Artists should foster processes instead of building systems

Evening walks are the best way to stimulate your thinking.

I’ve just returned from one: the evening light through the kitchen window looked irresistible, I could almost taste it. I left seized the moment and ventured out. I’m at home in Wales, and ss usual the light here was perfect. It had a real soft and gentle quality, especially as the the colours transitioned from orange to purple to indigo with the setting sun.

I’ve trodden the path I walked thousands of times – at least once daily since I was twelve. In the village, and along the mountain path, there were a new set of streetlights which must have been installed in the last few years. What was interesting about them was their colour: in contrast to the phosphorate oragne that most streetlights gave off, these new lights were much cooler. Almost lime, or even silver, with a purple or blue tinge.

They gave off the most surreal light just as the sun had set. It gave the path, and the houses in the village a ghostly glow. It was as if the hand of god had touched whatever they lit and told it to stop living. These lights were also much brighter and harsher than the orange lights that used to be there. Somehow these lights were more revealing, whereas the phosphorous lamps concealed in some way.

Maybe I was just used to the old lights, and so was unable to see. Under an orange light when I look at a scene I see only that which I expect to see.

The new light made me open my eyes to the possibilities of the world. You take photographs to learn how to see without a camera.

For once, I was glad not to have a camera, because then I wouldn’t be focussed on seeing. I would be distracted by image making, concerned with making a good composition. I would trade off experience for making good photographs instead. Thse would be a facismiles of what happened. Photo making brings you in contact with the unadulterated Real.

This constrasts with systems building; creating habits and ways of working to generate products efficiently and easily. The process works like this: tweet to test an idea. Tweet a lot to generate a lot of noise. Then, listen and wait. See what works: the void has spoken back you. Once you have some ideas which work, thread them together to put them in one place. This gets you little platform. The turn the threads into blog posts, or e-books, or online courses. Then we write essays to disseminate our ideas, which gets us a platform.

We paint the same things (still lives and landscapes and nudes) in the same mediums, with the same perspectives, to the same standards of beauty. But the idea of a process isn’t to create a product, instead it’s to bring us closer to the real. Art is a side affect, a gesture towards what we experienced. Art aims to point the way towards something else, it’s not an end in itself.

Systems are telalogical: they are designed to create certain outputs conforming to certain strictures about what the output ought to be.

Artists instead create processes. They need to be against optimisation, anti-strategic. They need to try new styles, new subjects, new mediums. It’s the only way to come in contact with something beyond yourself. Transcribe whatever you see as best as you can, but give up control of what comes out.