The Artist as a Professional in the Age of Hyperspecialization
A Short Note on Job Titles
For the past few years, every week or three, I’ll write a couple of meandering pages about something that I simply need to get out of my head. This is the most efficient way I know to forget things.
As such, I tend to have no idea what I’ve written down, but the accumulating folders of these little texts may, hopefully, hold some useful seeds with which to compile and grow this dissertation. Only now have I taken the time to click some of these folders and find out what I’ve been thinking these past couple years.
Because my work in this time has focused on the artists’ literacies project, much of this writing has to do with redefining the role of artists, conceiving of us as knowledge producers and not object makers. It is often concerned with the labels we apply to artists here in the US, and in the West, generally. All of this is descended from my experience and witness to the marginalization, misuse, and even abuse of artists’ and artistic ways of knowing. As I’ve said elsewhere, our internalization as a society of the Romantic conception of the artist as an inspired and impoverished struggler means there is scant presence of artists’ knowledge in our approach to problems, because our conception of what artists do is also poor and disconnected. Lots of the titles of these short drafts reflect my struggling with this issue of labeling and framing what artists know and do:
“What do Filmmakers Know That Behavioral Economists Don’t?”
“Are Artists Really Environmental Biologists?”
“Systems Thinking for Socially Engaged Artists”
Each of these efforts derived from study into the more professionally accepted field - behavioral economics, environmental biology, etc - and discovery that these practices were in many ways the same as so much of artistic practice.
These comparative exercises reflect my immersion in a professionalized world of hyperspecialization, as well as my daily reality as an artist and therefore part of the economic precariat, a rapidly growing global class of workers who may enjoy living resources from day to day, but who lack stability and security of any kind, and for whom economic precariousness is the only constant. The point is, everyone has a title, and they often lead with that title in identifying themselves (particularly here in the US, where ‘what do you do?’ is still the first or second question we ask of each other when meeting). These titles, in neoliberal capitalism, are signifiers for our usefulness and consequently our economic virility.
Doctors are useful, artists not so much, in this setting. But hyperspecialization has meant that new titles are forming on a daily basis, and they do so as a strategy for validating the usefulness of their holder - a thousand flavors of economist, social scientist, consultant, researcher, academic, public servant, project manager, specialist, and technician have emerged to describe an ever more granular landscape of activity and utility.
This proliferation of claims on professional utility could also be an opportunity for us more ‘useless’ professionals to don some useful camouflage, and bring artistic forms of knowing into venues where it may be absent, or may be misused. (What’s a mis-use of artistic forms of knowing, you ask? Well, there will be a chapter on that, because I suspect it may be a contentious argument - but in short I will say here that if we only use artists to decorate, communicate, and entertain, we mis-use - and even overlook - the possibly more powerful and necessary applications of their capacities.) A response for artists to their economic marginalization - and increasingly so to their epistemological marginalization - can be trying on different terms for our practice. ‘Systems thinker,’ ‘ecological strategist,’ ‘narrative designer,’ ‘embodied cognitive practitioner,’ ‘environmental biologist,’ ‘social network facilitator ‘- to try on just a few - are all, in my view, accurate to what artists do in their practice in perfectly rigorous ways.
But there is a risk in re-titling ourselves to more happily blend in to the professional landscape: that is that we actually become the thing we now describe ourselves as. Or as Kurt Vonnegut says, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Clive Cazeaux in Art, Research, Philosophy describes the descent of Western art and science from the Enlightenment and its reactionary sibling, Romanticism: “…as part of the reaction against the neo-classical commitment to rational and mathematical knowledge… The status of artistic imagination is elevated to being the faculty that recognizes similarities between things, in contrast to reason which (it is claimed) separates objects our or perceives differences between them.” (Emphasis is mine.)
This simple perceived distinction between artistic and scientific ways of knowing informs so much of the hyperspecialization and individualization in our world. As a result of centuries of separation, taxonomization, and sub-sub-subcategorization, the modern person moves around in the world in isolation, trained in our thinking to value our specialness, individualism, and separation from nature and one another. Ultimately, this framing fosters competition (we are all sitting in traffic, going the same way, but furious at whoever’s in front of us, slowing us down), and certainly anxiety. But further than that, this separateness we have been cultivating for 500 years in the West is at the very root of the climate crisis, and all the cascading crises that go along with it: resource competition, racism, patriarchy, economic injustice, and civil governance. The planet is telling us, in clear terms, you can take Nature apart to name its pieces, but you can’t understand it - or yourselves - without unifying practices of thought. I believe we are only at the very beginning of a large scale process of once again emphasizing synthesis, re-connection, similarity, semblance, and unities.
We need artists, then, to be professional systems thinkers, environmental biologists, consultants, and all the rest, but without abandoning being artists. This means resisting specialization, resisting endless categorization, being fearless about disciplinary boundaries, and approaching all forms knowledge on an equal basis. This may mean going in professional camouflage, because the specialists who have set up the institutional ecosystem through which the ‘professional’ world operates require it for access. But it also means artists need a better training in valuing their diverse forms of knowledge, and resisting external pressures to limit our scope to decoration, communication, and entertainment.
I would also resist the implied binary, though, of what it is we perceive artists and scientists to do. While it is true that science has been a force for granular and quantitative thought since the 16th or 17th century, it is not true that it hasn’t also had synthesizing and unifying effects; equally, while Romantic thought may have passed down to us the idea that artists are wholly unifiying and connecting, artistic practice is also capable of naming, separating, identifying, and sequestering aspects of experience. As ever, the binary Cazeaux points out (without endorsing it) makes for a helpful way of thinking. Perhaps the action that artists embody which is of most importance in repositioning themselves in the professional or institutional landscape is this one: finding comfort in complexity and uncertainty, and undermining binary or overly quantified thinking.