Over the years, I’ve found it’s important to have two streams of work. Let’s call them Practice and Performance.
Practice is the private stuff – The stuff nobody sees. It’s just for me. It’s the core of ‘art’ i.e. a way for me to engage with the world and understand what I think through the act of making stuff. It might be painting, drawing, poetry, sculpture, or music. The Practice is the essential building blocks for the stuff that the world eventually does get to see. I don’t have to compromise in Practice because it’s just for me. There’s no negotiation, no collaboration, most often, there’s no goal. It’s at once heart-wrenching as it is heart-warming. It requires so much energy, but also gives a lot of energy back to me.
Performance is the public stuff. The stuff that requires collaboration, negotiation, compromise. It’s still fun, but it begins with a purpose. It’s not just for me. It’s a problem I’m trying to solve for someone else. There’s a reader (or viewer) now. A publisher. An editor. I’m trying to convey a message. Achieve a goal. It’s a telic pursuit, not an atelic one.
Neither is better or worse as both are critical to growing as an artist and being able to fund the journey along the way. But, in this age of social media, where the algorithms are driving us to post more and more lest we be forgotten, it’s harder and harder to keep the sanctity of the private practice, the stuff that really matters. We are urged to blur the lines: share ‘works in progress’, reveal what’s going on behind the scenes. We’re told that we get the best engagement that way, the bigger follower count, we’re ‘building our audience,’ which, they tell us, will make us more money.
But the privacy that is essential to any practice is the stuff that feeds the artist’s soul. Without that soul food, there is no performance or, even worse, everything becomes performance. when that happens, well, we’ve no longer got a space to answer questions just for us, what we end up with is just constant anxiety about the follower count and no room to grow.