the Improved Order of the Red Men that was revived in the 1930s as a “whites only” fraternity. In its current reimagining the NRO grapples with that history in order to put all that on its head.
Jackson Polys:
The Improved Order of Red Men is a secret society that claims lineage from the Sons of Liberty, who claim responsibility for the Boston Tea Party. Those people who dressed up as Indian, participated in acts of playing Indian, dressing up as Mohawks to kind of, in one sense, disguise themselves as ‘savages’. There is this idea that they needed to differentiate themselves from the Europeans, from the British. So in order to do so, they became American and what was more American at that time than a ‘savage’. So they dressed themselves up as Native people and threw tea in the harbor.
Charlotte Burns:
This of course was a key moment in American foundational history—when the Boston Tea Party protested British taxes and took a step towards the independence of the United States.
As Jackson points out, America is founded on Indigenous appropriation and erasure. This is serious stuff but the group uses humor to get its point across.
Jackson Polys:
One of the influences of ours is Vine Deloria who wrote this short essay, “Indian Humor”, in which he articulates that we're brought up in a commingling of humor and deadly seriousness, where humor is a way to kind of imagine, or to actualize a different kind of reality. So we see the humor has a potential for changing realities for Indigenous people, if it's part of the process and maybe part of the end result.
Charlotte Burns:
Can decolonization be funny? Can big issues be treated with humor? Or is laughter a graveside pirouette?
Jackson Polys:
The humor in some ways is necessary in order to try to hold those opposing realities at the same time. It becomes a coping mechanism or a faculty, which could be developed as an artistic practice as well. It’s involved with trying to understand one's own relationship, and reorient and make one's own reality, which I think is something that I would like to hold onto.
Charlotte Burns:
Scripting this series, it occurred to us how much of the conversation in previous episodes has been about the past and about history. This episode, more so than the others, felt focused on the present and possibilities for the future
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, yeah. I mean, I think it's fair to say that there have been numerous times in the 20th century where artists worked hand in hand with revolutions, and they ultimately got sacrificed by them. And this is a first moment where we see artists in a position to and committed to actually making change, and change that serves both art and the wider communities. And so that's a kind of previously unknown power.
Charlotte Burns:
And artists are looking back at what's come before, whilst creating new possibilities for today and thinking about tomorrow.
Allan Schwartzman:
Because they wanted to work. These are things that are not being done in vacuums. They're in the community and they're tested out in the community. And these are mostly communities these artists live in.
Charlotte Burns:
One of the other really heartening things about this episode today is the sort of insistence by Tiffany Sia on the value of doing nothing, of creating a space for rest and not having to comment, not having necessarily to act, but perhaps to just digest.
Allan Schwartzman:
Indeed. I think the flip side of creating community activism through one's position as a successful artist also recognizes on the other hand that the patient needs nursing, nurturing, the space to make mistakes. These are things that the market denied. They saw them as capital sins that banished an artist from a market. But really what art needs above many other things is the opportunity to accidentally discover penicillin.
Charlotte Burns:
I agree. Here closing out today's episode is the artist Michael Armitage. He's reminding us of that rich artistic tradition of generosity. And indeed, it's something we might all learn from.
Michael Armitage:
But I genuinely feel that the artists that I've respected and looked towards have generally had a very, sort of hands-on impact in their own spheres, in their own worlds. And not only for artists, I just think that of people in general. We're part of something bigger than ourselves. And everybody benefits including yourself if you're inclusive of other people within any good things that come to you.
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Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Holly Fisher mixed and edited the sound.
Additional research and support has been provided by Julia Hernandez and Ali Nemerov.
Theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.
Podcast Art: the artist and Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute; photograph: Haus der Kunst, Munich/Markus Tretter
