Welcome to the latest excerpt from my e-book Near and Far, a collage of interviews about the arts and creativity as a transversal process within interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations.
Illustrations are by Rebecca Stewart.
If you want more information about the interviewees, then check out this post here.
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Building practice
Melissa DeLaney, Australian Network for Art & Technology
Meredith: What would you nominate as the challenges, perhaps, for bringing an artist into an interdisciplinary collaboration?
I mean, I think we've sort of almost touched on a couple already in this conversation, talking about that flow between online and offline work and how people have navigated that. And I think right at the beginning of our conversation as well, when we were talking about how we both have absorbed business practice as part of our creative practice. But a lot of artists don't feel comfortable doing that. And there's a narrative we're fed that artists can't do that which is bullshit. But an amazing amount of people do buy into it. I just remembered a conversation I had with an artist who, in her very underfunded project, had nevertheless managed her budget beautifully and honoured all her payments on time. But she would not, could not accept that she was good at managing money, even though there was empirical proof that she was.
And another conversation I had recently with a woman who’d collaborated with other creatives who drove her mad because they were not particularly well organized. And if we're honest, I've come up against that one as well. There's a narrative that artists cannot organize, which is not true. But some artists are almost scared of it, I think. So, there's some trauma that, I think, sometimes artists bring with them into the room. Do you find that with your cohort or not? Or, and if you don't, do you think there are any challenges for when an artist walks into the room?
Melissa: I'll use the sport metaphor. So, it's like there's a spectrum and there's AFL [professional football] here on the elite end of things, and then you've got kicking the footy with your friends in the backyard on the other end. You've got community sport, you've got the oval on the weekend in the middle, and there's a spectrum. And I see the arts as having a spectrum as well. There’s the elite end of art, whatever that is, whoever decides what that is. And then you've got this spectrum of people coming into it at all different levels of experience.
The double-edged sword currently for ANAT, and we really want to broaden out who we support over the next few years, is that the work that we currently support and have built the legacy on veers towards the elite end of the spectrum, simply by the nature of the kind of work it is. So, we do get artists who are up at that end of the spectrum - they tend to be very highly professional with very well-formed creative and research practice, usually mid to late career. So, they've worked through a lot of that embodied trauma, I think. And the same can be said for our scientists and technologists. So, we've not had a lot of problems. But a lot of people I see who are aspiring and emerging and still trying to work out where they want to be in the world and don't know how to get there, that's where a lot of that trauma sits.
And for me, one of the biggest challenges - the number one rule for us - is to pay the artists. And so, it's all around money and creating, valuing the work that an artist does as work. Recognising the professionalism of the artist is really important to us as an organization - finding money to pay artists. So that's the most important thing. And we are constantly saying to people in discussions and negotiations, do you have money to pay the artists? If they don't, then we won't work with them. And we're always referring to the National Association of Visual Arts rates as a baseline and anything from there's good. So, building that professionalism of practice is super important.
So, by respecting the artists and creatives you work with, and manifesting that respect through fair pay, good conditions, healthy culture, you are actually helping that artist to not only build a sustainable practice but to stare down a whole social history of disrespecting the arts and undervaluing cultural labour. Pretty neat, yes?
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