The Thing Quarterly, John Baldessari edition. Courtesy of the Thing Quarterly. Photo: Michael O’Neal.

Artists and other creative people who organize their lives around the arts have long dealt with the problem of the lack of money by utilizing the same resourcefulness they apply to making art. They have formed cooperative living and studio arrangements; started their own businesses; become grant-writing virtuosi; begged, stolen, borrowed, and even invented currencies. This situation is nothing new, and yet the conditions of today’s art world have prompted a new existential crisis for artists.

For an aspiring artist, thinking about one’s artistic practice as an entrepreneurial venture to be branded and marketed is becoming the default professional mode. The art market—in which large amounts of capital circulate in the constellation of mega-galleries, swanky art fairs, and high-powered collectors and investors—has grown to an unprecedented degree yet is inaccessible to most artists. There is little public support for governmental (i.e., tax-based) funding for the arts on a mass scale. Individual giving largely happens through websites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo that operate on a transactional basis, in which the projects with the most attractive rewards receive the most funding. While it’s natural for artists to try to figure out how to make a living from their art—which includes turning toward entrepreneurial strategies—it is frustrating that these new professional paradigms are becoming accepted as unquestioned truths, with any alternative deemed unrealistic. The many different kinds of art careers, art worlds, and art lives aren’t being considered, especially as models with which to debate, challenge, and improve the current state of affairs.

As I consider this art-world landscape, I avoid words like precarity or neoliberalism not because they are not useful to describe contemporary conditions, but because their ubiquitous deployment tends to abstract the problem in a way that is not helpful.

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Image: Scott Thorpe (left) and Brett MacFadden at the wrapping party for THE THING Quarterly, Issue 15: MacFadden and Thorpe.

A central tenet to emerge from Conceptual art in the 1960s was the perception of language as an object: a visual form of signification that requires us to negotiate its materiality in order to locate its meaning. In this process of negotiation, language was no different than any other artistic medium. The tactile quality of a page and typographical arrangement of text were recognized to be as active in creating meaning as the words printed on them. If reading was a set of physical gestures that unfolds linearly—left to right, top to bottom, from one page to the next—the interruption or reordering of any of these gestures led to a reconsideration and new consciousness of the act. In other words, language was set in motion, built, excavated, or incanted instead of written, and to read these texts was to experience them spatially.¹ The inheritance we’ve received from these investigations into language as object is an inherent understanding of the performative nature of reading and, concurrently, of a reader’s role as co-conspirator in creating meaning.

As art historian Gwen Allen notes in the introduction to her book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, beginning in the 1960s, art magazines went beyond their documentary purpose to become alternative sites that presented works of art. They placed the materiality of art and the materiality of language into congruous relationships and transformed those relationships into performative experiences. For example, 0 to 9, a mimeographed poetry magazine published by poet and performance artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969, aspired to explore language as a visual, phonetic, and kinetic form and featured contributions from both poets and conceptual artists. The magazine’s issues featured pages densely covered in text or left nearly blank, typesetting that suggested motion across the page, and even, for the cover of Issue 5, a sheet of paper crumpled and then flattened again. Preceding his transition from poet to performer, Acconci made experiments with typography and layout, motivated by what he described as a restlessness with the page that compelled him into a state of action. (“I couldn’t be on the page any more. Language took me out onto the street. I was moving on the page, now I wanted to move on the sidewalk, on the street. I was more thinking of the street as a field of activity rather than the page.”²)

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