Rising from
the dead

It is important to realize the difference between any work for earnings and the work that artists do. In his book The Social Production of Art, Janet Wolf argues that art work is one of the forms of work and essentially all work is creative, practically transforming basic material according to the needs of man. Contradiction arises in the era of capitalism, when labor is alienated. And from a historically valid point of view, in addition to what we usually consider to be productive work that is not really creative and socially involved, the arts seem to be quite different from ordinary work. Wolf herself acknowledges that, aside from ordinary art, as artists we still have the possibility of critical and subversive practice that has transformational potential and can contribute to political and social change. Her arguments are strongly embedded in the concept of art not as individual sculptures, paintings, etc., but above all as an activity that is connected to the social environment from which it is based and to which it responds.

In the interviews with the AVU graduates, I was therefore primarily interested in if they have two equally-important jobs, what is the difference between them, or on the contrary, how are they similar? I found seven examples that I examined. In the case of the painter and sculptor Jan Turner, who is a therapist and uses the Shiatsu method, both jobs are complementary, one could not exist without the other. For an anonymous artist who works in the field of site specific art and is a parish priest, his second profession is virtually inseparable from his artistic practice, and functions for him as one of his art projects, although this is not externally recognizable in any way. His parishioners could not identify his job as an art project, but they said he was a different and extraordinary priest. For an anonymous conceptual artist, real estate development is related to art in that it is necessary to immerse yourself in things, and devote a lot of time and thinking to them. What is different is that, unlike art, risk and unpredictability are not accepted as methods of work. She therefore tries to suppress this quality, but admits that it sometimes makes it difficult to recapture it in artistic work.

For example, in cases where graduates began working as full-time restorers, none of them said it was related work. Examples of these artists are Tomas Rafl, Jana Kremanova, Marie Blabolilova, Jiri Novotny, Jiri Riha, Marketa Paurova, Milena Soltezsova, Petr Bares and Jindrich Ruzicka. Rather, they referred to it as a job where they could not do what they wanted, could not express them selves in an artistic way. For Vladimír Kafka, who is a folk healer of cancer, his paintings are a stable foundation to which he turns and relies on. He considers healing and painting to be different forms of expression with the same intent and thus united. Pavel Šich's example is specific in that he managed to build a self-sufficient organic farm (Bláto Farm). Ondřej Brody and Evžen Šimera founded their own art school and are working on its accreditation in the higher education system. Ondřej Brody is also investing in several online projects, such as e-artnow, and in selling e-books for readers such as Kindle.

I will now describe one specific Czech example—an AVU graduate who, as part of his artistic practice, went on to study theology and become a priest. He saw his activities like being a double agent. He engaged in drawing and painting alongside his pastoral work. What I found interesting is that he considered painting and drawing to be a way of using routine activities to mobilize himself to perform his ecumenical texts. Drawing and painting served as a source of inspiration, and the result of the process was a sermon in front of an audience.

Like most of my other respondents, he graduated from the academy around the year 1968, and if he were still alive he would be around seventy today.

One reason why preaching can be considered a far better tool for passing on aesthetic experience is that the traditional artwork has lost its emotions and its communicative potential.

I interpret this situation similarly as to when Marcel Duchamp, in his lecture The Creative Act, used the term “coefficient of art” to describe how imperfect the transfer of ideas is from the artist to the viewer through the artifact. Duchamp argued that, of the intentions that the artist places into the artistic object at an exhibition, often very little is actually legible to the viewer. In the case of the priest, we see a highly intense transfer without any intermediary.

How to think about a publicly presented text as a work of art? In this, a fundamental role is played by my imagination. Take Lot’s wife, for instance, as she is slowly transformed into a pillar of salt. What does this pillar look like? What are its color and size? Is it a petrified figure or an abstract shape? If we were to touch the stone, what would its temperature be? Imagination enables the mediation of the spoken word through the language of virtual images and feelings. One of the priest’s sermons was written in the feminine gender. God-woman. Perhaps, because the term goddess tends to evoke Geek mythology, every sentence containing the word “God” included the addendum “woman.”

Also worth studying might be the stories of AVU graduates who in their second careers have worked as a bricklayer, yoga instructor, art restorer, or dancer, or who founded an art school, give shiatsu massages, or own an organic farm they built up all on their own... Just like the priest who saw his work as a long-term art project, every example of an artist managing to engage in artistic practice outside of the conservative structures of art institutions changes, one step at a time, the ontology of art, meaning what we consider art and in what settings it is present.

Finally, this subject is very important to me personally because, essentially, I too devoted much time and thought to what my education has given me, and what it took from me, after my graduation from the Academy. I am now in a situation where I can see coming what many of those graduates I talked with described. Less interest from the professional art environment, fewer exhibitions. Returning to the doctoral program gave me the opportunity and the legitimacy to slow down this period of exclusion. I started to work as an architect in the studio of Ing. Arch. Josef Pleskot, whereby I also began building my second career. For the five years from when I left school, I worked intensively in architecture. Then, not wanting to become too comfortable in one place, I went to New York to work with Vito Acconci, who was dealing with the relationship between architecture and fine art in a very inspiring way, and his approach helped me return to art.

In this text, I look at a paradox that exemplifies the mystery of art education that does not make you a famous artist but instead provides a nourishing background for other activities that are only partially dependent on or entirely independent of art.

The fundamental question thus is, “What happens to the things that make artists exceptional if they end up investing their vision and energy into other activities? What is interesting about art education and why do we voluntarily become a part of the invisible dark matter of the art world?”

For me, finding examples of Czech graduates who consciously left the world of art behind in order to pursue a second career was a challenge and not entirely easy.

The photographs in the appendix show drawings and documentary photographs from my exhibition Break Through, which included several meetings with what by now are older graduates of AVU.

The exhibition’s main motif was the use of primarily nonverbal means to make visible the social processes that influence whether an artist “makes it” or not. If we work with the vocabulary commonly used to describe whether an artist has achieved recognition or not, “making it” would appear to be a forceful breaking through from one state of being to another, not unlike the situation when two teams digging a tunnel from opposite ends meet in the middle, accompanied by a celebration of successfully expended effort and excellent planning. In the case of artistic success, however, it is a rather complicated journey, accompanied by permanent doubts and an attempt at retaining one’s independence.

The drawings that I asked the AVU graduates to produce for the exhibition were created in response to my question of whether it is possible to express in a drawing what you get from your art education even if you end up working in a different field… and also what aspects of your art education you have to suppress.

The conceptual model for the exhibition was a wall that acted as a filter on which some things could settle while others could pass through.

The drawings’ motifs, however, are extremely difficult to analyze in terms of meaning. A far more distinctive finding was that the invited graduates found it difficult to spontaneously express themselves through art. If anything, the drawings showed the latest organic artistic idea evoked by this situation. These ideas were apparently very important to the artists, and were often created at a time when they had to deal with the difficulty of having several jobs at once. Essentially, the level of spontaneity with which the artists could engage their imagination and try to respond to my question through art reflected the extent to which they had to suppress their artistic nature and how difficult—sometimes impossible—it was to recall it again.

In order to illustrate the object of my interest with a good foreign example, I will here mention Raivo Puusemp, who is relatively well-known today. Thanks to the interest and financial support of his friend Paul McCarthy, his work as mayor in 1975 and 1977 was published several years later in a book by the now-defunct Highland Art Agents collective. In 2013, a book titled Beyond Art—Dissolution of Rosendale, N.Y. was published with support from Stephen Wright, and Puusemp’s project was shown as part of a traveling exhibition curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen. Before becoming mayor, Puusemp lived in New York and was engaged in conceptual art. He held exhibitions. Some of his projects could be described as embedded or implanted art. As Stephen Wright told me when we met, at get-togethers with friends Puusemp would inconspicuously bring up various conceptual ideas in the hope that somebody would realize them. In an interview with Gruijthuijsen, Puusemp states, “I’ve always thought about art, I just haven’t done it. I would see something and think someone should do that. But I would never do it myself.” He saw it as artistic work, but he never talked about it openly like that, and the same goes for his time as mayor.

Puusemp was elected mayor of the village of Rosendale, New York, at a time when the town was suffering from debt, poor infrastructure, and non-functional public services. His plan and solution to the crisis was its administrative merger with a larger regional town of the same name, a task that he managed to push through and realize within two years. The texts do not describe in what ways Puusemp was better as a mayor with an art education than someone without one, but they leave the reader with an awareness about how it was a fascinating situation, especially from the perspective of people with ties to the institutionalized art world.

For me, this comparison and hearing the stories of AVU graduates’ real-life experiences opens up the entire question of how to look at people who have left the art world and exhibition making behind. The important thing would appear to be the extent to which graduates consciously break free from the idea of becoming a professional artist, and how they look at that part of their lives that has no direct relation to the art world. For instance, they might have a source of income that allows them to paint, even though they do not show their paintings at exhibitions.

It is a common but not very optimistic phenomenon among the academy’s graduates, one that I call “standby artistic thinking.”

A very strong and fundamental finding that I made thanks to this work is that the absolute majority of graduates who cannot make a living through art do not fully develop any other career. They work only occasionally, as employees, sometimes even part-time, in the manner common for students. The academy’s graduates create their own work while earning the money necessary to survive through occasional jobs that never take them too far from art. It is like being on call, always ready to start a successful artistic career.

If the graduates are working as art restorers, then usually for someone else; if they are printmakers, they work in a printmaking studio; if they teach, they are assistants. They teach at after-school art programs, at secondary schools, or at tertiary schools of art that they did not found and whose administration they do not influence. What conclusions can one draw from all this? Artistic thinking is kept alive in its least active form. They work for themselves, “for the desk drawer,” as this generation likes to say. Their potential is in a holding pattern. “It’s been a few years since my last exhibition, but if the chance presented itself, there are some things that I’d like to show.”

Raivo Puusemp’s relationship to his leaving the art world is completely different. Another well-known foreign example of someone radically rejecting an artistic career is Lee Lozano. In a diary entry dated September 8, 1971, Lozano wrote a manifesto titled I have no identity, and she called her gradual and conscious transformation from artist to non-artist Dropout Piece. As with Puusemp, it is an experience that made her famous.

Against expectations, in both these cases this conscious and definitive breaking free seems to have had a positive impact on the psyche—just as I registered among a very small number of the AVU graduates with whom I spoke.

Both Lozano and Puusemp are exceptional in that they acted as individuals. Although they worked within the context of the theoretical and artistic practice of Allan Kaprow, in particular his texts later published as Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, they had to make their own decisions and radically isolate themselves from art for a long time, perhaps even forever.

I am slowly coming to another example that piqued my interest.

In 2012 at London’s Rawen Row gallery, I saw a large exhibition dedicated to the Artist Placement Group, APG. The group’s founding in 1966 by artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni marks an important milestone in the history of British conceptual art.

During several years of systematic work, APG essentially created the notion of the artist as a migratory person who temporarily exists in various non-artistic roles. John Latham came up with a fitting term for this phenomenon, “incidental person”—a well-rounded individual with an art education who is something of a double agent working in a broad range of other jobs and professions. During its existence, APG organized fifteen artists’ placements for periods ranging from several weeks to several years. For the most part, the artists worked at industrial corporations such as British Steel, later also for various ministries and government bodies such as the Ministry of the Environment, Scottish Television, the intensive care unit at Clare Hall Hospital in London, and British Railways.

One example of an incidental person is the artist Andrew Dipper, who was part of a group of employees from the ESSO oil company who sailed on a tanker headed for the Persian Gulf. He described how, instead of his ability to draw a faithful portrait, a far more reliable application of his potential within the group was the fact that he knew how to weld. He also described how, while on the ship, he devoted himself to reading and photography.

APG’s aim was to change the status of artistic work, for it to have a closer relationship with reality, the economy, and politics. They wanted art, and especially artistic approaches and ways of thinking, to have a general influence on society. While still a student at the Central St Martins School of Art, Barbara Steveni criticized the sculptural work of her classmates, including Richard Serra—just as the Australian band The Histrionics would do decades later in their song “Useless Steel in the Mall.” The song (“We don’t need no public sculpture / Serra, leave our space alone”), which includes references to protests against Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan and includes excerpts from public criticism voiced by art theorist and editor of the art journal October Douglas Crimp, ironically comments on the furor surrounding the removal of Serra’s sculpture.

An important moment in APG’s history was an invitation from Joseph Beuys to participate in a discussion of the group’s activities and the possibility of expanding on those activities in Germany during documenta 6 in 1977. However, subsequent official criticism argued that, like Beuys, APG created social sculpture that was problematic and thus asocial. Similarly, a few years earlier, in 1972, the Arts Council had halted a grant, arguing that APG didn’t create real art but social engineering. Although the group continued to receive Arts Council grants, they were for lesser amounts. Shortly afterwards, in 1975, the group officially ended its period of experimentation and no longer engaged in artist placements. In 1979, it ceased to receive grants altogether and formally reconstituted itself under the name APG Research Ltd., with a focus solely on advisory and consultancy services for artists. In 1989, the group transformed itself again, this time changing its name to O+I.

Outside criticism thus led to the group’s slow transformation. The greatest factor was the negative reception of the group’s exhibition in Bonn, where art professionals criticized the group for voluntarily merging with the relatively commercial sector of society, and that this cooperation was not a clearly legible critique of capitalism and corporations. Apparently influenced by the fact that they had encountered APG’s ideals within the context of a gallery, the critics failed to see any artistic and aesthetic value in the group’s unusual areas of activity. Just like today, they clearly found it difficult to shed romantic notions of art as a positive, uncorrupted ideology with a pure and untarnished aura.

But perhaps it wasn’t just an unwillingness to step out of the comfort zone of how we define art and its boundaries. It is possible that the specific position that APG was promoting when they assumed that artists positively influence their surroundings was not entirely experimental in the true sense of the word or as we would dare to imagine. When depicting the artists in their role of “incidental person” in the factories where they worked, the group’s published materials often showed them photographing, painting, and drawing as if they were participating in an artistic residency. In this way, their activities more closely resembled an attempt to mediate, in a non-artistic setting, an encounter with the figure of an artistically active person and to offer a glimpse into his or her artistic practice, up close and personal.

When communicating what might be happening on the subtle level of influence when artists are active in various companies, a large role is played by the missing form of verbal expression. How to communicate artistic capability without sounding infantile, over-sensitive, or banal? How to describe the artist’s sensibility? Is there any potential in leaving it up to the imagination? Does the use of words to describe aesthetic influence or an aesthetic experience truly banalize and destroy this phenomenon, as many traditional artists claim? I believe that the answer is no. Our expressive possibilities are underdeveloped. Nothing has changed since the 19th century: We still speak of talent, inspiration, hard work, creativity, emotional motivation, creative effort, etc. And we imagine less and less under these terms. We are losing contact with the material that we work with.

From the perspective of this widening gap, the activities and philosophy of APG appear far more progressive than even the most daring deviations of contemporary aesthetics.

APG identified a situation in which artists migrate into other fields of work, which liberated many people from the unpleasant pathos of personal failure, lack of success in the art world, and subsequent bitterness. They combined the artistic with the non-artistic to create a perfectly normal state of affairs.

As indicated by the discussion surrounding the APG exhibition at Rawen Row, a large number of artists make a living through non-artistic jobs. But there is a fundamental difference in attitude. Most art school graduates suffer from an emotional sense of defeat if they quit art because they are not recognized as artists by their surroundings. Here, I am opening up another issue and addressing the widely held notion that this recognition can only happen if you are noticed by a curator who promotes you—as if being recognized was a passive consequence of someone else seeing the artist in you; as if the important thing was modesty, and any form of conscious self-promotion is unacceptable if artists want to exhibit at institutions that have their own curators. There is big difference between giving up on art because of a lack of opportunities to participate in the art world, on the one hand, and opting freely for a personal way of applying one’s artistic skills outside of galleries, exhibitions, institutions, etc., on the other. But there are very few examples of this independent, positive relationship to one’s potential.

Looking at the example of APG, Raivo Puusemp and Lee Lozano in the 1960s and 1970s as the first significant efforts to articulate the relationship between art work and non-art work, the 2011 text of Occupational Realism by Julie Bryan-Wilson is another major achievement in this direction. In an enumeration of several examples of specific artistic events, this text provides an insight into the conceptual notion of non-artistic work as an art project. One of the artists described is Ben Kinmont, who is an artist, and thus typically has a precarious position in relation to art institutions and their employees – curators. Nonetheless, his project, which he has been continuously performing since 1998, is an art work called: Sometimes A Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to provide a Living For Your Family - Ben Kinmont - Book Sales. Ben Kinmot is basically a bookseller, his second profession after graduating from an art school, and at the same time it is a job by which he earns his living.

Another example is Linda Mary Montano, who in 1973 created works under the name Odd Jobs, consisting of cleaning out cellars, painting rooms or gardening.

Julie Bryan-Wilson describes a phenomenon that is not just a unique conceptual project, but a thoughtful way to live your life in the spirit of an artistic approach to topics that concern us. By identifying their second profession as an artistic undertaking, artists free themselves from the burden of failing, or possibly avoid being marked as unsuccessful. It is only a slight shift in perception, but it being a conscious choice makes it an entirely different situation for the artist. Active and keen artistic thinking makes it easier to leave the art world entirely, for a time or only in terms of certain limitations. This is therefore one of the ways to develop the potential given to artists lying in the flexibility with which they can work in many environments.