Art practice as a strategy for resilience

Anne Eggebert

Resilience proposes its other – attack. A long-shore drift drags slowly at the foundations of a landscape until, eventually, it falls into the uncompromising sea – entropy ensues – dissolving towards a state of inert uniformity. Resistance in this instance might be seen as futile. The marvellous structures that we put in place don’t always support the context they are intended to underpin – they inadvertently cause eddies and swells that function to undermine the territories of our concern. Resilience proposes a flexible resistance – a reshaping or letting go of one space in recognition that another is forming way down the coast; or that the water itself has surfaces, other sites, to roll with the waves (or punches), to shift and tow with the current – crouch in the vessel, feel the heaves and swells¹Marshall Islanders’ navigational method. and what they tell us about the water’s journey – rather than sit apathetic on board and look longingly at steady ground, or look out to sea as the ground slides away beneath us.

‘Resilience proposes a flexible resistance – a reshaping or letting go of one space in recognition that another is forming way down the coast.’

There are enough things to be anxious about. An entropic culture, with its inert conformity is, perhaps, no culture at all. To regard the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement of less value than other subject areas is to miss the point entirely. A culture without these spaces to interrogate what it is to be human, to test ideas, customs and social behaviour, evolves towards a state of dull inert uniformity. And uniformity is dangerous, for then difference is at fault rather than of value. Uniformity proposes a thing that can be utterly known, rather than a possibility for the unknown: not knowing as a dynamic process, ‘operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance’²Ranciere, J (2009). The Future of the Image, London/New York: Verso. transgression, speculation, risk, surprise, failure and feedback – these interruptions offer us the ground for the production of new subjectivities.

‘When language works against the common use of words and the petrified reality they denote, when forms fight against the forms and images imposed on the world by others, the artistic enterprise is from the start a transgression in its perpetual and fundamental reinvention and reintroduction of languages.’³Greff, J P (2001). Criticism, legitimacy and transgression, in European Journal of Arts Education, Vol III, Issue 2 and 3, European League of Institutes of the Arts, Intellect.

Communication is necessary for culture to come into being, for human achievements to be activated, and so the social learning aspect of a resilient culture appears paramount. The ubiquitous mass communication system of the internet has its powerful affects, but the embodied nature of communication remains vital with its oral and auditory, body language and asides, scribbled notes, drawings and printing presses, image, movement and light, object and tactility, and its haptic and contingent being in the world’s spatio / temporal encounters: the studio, the museum and the public (in all their various forms).

To be creators of new knowledge, to bring their insights and energy to these spaces, young artists need to be resilient⁴Windle et al (2011). http://www.hqlo.com/content/9/1/8#B38 Resilience is the process of negotiating, managing and adapting to significant sources of stress or trauma. Assets and resources within the individual, their life and environment facilitate this capacity for adaptation and ‘bouncing back’ in the face of adversity. as they enter into the micro-enterprise world of the creative sector structured on precarization and insecurity⁵Raunig, G (2013). Factories of Knowledge Industries of Creativity, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts/London. – where creative entrepreneurs effectively work to zero hour contracts.⁶Denham, J MP, (former Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills) proposed, at the ukadia conference 2014, stated that HE might have to look to industry sponsors – when questioned about the viability of this in an area made up of self- employed micro-enterprises – his improbable solution was that communities of small business might sponsor HE. Resilience necessarily functions as dynamic interplay between an individual and available resources – adaption is paramount – but what are the limits of adaption before it becomes a force against the human? There is the art market, the strange extravagant beast that, if you leave enough tit-bits and morsels in its hunting grounds, might sniff you out (and gobble you up) …

The meaning of resilience, nonetheless, may be culturally or contextually dependent;⁷Windle, ibid. if a resilient culture is a social learning process it is continually having-to-adapt-itself⁸Heidegger, M (1977). The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York/ London: Garland Publishing. in accordance with the processes of failure and feedback, this then proposes adaptions that offer shifting cultural spaces of identification. Cultural adaption as a dynamic process of change. To enter into this cultural space with its necessary adaptions may be a stressful experience – but arguably one that artists should be well prepared through practice – an activity that is familiar with newness and the thrill that accompanies the arrival of the not-previously-known. Art practice relies on processes of critical awareness, productive response to failure through problem solving, reflection, and the feedback of the sociocultural environment of practice – all aspects that relate back to similar traits in the psychology of resilient individuals and extrapolate into a resilient culture. Practices and their encounters provide potential to explore atypical relationships through multidisciplinary approaches – a means of rubbing along together with all of our differences.

‘A culture without these spaces … to test ideas, customs and social behaviour, evolves towards a state of dull inert uniformity. And uniformity is dangerous, for then difference is at fault rather than of value.’

So, art’s interruptive, affective power is in itself a model for resilience both at the personal psychological level and at the cultural level. However, there is a double bind in that the typical characteristics of the artists’ condition – the blurring of boundaries between work’s parameters, and personal and professional relationships – have become today’s capitalist modus operandi.⁹Boltanski, L & C hiapello , E (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism, London/New York: Verso. On the face of it, it appears that the hegemonic cultural production of desire for identification with this ‘edgy’ lifestyle choice both enforces its selling power and reduces the potential for those really living it to make a living. Nonetheless ‘being resilient entails more than the ability not only to adjust and adapt to a perturbation, but also to transform when the perturbation requires a new conceptualization of the way in which to effectively proceed forward.’¹⁰Jain et al, The tapestry of resilience: an emerging picture, http://royalsocietypublishing.org/content/4/5/20140057.full. Critical practises articulate a complex range of responses to the contingent conditions encountered; interventions that ask what if, what is this, why is that, how can we, what then, and then and then: unsettling the terrain, troubling the waters and revealing the possibility of alternative perspectives. We should be able to step outside existing rules to construct new paradigms and the potential of a world that has never existed before and demand attention to the intrinsic value of art as a strategy for the production of cultural resilience.

We find ourselves at a moment when the loss of the appeal of traditional frameworks of identity is revealing the vacuous nature of what remains – commodity culture. Propelled to exhaustion, skeptical of its promise, disillusioned with its inequalities, contemporary Western culture is at a point of peril. Identification as artist offers both a holding frame or mesh within the complex multiplicity of identities on offer (for us or projected onto us) and a space for the production of meaning in relation to those identities. Identification as artist becomes empowering through art’s potential as a pluralistic, collective and potent space, while functioning as a tool to explore how we might move differently within our cultural landscape and, in doing so, through these unexpected movements, open up the potential for new subjectivities for artist and audience alike.¹¹See Mouffe, C (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London/New York: Verso, for the political potential of this space. The ocean’s fruits and the loosened fabric of the landscape piled into an extravagant structure that offers new terrain from which to leap into the void.

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