What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXVI with Esthir Lemi

Esthir Lemi - composer, Artist (Athens, Greece)

About: “First piano lessons, ballet lessons and first year in school happened simultaneously in 1980. I remember a beloved dance teacher, good music, my piano diploma in January 1991 and a Harold Pinter play at the Municipal Theatre in Patras. Since my early school time I had the firm belief that I was a painter and that I was going to study under the wing of N. Kessanlis at the School of Fine Arts in Athens and then move to Berlin, which I actually did. Kessanlis' Studio closed in 1998 and I got the IKY Greek state scholarship, then the Onassis Scholarship and started my MA at the UdK in Berlin. Back to Athens in 2004 for my composition diploma and the start of my PhD research at the University of Athens on Total Artwork. In 2008 I moved to Zurich, started a research in haptics (merging analogue technology with innovative tech platforms) at the ICST. I presented my PhD thesis in 2012 in Athens and moved to London for an artistic collaboration with the EAVI team at Goldsmiths. In 2014 I was the first European artist to receive the Fulbright Schuman funding, introducing a new concept of the artist as engineer/scientist. While working as a postdoc, on how the brain triggers different stimuli via our senses and the way our senses interconnect, at the University of Michigan, I had a joyful collaboration with R. Esslinger and C. McRae: together we created Loompianola!, a hybrid instrument. Then in 2014 in Copenhagen (haptic diary project), 2015 in Istanbul (Archaeoacoustics), 2016  in Helsinki (Lighting design project and solo exhibition), 2017-18 in Athens (lecturing Arts and Anthropology at the Athens School of Fine Arts) and 2019 in Marseille for Escales, a sound permanent installation at the Galleries Lafayette / Prado. 2020 back in Athens, working on Through the Looking Sound project, a kaleidoscopic score for a solo pianist, performed by Jana Lukst in N.Y. and Toronto.”

More about Esthir on www.esthirlemi.com.

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What are your thoughts on fame in the art world?

I started working as an artist around the millennium, when curators seemed to earn more fame and glory as the artists themselves, therefore, during my master degree, I have learned how to collaborate and work within the new reality of sharing “fame” with colleagues, instead of building a single artistic persona, that would gain fame individually. However, I think that fame functions merely through “gossip technology”, with all media patterns like word of mouth, fabrication of media personae and a focus on the appearance of things: the fabrication of a product. It is probably a side-effect of how the significance of art shifted into a product closely linked to fame and that has led the big institutions to focus more on fame, than the works of artists them-selves. In other words, I see fame as a spotlight created in art spaces with such an architecture and symbolic value, where the longer you stay under that same spotlight (e.g. the self / or the product) the more famous you be-come—it is a self-fulfilling prophecy There are just a few artists working on research who are super famous - my discipline as a composer is not related to any kind of fame. It is a long-term research and its longevity does not produce, nor aims for short-term fame. It is more dependent on the respect of people who are following similar paths in their artistic research.

What is your approach to rejection as a part of success?

When my work has some kind of success with the audience, the resulting debate around it, whether the work was really worth, often becomes louder and somehow aggressive, therefore I believe there is some fragility on reaching the spotlight of success, since the working environment is competitive per se. It is important for a professional to remain dialectic inside - and to understand that through every creative work we do change our mind and our practice, we re-evaluate things etc. I do believe that there is no win-win situation, because when a project reaches the best possible outcome, then the anxiety grows on how to reinvent better and more creative ideas – together with the need to relax and cool down, which is an oxymoron--success is never a neutral condition. It is not rare that the work an artist considers as his/her masterpiece is not always the same one that their audience and critics consider as their most important one. The capability to deal with a rejection makes an artist more aware of how to deal with a success, since the rejections demand a new reflection on the process of the work itself and thus, a different level of maturity in the artist’s self-awareness. The same maturity leads to the understanding that every successful project is merely a transition to a next level of the artistic process.

Any thoughts on income, financial stability and success?

Financial stability is considered as an equivalent of success, but we all understand too well that artistic labor is full of compromises that we need to accept. We provide our labor and we get paid for this. However, artists are still seen as if they were working for pleasure, and there is a lot of work to be done in order to create better labor conditions, in order for the artists to learn how to stand up for their rights within the market. I know many famous and successful artists who do not reach financial stability, while they provide constant profit for others in the art market. Covid-19 has revealed similar problematic situations in many countries, and this is the most significant thing that must change in the future: labor in the art world must be paid, for it is hard and tenacious work, and the pleasure of it should never be used to diminish its value or create excuses why people should not be financially compensated.

© Esthir Lemi

How do you define success as an artist?

I consider the macroscopic pattern we follow on success as patriarchal. As I am allergic to competition, I get inspired by artists who transform that pattern of a hierarchic pyramid into a tree –into a real ecosystem- and create branch-es and leaves that expand as individual ways of communication and artistic collaboration. These artists are for me the most successful.

Do you have role models for success and who are they?

Pina Bausch has been and will be an inspiration for me because of her en-tire artistic approach. I am deeply moved by the fact that she didn’t hesitate to introduce her team and each and every collaborator as an individual artist. The composer Jannis Christou is a rare example, in my country, of an artist that was able to find a space for everyone in his own team, so that they could flourish with their talents and grow their own artistic persona. Moreover, he expanded his compositional work deep into other disciplines. His hard work to understand the performative, whilst respecting the limits and needs of the artists he collaborated with, is something I deeply admire.

Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?

Ι would try to explain to her the compositional term of macro- and micro-structure, the meaning of understanding narrative identity and the self as an on-going process of re-defining things, and tell her to “fail again, fail better”.

Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/ gender

While working abroad, it is difficult for me to filter my work out of the national-, gender-, or age-based approaches, even though my work is not an example or representative of any of these areas. I am against female art as a kind of a minority approach concept, and I do not consider my research on origins so naive to let her reflect any kind of stereotypes The very same notion of fe-male art, as it is often used, defines women as some kind of minority, which at the end of the day is anything but feminist. I am more interested in creating tools for the next generation, especially for women, in a world where they would not be in need to define their work through fighting but instead concentrate on the tools themselves.. I feel today we still use language, tools and structure that have been made for a system that is persuasive, encouraging the game of the dominant and boosting discrimination and violence, although humanness is the key. I focus on humanness.