Responding to Jan Verwoert's "Why this town is big enough for more of us" *

I remember first reading Jan Verwoert’s essay, “Life Work”, a couple of years ago and feeling both disturbed and drawn to this cult of the art world's inability to separate work from life. Is this really what the subversion of the division of labour leads to: the absolute collapse of our pleasure from our pain?  As we all still operate within a capitalist society, this collapse of pleasure and pain into a single stream towards achieving value is further complicated when we remember that labour remains the root of value. 

I had left an office job then, the last real job I held, fulfilling my obligations to be somewhere between 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday with mandatory overtime plus working as a full time art critic, serving on boards, and organizing various events. The balance of life and work was out the window. I worked all day just so that I could work all night (made all the more ironic as I was employed by a new business and lifestyle magazine that was targeting the balance of work and life). 

I didn’t know I would begin devoting my life to work, but I knew I was not going to devote my life to working twice. The day job financially supported the precarity of my moonlighting, thus undermining the labour value of what I had actually been achieving.

The alluring cult of the art world then is something more than just exchanging services for financial compensation. It must offer something of value if people are willing to work for free. Dare I say there lies buried in art a purpose that keeps us running, influencing our ways of being, our ethics, and intentions. Here is another non separation: the trinity of the body, mind, and spirit. I am not religious in any official sense, but I do believe in more. More questions than answers, more narratives than doctrines, and more voices than outlets.  

Frameworks is a starting point to more. The model boils down to reframing conversations  between people who care. The first event was led by Jan, who generously challenged how we perceive the values and obstacles in our life work. He could only do so amongst a group of strangers by being an intent listener, as one can only engage with what is going on in a room if there is the will to listen.

The one resounding fact, as eloquently echoed in “Life Work”, is that, “no matter how fast the art world grows, we – ‘we’ being those who have become part of each others’ lives through what we do – will continue to inhabit the worlds that we together create for ourselves.”  We can only begin to shift the system if we collectively shift, and that includes listening to and revaluing how we have been talking to each other through our life’s works.




Reference:

Jan Verwoert, “Life Work” Frieze Magazine Issue 121, March 2009
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/life_work/


*First published on Frameworks Scotland

Searching for My Banff, Essay for Sarah Fuller's My Banff, AGA, May 28 - August 7, 2011

Photo and image credit: Sarah Fuller, Installation view My Banff, Art Gallery of Alberta, 2011

My earliest memory of Banff goes back to the mid ‘80s, when the hot springs still smelled like sulphur. I was about five years old and I remember thinking that the gurgling pools of dark water must be filled with rotting eggs, that people were boiling eggs and forgetting to take them out. I remember riding in the back seat of a rental car with my mother and some adults I no longer remember. We made stops in Calgary, Drumheller and the Rockies. I remember the smell of the hot springs. I remember rolling up and down the car’s window pane, but I do not remember much of what I would have seen through it.

There were photographs taken on that trip, to help us remember. But like most souvenirs and memorabilia, they are long lost in the dust bins of personal history. I hold a vague recollection of  one specific image, a photograph showing my mother and me, standing side by side, completely dwarfed by the back drop of looming cascades and majestic peaks against a clear blue sky.  This photograph proved we had been to Banff.

Only, I have no physical proof that this photograph ever existed. I could have imagined it, assembled it from the multitude of photographs I have seen of visitors in Banff. It’s an image that’s been standardized in tourism paraphernalia and promotional materials, yet I am sure it is mine. What is mine could easily be yours. Standing before the mountains, standing by the hot springs. The heat rising up in a thin veil of steam. Vaporizing into the vista behind me.

Real or imagined, this was my first memory of Banff.

Real or imagined, I have no other memory of being there.


“The Local is defined by its unfamiliar counterparts. A
peculiar tension exists between around here and out there
. . . This tension is particularly familiar in a multicentered
society like ours, where so many of us have arrived
relatively recently in the places we call home.” (1)

My own memories of Banff, like most tourists’ memories of Banff, intersect with Sarah Fuller’s My Banff in our search for an authenticity of being there in time and place. Locals and tourists alike seek a sense of place, though their experiences are not mutually inclusive.

Banff has always been a tourist destination. The hot springs was the raison d’etre for why Banff was localized at all. After CPR railway workers William McCardell, Thomas McCardell and Frank McCabe reported on their findings at the base of Sulphur Mountain, the hot springs were developed as an elite travel opportunity in an age of luxury rail travel and grand destination hotels.

Of course, before the railway named the area after the CPR directors’ hometown on the north coast of
Scotland, the area now known as Banff was not exactly a tourist location; but still, it was a site for transient experiences. Several First Nations communities traveled through and around the area, including the Plains Blackfoot, Cree and Kokanee people. The approximate region now known as Banff was a place for vision quests, and it was not a place to be settled upon. Some still identify the area as an unusually concentrated nexus of energies, a convergence of forces where five valleys meet.

Today, anyone who has visited Banff, especially up Tunnel Mountain Drive, will know (or is told explicitly through corporate branding) that Banff is a place for creativity and inspiration. Visitors, especially resident artists who stay for weeks to months, still report vivid dreams or intense insomnia. Long before Banff became the tourist destination it is today, it has attracted visitors seeking an inspirational experience.


1.  Lippard, Lucy On the Beaten Treak: Tourism, Art, and Place. New Press, New York, 1999. Pp 13. 


The essay in full is available on site in the RBC New Works Gallery through August 7, 2011 and available for purchase through the AGA  Visit Sarah Fuller Photography for more information on the artist.  

Commentary: Federal Cuts to The Arts - A Special Report from Abroad*

This is war. Stephen Harper and The Conservative Government with their newly elected majority is sparing no time in laying down their law, and the first to go are the sacrificial lambs of curators from our National Gallery of Art and  part-time scientists, already reduced to contracts, from Environment Canada.

It’s become clear that politics is a game for Harper, and ministries are pawns in his strategy to maintain on top.  

Harper has been hacking away at the arts, environment, overseas aid, women’s rights, queers, universal health care, and all other social programs during his reign as a minority government. Now in a real position of power for the first time in his long and winding political career, Harper at last can flex his ego by immediately showing how weak the NDP opposition really is by slashing into their weakest and loudest points, the environment and the arts.

Harper began as a whippersnapper in the heydays of The Reform Party, but he left the party because he thought Reform was too socially conservative to ever be a powerful Right-wing party. Strategically, Harper rose to power in the then-collapse of Right-wing politics starting with that l’efant terrible, The Canadian Alliance, merging with the weakening Progressive Conservatives.  The Liberals ran wild, unchecked, and now there’s hell to pay. In serving the ideals of an ultimate Right-wing party, one that Harper has conflated with his evangelic faith, Harper will lead the country into a state of complete retardation. 

Canada’s reputation for politeness has been our pride and will become our fall. This country produces an outpouring of amazing minds, many of them writers and artists. Art, its creation, appreciation, and acceptance is rooted in our identities, and our identity in Canada has only half-formed, with little resistance. There are patches of resistance within the larger framework, the First Nations people and Quebecois identity are the two most visible, but only because they have fought to remain visible. 

Distance brings perspective, and I cannot believe my eyes with every news story I read.

The cuts will keep coming, but resist them through actions loud and soft. Pronounce who you are and what you believe in through everything you say and everything you do. Art does not just exist in galleries and galas, art is being aware and making aware of our human rights and existence.

Art is resistance, Resistance is art!

 *Amy Fung is currently completing an Arts Writing and Curating Fellowship in the UK.