Politics

What I mean when I say I am working as an artist

Personal, Poetry, Politics, Theatre

This is a post written mainly for non-artists, to explain what the hell it is I do with my time and how the money happens and why this is important. But it’s also a process for me to explain this to myself, and so I hope it might be interesting to some other artists too.

What a professional artist is

I write and perform poems, and I make performance/ theatre. Increasingly I site this as “experimental performance” or “live art”, which is industry jargon you probably don’t need to worry about – it basically means that my performance isn’t what you’d usually expect to find in a theatre. I also do quite a bit of organising and programming: I co-founded the spoken word organisation Inky Fingers, which has recently got public funding for the first time, and I co-curate the performance night ANATOMY. This is really working as a “producer” rather than working as an “artist”, but the lines are blurry: organising events is a good way of getting to know the geography of your sector and getting your name out there, to a point, and I also consider hosting or MCing nights an artform in itself. But that’s by the by.

I actually only call myself an artist in certain necessary contexts – when marketing myself and making proposals and bids for funding. I am queasy about identifying with the term, which I’ve written about elsewhere. I usually say “I write poems” or “I make performances” or something, talking about the activity rather than the identity. But let’s go with “I am an artist” for now. And when I say “non-artist”, I mean someone who doesn’t think or talk about themselves as “a professional artist”. Everyone is an artist, obviously.

I finished full-time education in May 2010.  I’m now in my second financial year of being a professional artist – I spent a few months after finishing education a bit lost, as many of us do. I’m what the industry calls an “emerging artist”, which means I haven’t been doing it outside of education for all that long and I rarely get paid. The general idea, currently, is that in a few years I should become a “mid-career artist”, which means I will make just enough from doing and teaching art to not have to have a non-artistic job. (The amount an artist has to work teaching or running workshops varies across artforms – poetry relies on it heavily, while theatre does much less so. Eventually I should become an “established artist”, which means either that I’ve been doing it for bloody ages or if I’m supremely lucky that I’m making pretty good money. Whether or not any of this happens depends on the economy of my sector; there’s much less job security for “mid-career” artists now than there was 20 years ago.

But, for now, an emerging professional. You become a professional artist when:

  • you spend more than half your work hours on making art; or
  • you get at least 1p more money for making your art as you spend on making it; or
  • you start calling yourself a professional because you feel like it; or
  • whatever other criteria you want.

The most telling criteria I’ve come up with is “You know you’re a professional when your art has been stolen or ripped off for the first time.” In any case, I’ve met all of these criteria for at least two years, and the first criteria for much longer.

But what does it mean to spend your time making art?

How my hours break down

Working predominantly as a freelance solo artist, I need to:

  • plan the art;
  • make the art;
  • organise places to put the art; and
  • find ways to finance the art.

These things can happen in any order, and which order they happen in largely depends on whether or not someone’s going to pay me and how much control they want over the product.

On average, each month (counting a month as 4 weeks, and a day as 8 hours), I spend roughly

  • 3 days writing poems;
  • 4 days performing or preparing for performances;
  • 4 days writing and answering emails, or doing general admin;
  • 3 days in meetings and interviews
  • 2 days writing proposals and funding bids;
  • and 2 days planning and running workshops.

This is a fairly conservative estimate of how much time I spend on the “hard work” bit of being an artist. You will note that of the 18 days of hard work each month, only just over a third is spent on what you might think of as the fun bit – or at least the creatively satisfying bit – of making art.

In order to make ends meet, I have a “day job”, or a non-artistic job. I am one of the very lucky few artists whose day job is actually in the arts industry, and who has a satisfying job which uses my training and talents. I work an average of 9 days a month on this.

The quick adders among you will have noted that we’re now on 27 days, which is 3 days over the UK’s maximum working week (48 hours, or six eight-hour days a week). That means that I work well over 8 hours most days, and have very few full days off. Could be worse, as I enjoy most of my work. But those were conservative numbers, and I’ve only included the “hard work”. Making art also involves a lot of “soft work”. To make good art, or at least to make successful art (by mainstream standards success), you’ve got to be constantly actively engaged with the world and the art other people are making. That means that I spend a lot of time

  • reading poetry;
  • watching performances;
  • reading / watching / listening / participating in texts and events about art;
  • pissing about on the internet and other communication and entertainment media; and
  • doing things like writing this blogpost.

I didn’t include this stuff because most non-artists (and probably most artists) are likely to sniff at the idea of it being called work. But I mention it because it is part of what I do, and because if work is, at least in part, the stuff we are obliged to do rather than the stuff we enjoy doing, then the work-attitude, the feeling of being at work, does infect me when I’m reading poetry and watching performances and all that. The flipside of that is that the feeling of being at play, when I’m lucky, infects the enjoyable bit of my “hard work”.

All of which is to say, this is why many artists will consider themselves over-committed over-workers.

How the money works

I’ve made £2723 from my art in this calendar year. There’s two months left, but not much art work coming up in it. That includes running workshops for others, but doesn’t include producing work, not that I made any money from that anyway. This breaks down as:

  • £1000 theatre commission for CLASS ACT
  • £1000 grant from Creative Scotland for This is not a riot
  • £150 for paid poetry performances
  • £355 for running workshops
  • £200 for giving talks
  • £18 from box office splits (I know, right?)

Though this is all personal income, the two big chunks do include the money I spent on making the work (including employing others to help), which was around half in each case.

I may have missed something off, but nothing big.

The majority of that will have come from public funding in one way or another.

I’ll earn around £9500 from my day job in around the same time. (I’ll say again that I am very lucky to have the job that I do, although I wish I didn’t have to say that, because it takes the combined education of two MAs and years of artistic experience to qualify for it.)

The quick adders among you will this time note that I’ll only just clear £12k in one year. This is half the average UK salary for people with 1-4 years experience in their industry. It is also £2-3k short of the Scottish Living Wage, and it might even be shy of the UK Minimum Wage.

How do I live off that? Especially considering I pay £200 a month in debt from my postgrad?

  • I share a room with my partner in a small shared flat. That helps a lot.
  • Our flat splits food bills and eat together. We are very frugal energy-wise.
  • I am also frugal. I spend very little outside of daily expenses, compared to others my age and class.  I don’t take any drugs (other than alcohol and coffee), I don’t drink much alcohol comparatively, I very rarely go on holiday to anywhere other than my parents’ house, I get all my clothes second-hand. I do drink a lot of coffee though
  • Sometimes we get food out of supermarket bins, but more out of principle than need.
  • I don’t have dependants, or any other debts.
  • I have middle-class support structures.

That means I actually have disposable income and a small amount of savings. All my disposable income goes on poetry books, event tickets, games and music, plus occasional nice food out, whisky, and one or two beers a week. I don’t feel particularly short of money.

I’m not putting my finances out in public to ask for pity, and clearly not to brag. I’m putting them out there to explain what it means to decide to be a professional artist.

What does it all mean?

I work, and I work hard, for vastly more hours than I’m paid for. For the very little public money I get for my art, I give a lot back: I organise two major performance projects voluntarily, I give around 20 hours a month as trustee of Forest, a local arts centre, and whenever I do get paid I make jobs for other people. I’m not trying to big myself up – I’m just trying to explain.

I am not doing art because it is easy, nor because it is easy money. I can only be doing it because I love it and because I think it is important.

I, along with other artists, get mind-bendingly furious at the kind of people who comment on articles about arts funding calling us “lazy” and “scroungers”. They have no idea. No idea at all. And I suspect one of the reasons that artists and the industry are really a bit rubbish at explaining what it is their work involves and why it deserves funding is that we’re too damn overworked to take on a major communications campaign.

My finances should look pretty awful to anyone outside the industry. But I do think that my peers mostly have similar balance sheets. I don’t have the feeling that I’m anything unusual. If anything, I suspect I’ve had a little more success than others with my level of experience, though I, like most artists, am constantly berating myself for my failures and for not succeeding faster. In short: I do not feel like my level of work and pay is anything unusual for an emerging artist. I don’t have a good sense from older artists and others in the industry about whether this is a big shift from past decades. I would like to hear from others whether my finances look appalling to them, or whether you too shrug and think that’s just how it is.

It should also be clear that I grab the work when I can, and that I have to be able to manage a lot of projects at once, shift flexibly between them, and be prepared to work strange days and strange hours. I do not have a weekend. This is called “precarious labour” or “cellurisation” or sometimes something else. Artists, or, more horribly, the “creative industries”, have been particular drivers of this economic shift in labour practises. There’s a lot of socioeconomic theory about what it means and I could talk about it for hours, but not here. Bifo’s After the Future and Fibreculture’s Issue 5: Precrious Labour are good places to start reading, and the Precarious Workers’ Brigade is good place to start doing.

I could say that I am only able to do art because I am frugal. But my class comes into it a lot: it helped me to get the education which got me the day job; it supported me while I was a student so I didn’t have to do much bar work, which meant could spend my time practising art and learning a lot of organising skills; it provides a support structure so that I can afford to be financially precarious, or at least so that I can feel like I can. I have much lower barriers to being an artist than the majority of the population.

I said that I’m writing this to explain to you (and myself) what it is I’m doing. But of course I have another agenda. I am very modestly successful, for my career stage, and yet this is how hard I have to work for this little actual employment. This is the basic reality of trying to be a professional artist. We cannot have a healthy arts culture, or a diverse arts culture, or high quality art, without  funding. Without more public funding. (The reasons for why it needs to be public rather than private can wait for another time, or for the comments if you want.) There are more precise, more subtle, and more wide-ranging arguments to be made. But I hope that outlining the basics of my reality adds to them.

Poems for Pussy Riot: Review and Response

Poetry, Politics

Sabotage Reviews asked me to write  piece about English PEN’s Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot, a big and ambitious act of solidarity in poetry anthology form. (Buy it.) I was very impressed by the book, but some aspects of it I felt needed criticism — more in the political analysis sense than the aesthetic appraisal sense, though the two are of course intimately connected. Basically, given the way the Pussy Riot struggle has become a Western cause celebre, I think there are big questions around how we approach it. So I tried to think about it through the review (which you can read in full here):

It is uncomfortable to find so many British and Western poets condemnding a despot overseas while forgetting the despots at home. Why, for example, is there no 110-poet feminist anthology calling for Barack Obama to free CeCe McDonald, the African American transgender woman imprisoned on a suspect manslaughter charge? CeCe is not so easy a cause.  And why does America’s kill-ordering, executive-expanding, citizen-murdering President not appear in Philo Ikonya & Helmuth A. Niederle’s Dictators Never: Roll Call, which approves of riot only when the bogeyman is unambiguous. Obama is not so easy a target, and not just because he is more metrosexual than shirtless Putin. But poetry should not just stand up for easy causes and pick on easy targets – that makes for easy poetry. In short: Catechism risks, in its liberal call for freedom and human rights, being co-opted by a Western-centric anti-Russian sentiment. Unless poets are careful, we can be led to implying that terrible oppression only occurs “over there”, and never where we are standing.

When this was published, two of the anthology’s editors were kind enough to engage me in discussion about it. They raised questions and concerns which I hadn’t foregrounded in the review, and which were as important as anything I had to say, if not more so. In short, it felt to me like one of those too rare moments where people learn from each other through disagreement, where important things end up being said through discussion. Plus, some of my own BS got called out, which is always pleasing to an intellectual masochist. Here’s some of that conversation (I’ve left out one speaker who didn’t continue to contribute and so might not be represented fairly, and also the bits of politeness where we say thanks for each other’s comments, which are important to us but not to this post):

Sophie Mayer: Harry, just to say: I’d be stoked to work on an anthology in solidarity with CeCe McDonald and other political prisoners of gender/class/race inequity in the US. I imagine that many Catechism contributors, such as Sandra Alland, Francesca Lisette and Hel Gurney, who are involved in queer activism in the UK, would feel the same. […] The majority of your approving quotations in the review are from male-identified poets, whereas the contributors’ list features more female-identified poets, many of whose poems DO focus on the body as the site of political protest because politicised. Anarcho-feminism is alive in the language work being done by these poems, such as Charlotte Geater’s: poems in which the body is put on the line.

Harry Giles: Re: another anthology, let’s make it happen!

The comment concerned me, so I’ve checked the numbers. The review mentions 9 male-authored and 7 female-authored poems (going by the usual assignment of names only), which, it’s true, is out of balance with the authorship of the anthology. That may indeed be unconscious male bias on my part, although it might also be within statistical margin of error. On the other hand, I think you’re wrong when you say that the majority of approving quotations are from male-identified poets: by my count, 5 male-authored and 2 female-authored poems are mentioned in a more critical context, and 5 female-authored an 4 male-authored poems are mentiond in a more approvng context. That the majority of the criticism is focussed on male-authored poems may not be a coincidence — and the critical bent of the review may be an explanatory factor in the distortion of numbers. It might also be worth saying that I reattribute to a female author a quotation misattributed to a male author in one of the poems! But I do admit that it may also be down to unconscious bias, and that is worth addressing.

As an anarchist, I regularly find my arguments, my idols and my iconography appropriated by liberalism — or, worse, by neoliberalism. So much of the stuff written about Pussy Riot has been appropriative, often by a neoliberal anti-Russian agenda. So what I wanted to do in the review was to explore that territory, and to point out some of the odd things that happen when liberals/Brits/men write about Pussy Riot. And to reaffirm that the riot in Pussy Riot is exactly what it says.

Sophie Mayer: [I am] keen to reiterate that “pussy” also is exactly what it says it is: a riot located and centred in the disenfranchised and feminised body. The hard left (Anglo at least) does not have a great record of sex/gender activism and foregrounding gender-based oppression, which is why I think the “pussy” (as useful, provocative symbol/shorthand) is so important — in CeCe’s case as well.

Mark Burnhope: Yes. The project (particularly the poetic project) is as much about symbols and images, representations of hard patriarchy and its subversion by Pussy Riot, as any literal, pointed political agenda. It seems to me that what Pussy Riot say in their activism towards Putin, and what Pussy Riot *are*, their reason d’etre, their wide context, are two different but interwoven things. The latter is as much about feminism as any other debate we might have. In fact, you might say every other issue orbits around it. Before I lose my overall point: these hard patriarchical systems are something that all people should be invited to protest — however ‘left’ they are — as I hope this book does. Politics, social justice, or both?

Harry Giles: Violence is, as it is distressingly often, a key division here. I might not have written as many critical paras as I did if there weren’t several poems implying that Pussy Riot’s politics are entirely peaceful and non-violent. The patriarchy as “something that all people should be invited to protest”: yes, definitely. Diversity of tactics FTW. I support the use of non-violent tactics. But those who don’t see them as the only option often feel excluded by those who do. And, of course, the macho portrayal of violence can be equally excluding: there is a double-risk. I’m now wandering a long way away from the poetry, so I’l just say: sometimes the effort to include as many voices as possible ends up excluding other voices; this is the paradox of liberalism. My subjective reaction to that was something I was trying to get across in the final sentence of the review. The review gave me some space to address issues I think have been under-represented in the Pussy Riot commentary; I’m glad others are rebalancing other issues here.

Mark Burnhope: I personally do not see Pussy Riot’s protest, or intent, as “violent”, and would perhaps not take their use of violent imagery as literally as you might, but as the subversion of the traditionally male-capitalist monopoly on those images. I see an irony in the fact that they drop ‘protest bombs’, but their ‘crime’ was nothing more than performing illegal gigs which are “off the grid”, under the radar, of the Putin system.

This conversation had me considering intersectionality, something I think about and sometimes struggle with a lot. I tend to emphasise class-based politics and the role of state violence within my own resistance, but I’m also all too aware that those espousing these concerns have had a historical tendency to sideline feminist and queer politics, something I absolutely do not want to do. I count myself as a feminist. I realised that in my review, though, I allowed those concerns to be sidelined by other political questions, when really they needed to remain foregronded and intersectional. The poets who follow me may now be wondering how all that’s supposed to be accomplished in a poetry review. I do think it can! In fact, I do think it has to be. Easy politics, as I wrote, make for easy poetry.

To finish up, I’d like to link to a couple articles that I read during my research for the review. Vadim Nikitin’s The Wrong Reasons to Back Pussy Riot (NY Times, August 20) informed my thinking from a Russian perspective, while Lizy Yagoda’s CeCe McDonald vs. Pussy Riot: Political Imprisonment and Perspective (Feministing, October 16) gave more Western context. Two quotes:

Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democracy, anti-Putin feminism without the incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics.

Unless you are comfortable with all that (and I strongly suspect 99 percent of Pussy Riot’s fans in the mainstream media are not), then standing behind Pussy Riot only now, when it is obviously blameless and the government clearly guilty, is pure opportunism. And just like in the bad old days, such knee-jerk yet selective support for Russian dissidents — without fully engaging with their ideas — is not only hypocritical but also does a great disservice to their cause.

For many white feminists (and white male feminist allies, whose words tend to fill column inches), it is easier to find solidarity with and support the actions of women who look like the women of Pussy Riot do: white, attractive, married, mothers who conform to our expectations of femininity in every way except their activism. The mainstream media narrative of Pussy Riot harps on our supposed similarities to the women—their married life, their vegetarianism, their message t-shirts—while conveniently glossing over seemingly unsavory dissimilarities—the orgies, the rejection of male involvement in the group, that time a member inserted a piece of raw chicken into her vagina in a supermarket. Conversely, whenever a writer describes CeCe, the differences are emphasized: she is trans*, she is black, she was violent. Neglected re the similarities; she is a daughter, a friend, a mentor, and a person who, one dark night, was afraid for her life.

The solution isn’t to throw over the members of Pussy Riot in favor of advocating for our home-grown political prisoners. What is happening to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina is horrific and Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church deserve all the shade they get. But to ignore that the United States regularly imprisons women for political purposes is, at best, willfully ignorant, or, at worst, condoning the privilege implicit in the prison-industrial complex.

Art and Activism Redux

Poetry, Politics

Two things around the intenet that seem to fit together.

Here’s me talking at the Vile Arts Blog about What We Owe, my recent show at the Arches. It’s ostensibly a preview, but we ended up talking much more abtractly about the link between art and politics:

“There’s a lot of anger in the arts at the moment,” Giles observes. “And that’s coming out in the form and content of our work. Most of my performance is big-P Political — I tend to chew into a big issue (like “class” or “riots”) and then confront it frankly, try and talk about it honestly, try and make it fun for any punter to engage with. That’s what What We Owe does with the subject of debt. And it’s really nice to see it sitting in a programme of politically-engaged performance.”

Secondly, I’m in a book! Edited by Silent City, Art and Activism is a book of texts and page-based interventions on the role of the arts and their connection (or lack of) to activism. It contains a version of Give Up Art, an essay / performance / argument I wrote last year based on the classic Give Up Activism. You can read about the new book at Amelia’s Magazine, and buy it at Amazon or iTunes (I didn’t pick the platforms). It’sonly a fiver, and has 20 brilliant bits of writing in it, plus me.

Art and Activism