I like the provocations offered by deCentral in its series of talks on practice. Per deCentral, practice is “an ongoing process…shaped through duration, repetition, embodied knowledge, and situated relationships.” By its nature, an art practice resists “once in a lifetime experiences.” This is exactly the kind of art practice that transforms it into jiyū shūkyō.
If this is one’s view of one’s practice, then assumptions about the following must be contended or questioned:
- scale of productivity
- speed in productivity
- the role of the spectacle
- professionalization of artistic landscapes
A rejection of contemporary capitalistic values on art, a jiyū shūkyō art practice could instead espouse the following:
- slow production
- repetitiveness
- collaboration with people often invisible in our market-oriented art worlds
- utilize market value to create new forms of labor as artistic ecologies (e.g., regenerating land, creating differing learning environments that builds community, reshapes schools, archives, and libraries)
Per deCentral, an art practice “should be a site where new temporalities, politics, and affinities emerge.”
Quotes from deCentral
Practice is long understood as the training and refinement of skills within a particular medium, unfolding in divergent ways, often within designated space and place, in pursuit of mastery, or as experimentation, without a predetermined end. How one practices is therefore not neutral, but a question of agency.
Acknowledging skill and medium-based framings as but one mode of practice, we also encounter conceptual artistic, curatorial, as well as collective or social practices that illustrate longer-standing shifts away from single artworks, instead favouring processes and modes of doing or supporting, that are provisional or ongoing.
Thus ‘practice’ cuts across material and immaterial forms, across approaches reliant on traditional sites of production and exhibition, as well as those that take place beyond such settings. The breadth of such reference leaves little doubt as to the ubiquity of the term ‘practice’, yet this ubiquity also demands scrutiny.
When practice is referred to as a group of works or projects, or a term indicating the life-span of a single artist—or even of collectives framed as unified entities—does it also operate as a neoliberal category? Does “having a practice” function as a way to tell a story about ourselves as artists, curators, supporters - thus a way to organise, make coherent and, ultimately, make us legible to local and foreign markets and institutions?
interrogate the distinction, if any, between an arts or cultural ‘practitioner’ and a ‘professional’.
study the processes of such categories and how they are produced, maintained, valued or contested. Is the act of practising alone sufficient to confer professional status, or is ‘professionalism’ granted through other mechanisms such as peer recognition, economic metrics, and institutional visibility?
What other imaginings of practice might unfold alongside them?
Some forms of knowledge come to be recognised and rewarded by institutions, while others remain marginal, informal, or less easily named.
studying as a form of practice shaped by the infrastructures and relations through which knowledge is produced and valued across contexts.
what counts as work and study, and how these categories are continuously negotiated.
Practice is often framed in opposition to theory; yet the study of knowledge and its production has never been separable from the forms through which it is accumulated and shared, from those most readily found within institutional frameworks — such as lectures or seminars, to performances, open studios, or simply conversations – often relegated to the register of the “informal,” and thus less recognised as sites of learning. To speak of studying, then, is already to speak of practice: a situated activity shaped by the infrastructures, relations, and regimes of value through which knowledge is recognised and rewarded.
studying as a form of practice in its own right, reflecting on pedagogy and methodology, as well as the often invisible labour they entail, be it reproductive, affective, or collective
what counts as work and study, and how these categories are continuously negotiated across geographical, social, institutional, and economic contexts.
When artistic and curatorial work unfolds beyond the assumed space of the exhibition - through acts of convening, hosting, and enabling creativity - such practices draw attention to the social and material conditions that allow artistic life to take shape.
practitioners who move fluidly between the roles of artist, curator, host, organiser, funder, and educator…challenges the concept of artistic practice itself
What does it mean to support others’ work, to create platforms, or to enable encounters? Where does artistic and curatorial practice begin or end, if such boundaries should be drawn at all?
Many artists carry out their work as long-term projects that engage particular communities, often examining relationships to land and ecology, questioning systems of value and exchange, testing the mode of collective organisation, asking how the conditions of social and material life impact criticality and creativity. Such artists often operate with differing pace and responsibilities, where their ‘labour’ does not only result in objects for display but creates social value beyond the financial profit of an object sold in a gallery, or the repute of a museum or biennial.
Todo
- What is the spectacle?
References
https://www.decentralth.com/en/engagements/41/event-1-how-do-we-learn-to-practice