What Does Success in the Arts Look Like? - Interview XXIII with Ruth Catlow
/Ruth Catlow – Artistic director of Furtherfield, London
Artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Artistic director of Furtherfield, a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017); curator of the touring exhibition New World Order (2017-18); runs the award winning DAOWO arts and blockchain lab series with Ben Vickers, in collaboration with Goethe Institute; principal investigator for the blockchain research lab at Serpentine Galleries. Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies.
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What are your thoughts on fame in the arts?
Fame is a currency in the arts. Art workers can trade it to get stuff and others speculate upon it. This probably applies in other sectors that depend on the reputation in an attention economy. The drive for fame in the arts promotes a culture of competitive individualism, the myth of genius, and is a denial of the deep interdependence of a healthy cultural ecosystem. It does however make an excellent topic for critical play. By working with attention, fame, influence and speculation as a medium, artists like Amalia Ulman, Jeremy Bailey and Jonas Lund make visible the contortions that we must all (not just art workers) undergo in social media and crypto platforms - in order to participate and survive in daily life.
My early life as an artist in London coincided with the rise of the Young British Artist scene. This Saatchi & Saatchi-backed marketing-led supercharging of the art market functioned to create a few art stars and to promote them in order to manipulate, or to at least raise the value of those artists' work in the art market. A deliberate playing with the mechanisms of the market, the mechanisms of fame, the mechanisms of media (including a deliberate alienation of wider communities and audiences for arts) in order to give precedence to arts’ status as a commodity. It was an effective take over of the art world ecology by extractive forces and it limited the scope of what artists could address. So while I think it is possible to make fascinating works of art dealing with questions of fame, that period saw a limitation and a clipping of wings of artists who wanted to deal with social or political questions. Furtherfield’s Do It With Others (DIWO) campaign was partly a response to this experience - a desire to work with other art workers around the world to create more meaningful artworlds together.
Image by Furtherfield (2017) base on 2006 original. Don’t Just Do It Yourself, Do It With Others - DIWO!
What is your approach to rejection?
It depends how much my survival and that of collaborators and communities depends on the outcome. In ideal circumstances we commit fully to imagining projects that are the right mix of enchantment and necessity; throw everything at them; and then detach from the results. The process of thinking through the pragmatic details required to realise imaginaries is an important process of discovery and also for connecting with others. Creating proposals is about finding out whether what you have to offer is a good fit. A rejection is sometimes just good information. Sometimes the good information is still painful if it tells you that your needs, drives, values and visions are deemed to have no place in the world.
It is also very easy to misinterpret this approach as meritocracy narrative about flexibility, tenacity, success, all as signs of personal merit. It's not a level playing field out there and if we care about the life of the arts, we need to attend better to the damage done by the obstacles that strewn in the way of most people approaching the Artworld, rather than rewarding an evermore-homogenised group of people for producing elite experiences for boxes the Artworld has made for them but which have zero relevance to most people.
Any thoughts on income and financial stability in regards to success?
I think this connects to the previous question. When we talk about financial success in the art world, we need to think about what that looks like for those born into relative wealth and those trying to work from outside the walled garden to create some kind of stability in order to develop a sustained and disciplined practice. It depends on what your baseline is. The Artworld in 2020 comprises a much higher proportion of people who have some kind of safety net than it did in 2000. They come from families who can provide them with homes in global cities, who can help them out when they fall into debt, who can pay for their studios and who already have powerful cultural connections.
Many people needed by art are not able to take the same risks that I can take. I can take risks partly because of my class (eccentric middle), and my age (I'm in my early fifties), and many people younger than mid-forties didn't benefit like I did from a free arts education or from welfare support in the first 5 or 6 years after leaving art college. (Now in the UK there are lots of children who are receiving no art, music, drama education at all even at school!) These things provided the soil for a shared culture, networks of exchange, knowledge, resources, and community practice with a lot of other people. These aren’t in place anymore. As a result we’re seeing a reduction in the variety and number of people who can contribute to the co-creation of more experimental, investigatory non-mass culture that are so needed at this time. This is why money, finance and access to the arts are interconnected and such a big issue.
How do you define success in the arts?
I look for art actions that reveal the material, political and social conditions of the moment and expand a sense of freedom, solidarity and agency for and between people and different living systems.
I’m currently most interested in new ways of working with environmental and climate crisis and biodiversity collapse, the things that are urgent and deal with existential questions and that use all means necessary to extend expressive range and increase the potency of connections across differences.
It will take decades at least for humans to get to grips with the philosophical, social and political consequences unleashed by strangeness and wonder of the Internet. It's not surprising I guess, given our history growing up with the web, and now running a gallery and commons space in a London park, that at Furtherfield the things that especially fascinate us are artistic practices that engage with questions of translocality- the social and cultural effects of network flows, migrant flows, travelling, and high-speed digital networks. These produce a phenomenon in which most people now identify personally, simultaneously with a number of spaces and places, both physically and digitally. The most successful artworks acknowledge this moment and respond by asking what artworlds might spring from this new environment for decentralised cooperation and communication.
Playbour: Work, Pleasure and Survival, curated by Dani Admiss at Furtherfield Gallery (2018). Photo by Pau Ros
Do you have role models for success and who are they?
Because Furtherfield has grown up over 25 years as a network of people - artists, techies, activists, and thinkers - I have a community of peers who model a different kinds of success, as well as difficulties and failures of artistry and survival. I am inspired by and learn from them all. Success makes complex power structures visible in a way that makes it possible for people to take hold of them and then cooperate to create new ways of being, feeling and knowing for more solidarity.
Which advice on success would you give your 18-year-old self?
I do wonder how life would be different now if my 18 year old self had understood more about different approaches to getting organised, was better informed by history, and had the tools to do it. This is very crucial to being able to collaborate well with people. And I definitely spent the first 20 years after leaving art college improvising all of those things and learning for the first time every time I was involved in a new adventure, but honestly, that’s not the advice I would give. You know, I think I’ve done it right. The advice would be, do what you did, follow your curiosity and work with good people (and constantly reevaluate what “good” means).
Your thoughts on success in the arts and race/gender
I would add class into that as the third category. I guess I've already touched a little on this in my answers on financial stability and success. I mean again it's about questions of access, voice, and the ability to create opportunities for all people to be involved in experimenting with expressive meaning making processes in relation to real life experience. I think that the art world is structured against these things happening well. We struggle because the dominant art world is made up of very old institutions that developed during imperialism and colonialism. They reproduce patriarchal, colonial systems of selection, organisation and ideas about what is good. This is one of the reasons why it has always felt important to constantly reconsider what an organisation is, and to make the creation of the “art worlds that we want” a collective activity. This is one of the spurs for our three-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme, “crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.” This was inspired by Octavia’s Brood (2015), an anthology that supports new sci-fi imaginaries for social justice in the States, by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha.
We are consciously trying to build the art context for our work in a way that connects with the life ground (not just an international fantasy world) not just thinking about artworks or projects as discrete things that could go anywhere. We want to be part of a mic check or amplification system for the important voices that are present but excluded, and that we need to learn from.
Artists Elsa James, with her work Circle of Blackness at Furtherfield Gallery (2019). Photo by Pau Ros.
Last year for instance we commissioned an artwork called “Circle of Blackness” by Elsa James which connected with the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park where our gallery is based. She worked with an historian who works with black histories to discover more about the lives of women who had lived in the 1870s. She made a holographic piece which honoured one of these women and imagined their same character 150 years in the future as a way to envision the emancipation of black bodies and the power of black voices in the place. Another example would be the interview with Ingrid LaFleur, curator of Manifest Destiny (2019) in Detroit, that explored her experience as the first woman in the US to stand on an Afrofuturist platform in order to stand for mayor.
We are connecting practices on the ground with international examples of artistic and political figures who are making crossovers between culture and politics, so this is an example of us trying to address race in this context. We are focused on the power relation between margins and centres. It seems a natural thing to do if you’re working with network cultures.
