In Our Own Spaces #2: "Bring The Work You Hate"
Intentions for a community hosted artist salon series
The following writing was created for and spoken at the second edition of the community-lead and hosted artist salon series “In Our Own Spaces” on August 19, 2023. My partner and I founded this salon series as a space for communal gathering, radical conversation, and redefining uses of art in our current society.
After writing the first draft of this, I looked over the page and decided to myself: “I hate this”. The irony. Where does that instinct come from? To look over a work and instead of appreciating it for what it is, or even recognizing parts of it that deserve further exploration, to just write it off completely: as unworthy, not good enough, a failure.
Art has been objectified and devalued in our needy, overbearing, and oppressive system. Creative contributions that express and experiment in emotion, awareness, community, and connection are valued as lesser than the more tangible yet superficial qualities that fuel systems of hierarchy and wealth accumulation. If an artwork is not assumed to have some capital worth, it is worthless. So as artists we are left to strive and chase, feeling powerless and inadequate, and instead of looking at the realities of our environment, it’s far too easy to internalize that worthlessness. Artists and artworks cannot simply be.
We pour ourselves into clay and onto canvas. The artist identifies with, and identifies as, the work, because it is literally a piece of our souls. Especially in our surveillance era, when it feels like everyone and everything has eyes on us at all times, we fear the perception of the presented self: primarily the physical body, and in the case of the artist, in the artwork as the physical representation of the soul. What will people make of me? What will the art world make of me? Who am I to history? All of this becomes the responsibility of the work to communicate.
There is then a massive expectation placed on the work: to represent the self in a way that is pleasing to others, and to be valued in a world that is built to not value it. And we project anger and contempt that we feel toward ourselves, as a result of this pressure and helplessness, onto this work. We resent it. We’re disgusted by it. We hate it.
When we hate, we foster hate. It festers and grows inside of us, it colors our experience of ourselves and of the world. When we hate our work, we start to hate others’ work. When we hate ourselves we start to hate others. Maybe because we’ve decided that they’re better than us, maybe because we’ve decided that they’re worse than us— we hate them for keeping us in their shadow or we hate them for failing to uphold the unrealistic standards we’ve set for ourselves.
I often feel that art can act as a healthy guard to the internal experience:
I separate myself from this part of myself by making it into an image of its own.
I don’t have to be vulnerable, the work can do it for me. And I don’t have to hate myself, I can hate the work. To hate a work of art is to create for the object an experience of being unseen, and that’s not really fair to the work, or the viewer. So how can we collaborate better with our work? Tonight is our opportunity to explore that together.
When reflecting on the work around you, give others the opportunity to be seen in ways that they cannot see themselves— approach their work with curiosity, patience, and love. Use the support of this community to find something you love about your work, and let that reflect and fill you up with compassion for yourself. Wherever you are in your artistic practice is perfectly aligned with where you are in your own journey. Our work cannot grow if we do not grow.
