Artist Meetup Blog Entry 8
August 2024: The Artist-Activist Meetup
I’ve been excited to begin a new year of programming for our meetups. The Celebration of Expression last month emboldened me, showing me the proof I needed that our meetups have begun to solidify as a diverse, supportive, and experimental community.
I have briefly touched on this in the last few entries, but it bears repeating here: our first year of meetups centered on orienting ourselves among our histories, our communities, our mediums, and each other, all of which gave us the chance to begin understanding and practicing reflexivity, or how we position ourselves in space and time, and how our actions, gestures, presentation, and expression all work to affect the flow of the world around us.
I reflected on this when drafting up ideas for our next curriculum. Stories of Atlantic City’s artist meetups—as you might remember if you’ve ever scrolled to the very bottom of these blog entries—is funded by the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC). I was greenlit to create our meetups because the SOAC team saw these gatherings (and, subsequently, this blog) as a holistic form of hyperlocal information-sharing and as a way to address top-down issues in community-building in the Atlantic City area.
I take this call seriously. Before we began our meetups, I was driven by the desire to provide space for the many voices of expression in and around our city; once I met you, I was driven by the dream we share, to create a space inviting the many voices of expression in and around our city to unite. Your honesty and dedication to our space, your vulnerability among peers, and your commitment to your craft have been my greatest fuel source.
Reflecting on this second year, I couldn’t stop thinking about your voices. How do I, as the guide for this space, provide opportunities for you to develop those voices? I have said in these entries before: this is not a space for me to “teach.” Rather, this is a space for us to join, and I am tasked with guiding that union.
Opportunities for group reflection (read: feedback, critiques, workshops) became the central cog in this machine I envisioned. To better understand what our art communicates to a broad audience, we must first practice understanding what that art communicates to the other members of our community! Here, we have a chance to act as a “focus group” for each other, to lead through our vulnerability together.
Arts and Ethics
The “theme” for this year’s meetups is Arts and Ethics, and by that I mean to say that we will spend a hundred different ways looking at the relationship between personal expression and civic responsibility.
What is an artist’s role in community-building?
This is a question that brilliant thinkers have been asking for thousands of years.
For example, twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was waxing poetic philosophic, arguing that poets were dangerous to the function of his Republic, a thought experiment that reflects, millennia later, what we’ve seen become oppressive control by way of dictatorships, dogmatic regimes, authoritarianism, etc.
It is nearly impossible to practice making art in a way that communicates civic responsibility if that art is made apart from community. Many artists make their work in their studios and then show only in galleries in which sales are priority—and this is a valid career path in a world that requires “career paths.” But, unexamined, it also makes the artist complicit in the systems in which they take part. Ceding voice, one can become an accessory to oppressive forces of control such as government, capital, ads/propaganda, priviledge, gentrification/forced migration, and so much more. A relationship to one’s own voice in reflection of their community helps to refute this.
A Smudged Mirror
I consider myself an artist-activist. If I must choose an exact moment that I started to more seriously practice my artist-activism, it would be June of 2017. That summer, I attended the Artist as Citizen conference facilitated by an organization now known as Arts Ignite (it was called Artists Striving to End Poverty back then).
The conference was held at Juilliard on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and it brought together over fifty up-and-coming artists of a variety of media from across the country to work closely, day in and day out, with each other, our team of organizer artists, and a brilliant group of workshop leaders. We spent a week together, building ideas, challenging each other, growing together. I’ve mentioned in a previous entry, and I bring it up in our gatherings frequently, the necessity to “lead through vulnerability.” This is one of the many life-changing concepts I learned at that conference.
(for the reader interested in seeing what kind of art 2017 Jacob was making, this was my group’s collaboratively-designed multimedia performance)
The conference’s name, “Artist as Citizen,” was pulled from a book of the same name (1, 2) written by Juilliard’s most recently succeeded president, Joseph Polisi. Juilliard has a history of interjecting social thought into their curriculum, offering opportunities for students who are experts in their trades to interact more deeply with community work. I will say, I never took the time to read Polisi’s book. I got to meet him, and attended a lovely interview with him. He seemed very smart, very kind, and very steadfast in his goals. Maybe I consider him an ancestor to my practice, if only because of how much my artist-activist predecessors admired him. But my practice was never one occurring in a vacuum.
Identifying a Practice’s Challenges
Each art form faces a different set of ethical, moral, communal challenges. Photography, for example, is as close as we can get to sight itself. For the majority of its history, it was almost exclusively a medium of documentation. It was birthed from printmaking, an ethos of replication, alteration, information dissemination, etc. Photography has granted us the power of global culture, invoked spectatorship, and helped build legal and moral arguments against a plethora of injustices. Human Rights in Camera is an excellent book that discusses this in greater detail.
Photography as both a technology and a medium (the technology: camera, film, lens, dark room, chemicals; the medium: eyeball, insight into setting up a composition in real time, negotiating the technology, body tracking and performing the snap, or, to sum it up succinctly by quoting my undergrad professor Wendel White, “photography is the art of exclusion”), it’s faced a specific set of challenges in the 21st century.
Too often, I hear folks say, “anyone can be a photographer nowadays.” What do they mean by that statement? What are they performing when they say that thing? What propaganda are they echoing?
(Here are some powerful photo-taking-related statistics: 1, 2)
Smartphones are everywhere. These small glass and metal bricks hum with connection, just waiting to be asked a question or invited to capture audio or video or photos. Their eyes are incredible. We are in a technological revolution: we can document and instantly share out the faces of our loved ones, a meal we think is particularly beautiful, or an atrocity being committed in real time by a state power. This should not be taken lightly.
“Anyone can be a photographer nowadays.”
And if so, what a joy! So we must renegotiate what it means to be a photographer. Some folks like to make this distinction: we have everyday photographers and we have fine art photographers. They say the former is anyone with a camera. The latter can be a photographer using a digital or film camera, and the industry gets to declare that they are special or separate from other photographers because of a certain sort of costly training, costly equipment, or costly material—I’m starting to think those with money have a thing for money.
Every industry, every practice, has its gatekeepers. I can only speak as someone raised in America’s hyper-capitalism, but here the gatekeepers believe money is voice and voice is power and so money controls who has the power. Discrediting everyday photographers helps to chip away at the confidence of those everyday folks who have, through this technological revolution, been granted incredible power. To notice this and to speak about it among peers is to take away its insidious control.
I’ve been zooming in on photography to help us dissect the challenges that any particular art form faces, but let’s return to Joseph Polisi. Juilliard trains musicians, composers, dancers, theater artists, and performing arts writers. Their focal point is in those practices the challenges of which have to do, almost entirely, with wealth, class, standing. Almost every mode of dance, for instance, at once point came from a folk tradition but was then usurped by an upper class. The same is true of theater. The same is true of jazz and classical music.
Consider, for instance, Rehearsing Philadelphia, a project I helped bring to life in 2022, in which conductor-composers created brand new, large-scale works alongside the community members they brought together to play in their ensembles and orchestra. The formalization of a medium does not require the consolidation of power. Certainly not anymore.
We all have voices that sing and speak and breathe into instruments. We all have bodies that move and act and sway and evoke. The conservatory has controlled those bodies and voices for generations. Polisi sought to meet the media where they were, to utilize perceived power and prowess from these forms of “high art” by infusing them back into community. This is my activism-ancestry.
I believe it is our job as artist-activists to bring ourselves, our own lived experiences and the challenges we’ve faced and learned from, to our art form and to our communities and to the causes for which we speak out. I like to say that “art is a smudged mirror,” in that it should seek to almost perfectly reflect the world around us, with a little bit of beautiful, messy interference by the artist.
Each day I seek new ways to allow my fingers’ smudges to interplay with the worlds reflected in my mirror.
The Meeting
We are our own greatest judges. This is by design. It is a mechanism of control that allows for horizontal influence: we are taught from an early age that we should meet certain standards; we internalize that and regurgitate judgment; we hear each other’s judgments and it amplifies the judgment within us. Activism is dangerous—remember, even Socrates thought so. Expression is a danger to control.
During the first meeting of this new curriculum, we chewed on the concept of revolution. One member said he’s tired of how the grand ideas of revolution often look. Instead, he believes in humor and subversion. To paraphrase: subversion makes a radical idea palatable.
Maybe humor shakes us from our stupor—I think about this exceptional essay by Ilya Kaminsky, Of Strangeness That Wakes Us, in which Kaminsky muses:
“Why break a language? To wake it up.”
Perhaps this piece should be the first suggested-required reading of the new curriculum.
I don’t think revolution must mean any one thing in particular. In fact, I think any requirement within us that it “must look a certain way” is the voice of the inner judge itself! Gil Scott-Heron says The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—revolution takes place quietly, locally, first when we look in the mirror, then when we look out the window. Maybe, the world begins, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
What I’m saying is that we are experiencing tiny revolutions every day. They occur within us, and, if we let them, they pour out of us and onto our canvases and notepads and stages and classrooms, and then out over the spaces we influence. I’m talking about art-as-voice and artist-activism, sure, but I’m actually talking about activism, but I’m mostly talking about simply being a person among people, but I’m REALLY talking about love. All lessons inform each other. Revolution can really only flourish at the crossroads of lived experiences, the intersection of so many disparate ways of thinking.
Moving Forward
During our gathering this month, a member said “you invite yourself to the table.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’ve had a lot of imposter syndrome in my life (hey, that’s also the judge doing its dirty work), and I’ve also, more rightly, had many moments in which I’ve had to pause and ask myself if I, a white man-shaped being, am the right person to sit at a particular table, to wield a particular power, to speak my voice over another’s voice.
“Inviting yourself to the table” was an elegant response to thoughts on allowing ourselves to take part in liberation: we all belong at the table. Should we want to be invited? Yes, that too. But we can also offer ourselves, transparently, openly, with understanding of all the many different ways we can sit at that table: silently, loudly, in protection of others, as a specialist, as a person who can wield a power others haven’t yet been granted by the society we seek to change. We liberate each other. To sit at the table, together, means holding ourselves and each other accountable and honoring ourselves and each other’s beauty.
As we move forward with these meetups—especially as we build toward workshop-critique-feedback sessions—we’re going to try something new. Next meetup, we are going to build a set of community agreements together. We will decide exactly what we need from each other to feel seen, heard, and supported when we all sit down at the table together.
Until then, here’s your homework: begin to meditate on what you need from your community to make sure you feel that you are known.
Interested in a complete and ever-expanding list of references made across all of our Artist Meetup blog entries? Visit our Artist Meetup Blog’s new Annotated Bibliography!
Our Artist Meetup series is supported by New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit that funds initiatives to benefit the State’s civic life and meet the evolving information needs of New Jersey’s communities. A first-in-the-nation project, the Consortium reimagines how public funding can be used to address the growing problem of news deserts, misinformation, and support more informed communities.