The Outer Voice Toolkit
There’s no shortage of rulebooks, guides, listicles and blogs on how artists of all disciplines “should” approach their work and their careers. There’s little new in that territory, particularly in the age of social media, where everybody’s an expert on everything all the time.
However, we find ourselves in, as the commercials tell us, unprecedented times. Society is in tumult, the economy is in the toilet and the pandemic has brought the world worry, uncertainty and grief.
Many of our disciplines are in disarray. Theatre, live music and filmmaking are a few that have found themselves trying to find a way to move forward with social arts in socially distant times. Gallery shows have moved online. We’re tapping the brakes again on plans to loosen restrictions on gathering.
How do we move forward as artists? How do we create work and get our work seen when we can’t gather and when the old structures are crumbling and undergoing long overdue dismantling? How do we create change?
Outer Voice exists to listen to and learn from artists. Here’s what we’ve learned from our interviewees, friends and our own experience.
5 tools to move forward into the Brave New Whatever-the-Hell-is-Next.
Think Across Disciplines
This is the time to build alliances. If we join forces — painters with theatre companies, musicians with photographers, sculptors with filmmakers — we strengthen our budgets, broaden our audiences and deepen our own practices.
Cooperative work across disciplines is the future of art. In the past, artists have relied on curators and casting directors and A&R representatives. Today, industries are in flux, from galleries and museums to studios and funding institutions.
If the traditional structures aren’t there to support us, we need to build our own. Working together across disciplines creates stable foundations for everyone and also broadens our palettes. We also need to look to new sources of funding, and working with artists from outside our disciplines opens new perspectives and new connections.
Let Go of the Lone Artist Idea
I have never met a working artist who achieved any success single handedly. From teachers and muses to critics and audiences, our work relies on other people. We need community. No artist achieves success without other people. The American idea of the rugged individual, the smart lone wolf, has infiltrated the way we think about artists. The mythical loner characteristics we attribute to Jackson Pollack, James Baldwin or Emily Dickinson are just that — myths. Even they needed publishers, friends, gallerists and advocates.
To have community, we have to show up. Be there for other artists. Attend other shows, Facebook or Instagram live broadcasts, Zoom forums, whatever. We have to support one another, because we all know nobody else will.
This is why we must reach out across disciplines and start our own collectives, cooperatives and alliances. Share resources, audiences and ideas. All ships rise together.
You Don’t Have to Try to be Political
First of all, if you’re alive and making something in this moment. It’s political already. Your work doesn’t have to be protest art, issue art or identity art. It just has to express what you need to express. There’s no way it isn’t influenced by this moment in some way.
Second, as songwriter/organizer Eric K. Ward told Outer Voice,
“Artists right now can do lots of things. One is they already know how to do art that helps people understand the moment we are in and where we should be going, and helping us understand what it looks like. It's hard to ask people to go to a future that they can't visualize. That they can't comprehend. That is a really scary thing … And the role of artists is to help us understand what that world looks like what it feels like. It’s to prepare us.”
We all need a lighthouse in this storm. Our spirits need it. If we can contribute something that lights someone’s path, and that does it intelligently, with care and conscience, we’re doing our part.
But, for the love of everything, don’t pretend you’re “not political” as a human being. This is not the moment.
Scrape, Scavenge & Scrounge
Twyla Tharp calls it “scraping,” Jerry Saltz calls it “scavenging.” I call it “scrounging.”
Find new inspiration, new ideas, new content, new raw material everywhere and anywhere. Be more voracious. Be more wide-ranging. Listen music you’ve never listened to before. Pick up weird magazines and arcane old books. Watch documentaries about things you didn’t know existed. Learn the rules to a game nobody plays anymore. Follow the accounts of people who make stuff you didn’t even know people made. Anything. Everything. Devour it.
For instance, I’ve recently delved into vintage National Geographic magazines, translations of 20th century Black poets who wrote in French, the weird series Tokyo Vampire Hotel and the new record from Mali’s Songhoy Blues.
New, different, weird inspiration will come. As Jerry Saltz says, “Originality did not conveniently die just in time for you and your generation to insist it no longer exists. You just have to find it.” It’s not a magic pill. The ideas don’t just jump out of the old book onto the canvas. Typically, they sift down to the bottom where they get overlaid with a couple of other ideas that then jumble together and shake something new loose while you’re in the shower or on the subway.
Don’t appropriate other cultures’ work. But have fun learning, digesting and interpreting. Have fun giving your curiosity some new treats.
Be the Architect & the Engineer
If you’ve ever worked with architects and engineers, you know there’s a pretty deep divide between them. Each tends to roll their eyes at the other.
Architects are the idea people — they have the gorgeous thing and the general idea of how that gorgeous thing can exist in a world with gravity and weather and humans. Engineers have the know-how to bring the vision to reality.
Architects think engineers only know how to say “no,” and engineers think architects have their heads in the clouds (if not somewhere… more snug).
We have to be both. We have to rectify this relationship within ourselves to move our work forward. We have to have the idea and the skill, the vision and the muscle.
This is bigger than just creating the work. This is about getting the work seen and heard. It’s about getting it in front of people.
A friend and Nashville artist recently said to me, “what about people who say, ‘I just want to paint. I don’t want to have to learn to market myself or whatever, too?’” My answer is… “too bad.”
To be an artist in any discipline moving forward, we must be more than only artists. There’s most likely nobody there to champion us, loan us money, keep us from needing side hustles and day jobs. There’s nobody there to be your publicist, gallerist, promoter or agent for free. We have to get comfortable wearing a lot of hats, and we have to learn to teach ourselves. Web analytics, press release writing, grant applications and more. We have to be our own support staff.
How can this become an active toolkit and not just a nice little collection of well-meaning ideas? Try these action steps.
1. Reach out to an artist in a discipline very different from yours. Ask to have a conversation about collaboration.
2. Think about whom you can help. I recently bartered editing services for internet analytics advice from an expert friend.
3. Draft, sketch, rough out a new creative idea, just because it feels right and good. No agenda.
4. Play with this title generator, then use what it creates to investigate a new idea. "Purple Ice Butterfly" led to these color-changing ice cubes. "Smiles Nocturne" led to this poem.
5. Learn about something you need, even if it's boring. SEO optimization for Instagram posts? Yeah. Not a thrill ride, but so useful.
Need help defining your voice or reaching your audience? Give me a shout. I offer consulting and services for all kinds of individual artists and arts organizations.
