After writing about artists here for two years, I was relieved to find myself hustling through the mist that hung over Commercial Street to PAAM a couple of weeks ago for the Forum 24 panel that would give me an answer I needed: “What is an artist?”
Mira Schor said she calls herself as an artist because she has been “in a lifetime fight” to find her place in art history, to challenge definitions of what art is. She went on to read the statement Hans Hofmann made at the original Forum 49 symposium. “Quality must be conquered. It asks for struggle, it often means despair, it asks for character.”
She’s with him: “Living through the tough times” is a requirement for the label. But what’s missing here is that, when taken seriously, artists deeply enjoy the work they do. Otherwise, why would Peter Hutchinson continue making his collages at 94?
Mike Carroll, who organized the panel, asked if an artist needed to exist in an ecosystem. I thought of R.C. Patterson, who keeps a low profile around town and has his studio set up next to his bed at the Foley House. His molar sleeps in a jar inside a green mixed-media vessel in his apartment.
I thought about the narrator in Eileen Myles’s Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, who says, “An artist’s responsibility for a very long time is to get collected, socially.” But what happens if an artist is a loner?
This is rough terrain. The panel struggled to pin down a definition. Helen Molesworth did not exactly disagree with Schor, but she had another idea: “Artists decide they are artists, and only they can decide what that means. They must pursue their own interests without promise of reward or recognition.”
Should we look at output? Schor said she started making serious work when she was 10, but that is not the trajectory of all artists. Sometimes the writer Avigayl Sharp spends a day writing one sentence; a great deal of walking is involved. Painters have fallow periods. And artists do ordinary things like working in restaurants to pay the bills.
A small child with a blond mushroom cut kept making noises behind my chair. Midway through the symposium he crawled over to the gallery wall, stood up, and started pushing his stroller toward the exit as if he were his own parent. Eventually his father removed him. As they left, the child threw something to the floor and the echo reverberated through the museum.
No one remarked on this. But I was struck by the child’s performance — the aliveness of it, the imaginativeness of steering one’s own stroller, the resistance to the social conventions of the buttoned-up room.
I left thinking about how intellect can sometimes stifle creative impulses. The way I see it, artists deal in the imagination and traffic in the unexpected. They live and breathe their inner worlds, then they take time and materials to translate what they imagine into a medium. That is the passionate pursuit that defines an artist.
