When Art Movements Turn into Support Groups

Can the ancient Skeptics teach us to have less tedious art conferences?

What is to be gained and what is to be lost by embedding yourself into a particular cell of like-minded arts practitioners who produce work within certain agreed aesthetic, technical or political parameters? And how should one go about not falling into professional complacency?

In 2005, I had the opportunity to receive a grant from an arts program by the Mexican government known as the Beca de jóvenes creadores. As part of the system, grantees were required to attend grantee gatherings where they would present the progress of their proposed projects and would receive feedback from a group of advisors as well as from fellow grantees. The grants were given in very specific categories: painting, sculpture, fiction writing,  photography and so on.  To me, in retrospect, the gatherings were the most meaningful aspect of the grant in the sense that it allowed us to connect with other fellow artists and establish future collaborations and friendships, many of which in my case last to this day. Yet, there were two interesting things I noticed at the gatherings: first,  that several of the grantees were —perhaps predictably— past students from some of the advisors, who had also been jurors for the grants. The other observation was that, also perhaps predictably, a lot of the art created by the young grantees had a strong bent toward the current tenets of that particular discipline. For example, photography in Mexico is heavily influenced by the black and white photojournalist tradition and strategies of artists like Graciela Iturbide, so more often than not you would see works that conformed to those conventions. One could deduct that, in a way, by selecting grantees that aligned with their aesthetics, the advisors were also cementing their own legacies.  “This is how you create clans”, I was told by a fellow grantee.

It is also not an unusual strategy, and this small grant program in Mexico only provides a microcosm to understand how artistic networks get formed everywhere, whether in a small city, a university environment, or amidst artist communities that coalesce around an arts center, a foundation, even an art gallery.

Being in community is not just a social but also a biological need ( as it has been proved  during this pandemic, being alone lonely has actual real health consequences). It is a normal impulse to seek those who share and support our views. But as it has also been proven by the current political moment and the role of social media in it, social reinforcement bubbles lead to greater polarization and the entrenchment of our beliefs, to the point that even when we see them questioned  or proven false, we refuse to accept opposing perspectives.

In the same way in which we have social reinforcement bubbles in politics, we have them as well in other areas, including art making. While these groups can become great support systems amongst artists, they can also become reinforcement mechanisms for certain biases, and the common language developed over the course of time can become hermetic, self-referential, and, in the worse cases, dogmatic.

The categories of these groups are varied and impossible to catalogue in a column. But they can be grouped in various ways, such as groups that are focused on a particular craft or discipline, on the ideas of a particular thinker or movement, or even along political ideas. And truly no discipline can escape this type of provincialism: they can range from artists books to new media art. As specific disciplines solidify and harden into strict “fields”, what follows are organizations, conferences, and publications that become more networking and promotional opportunities for their members and less active platforms to question aspects of the field itself.

I myself have experienced this phenomenon in the world of socially engaged art. While no one can claim that social practice was “invented” any time recently, the mid 2000s saw a great rise in this type of artistic impulse. At times it was called a movement; it made museums uncomfortable; it provoked backlash from traditionalists. And then, as it is often the case of the arch of a natural life, it then resulted in art school departments devoting its efforts in teaching it, it became “gentrified” as famously said once at a conference by artist Rick Lowe, and more and more we saw the practice translated into methodologies, tried-and-true processes and formulas (and I confess to having contributed a few myself). Social practice might have now become the new academic field.

Perhaps to help us get out of this and other similar holes that we have dug for ourselves we can look not at the future, but at the past: somewhere about 2400 years ago in the thought of the Skeptic philosopher Phyrro of Elis, — who, by the way, was a painter himself. Phyrro (who left no writings himself but was recorded by others) had such a radical epistemological position that today we could see him almost as an artist of thought himself. He reportedly declared that things were  “undifferentiated and unstable and indeterminate, for this reason neither our sensations nor our opinions  tell us truths or falsehoods”, and he further concluded that “things are equally indifferentiable and unmeasurable and undecidable since neither our sensations or our opinions  tell us truths or falsehoods.” [1] He would never say “it is so,” but “it seems so,” or “it appears so to me.” His comments would typically start with “perhaps,” or “it may be.”

Phyrro’s state of ataraxia (serene calmness or imperturbability), his thinking, and the close adherence to his method, can be maddening and at times absurd (and in fact his biography often includes episodes where many of his friends save him from life-threatening circumstances as the philosopher, ever skeptical of every event, was not certain on whether to act to save himself). But skepticism about ourselves and our certainties in art and practice can be a healthy critical method to keep our clarity about our place in art debates, the relationship we have with our social context, and the way in which the comfort  we feel and the reward we receive from our supportive community might keep us from pushing ourselves further. If anything, Skepticism is a great method to identify dogma, and questioning all that is considered incontrovertible and accepted in any universe of thought is precisely where we need to start to make progress in our thinking. Not necessarily constant self-doubt, but clear and intelligent questioning of where we are, with the potential of arriving to a new clarity of purpose. And most importantly, making peace with the idea that we might never be entirely comfortable with our doubt.  As physicist Richard Feynman once remarked:

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.  I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

Last but not least, this is not a recipe for a hermit’s life: we must partake and enjoy our friends and community, support them where we can, and celebrate them when appropriate. But not without also debating them at times, and not without keeping a bit of comfortable uncertainty and healthy skepticism. And if your skepticism reveals to you that your practice has become academic, it might then be time to move on and invent a new one.

[1] Harald Thorsrud, Ancient Skepticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. P.19