Of course a lot of the book explores the importance of money in art – how much of that is autobiographical? And when it came to suddenly having money, how could you see that you were able to create and produce things in a new way?
Things are different now – in 2020 I moved out into a flat on my own and was comfortable, but that’s not the truth anymore. But for a while, what money bought us was focus and the ability to enjoy “oblivion”, as the Valentine character in Poor Artists says, where I’ve taken myself away from everything so that I can just be an artist and it can just be me and the art. It was actually the year I think that the quality of our writing jumped up the most as a result of having no distractions, because it was all I did – it was amazing. In a way it felt like a year of what life’s supposed to be like, because I get to do what I want to do. I’m sure everyone who has an artistic practice vies for the same thing.
I remember the day I had an idea for something called The Successful Funding Application Library – I wanted to make a page on the website where we just put loads of examples and pdfs of people who got funding, residencies etc., and I didn’t get up from my laptop for four hours. That experience was happening so often, and it was really fulfilling because you could have the idea and execute it in all the same breath. I want that for me now and for others, but the economic situation that we’re in disrupts creative flow, which then disrupts your mental health and sense of self. You start asking: “Where the fuck am I gonna go with my life? Am I even an artist if I don’t get to do this that much anymore?”
I feel like as inequality has grown in the world, people are understanding the limits of meritocracy. But art is one of those practices where successful people have historically been revered and held up as having God-gifted talents that transcend their conditions. Why was it important to challenge that in your book and demystify the art industry?
There’s a comment in the book about an artist called Maria Andwander, who took Flash Art Magazine – which says on the cover “The Leading European Art Magazine” – and she made an artwork where she used a chemical and a q-tip to erase the words inside the magazine meticulously. So it would just be white pages and white pages – I think about that all the time, because from the perspective of a critic it is ridiculous that I have the power to say who is and who is not worthy. I hate that. I think about all the artists in the magazine who feel important because they’re in it, and the much greater number of people whose names will never grace those covers.
It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot because we’re trying to publicise this book – we’re speaking to Huck Magazine, The Guardian, whoever, and I’m grateful because I want to sell the book and have enough money for a deposit on a house, so I’ve got to play the game. All artists do, but at the same time I wish we were in a world where we didn’t need to bow to those powers. A world where money didn’t exist, where we could give the books away for free. And it wasn’t a case of who is in the magazine because everyone’s in the magazine and no one person is the editor. Poor Artists became about not trying to fix the world we’re in now, but trying to design another planet we can escape to.
