I've been thinking a lot lately about the relevance of art, and by natural extrapolation, the relevance of art-makers. In my education as a kid, art was always on the fringes. An integral part of elementary learning then becomes a choice of electives in middle and high school, often pitting music against art against (if you're lucky) theatre. I never took a theatre class until college, because my high school didn't offer one, and yet I've always know I wanted to work in theatre, because I grew up in an art-filled house. Art was always relevant in my family, even when it seemed extracurricular to others.
I'm wondering about that lately, as I more and more think that, possibly, art (as a form of expression) is one of the single-most relevant things we have. As a kind of object, things like poems, sculptures, sonatas, performances, leave a trace. They leave behind something of the art-maker as well as something of the experience with the art, and they remain in the world and in our sort of collective consciousness potentially forever. Art in this way functions as a bookmark, I think, kind of an indication of where someone's head was at a particular moment. To me, it's important to cultivate that kind of awareness, that we are all part of something bigger, with relations and responsibilities towards each other, and we all fundamentally spend most of our lives trying to communicate with others.
I suppose I've been thinking about these sorts of things a lot lately because, for the first time in my life, I am free to make art as my full-time job right now. I'm not trying to audition and run a theatre company while also working two jobs just to pay my rent. Although I'm broker than broke, I've been given this gift of time out of the rat race where art is peripheral to one's "real" job. I've been blessed with the gift of a year. It's a beautiful thing really, to be given the gift of 365 days. To me, that's what this year is. A selfishly awesome gift.
I've been allowed to move to a foreign country. I've been granted the extreme privilege of (thus far) not having to work a regular job while I study. I've been welcomed into other foreign countries, to tour their museums, visit their monuments, drink pints with their citizens, and butcher their languages cheerfully. I've been granted the opportunity to make friends here, enlarging by a power of 1000 what my conception of "home" is. I've been invited to make work that people will watch, comment on, critique, respond to etc., and have been given the chance to do the same for them. I've stood in the sacred spot of Celtic kings, shivered in the Globe's wooden O, stared blankly at the weirdness of Trafalgar Square, and lit a candle in Notre Dame Cathedral. And, because I have this luxury of time, I've been allowed to let my brain wander, and figure out how it can use these things to inform my artistic practice, to "make art." This year, I make art. Period. And I still have time.
This year, I am getting my first taste of what life as a working artist is, and I am beyond positive that I never want to let it go. I may not be a "good" artist. My art may not matter. It certainly won't topple a government, change hearts and minds or shift many paradigms. But it is without a shadow of a doubt what I am supposed to do, what I am doing. It is not for a peripheral activity, but rather the thing that I do. And that counts.
