For this issue of FYI, we decided to bring a group of artists into the offices here at NYFA to discuss the issue’s theme of "Generational Dialogues." It immediately became clear that the roundtable participants were uncomfortable with the use of words such as "established" and "emerging," and "older" and "younger," to talk about different generations of artists. As writer John Yau pointed out, the notions of "established" and "emerging" may only be useful as a kind of curatorial language, and a carefully qualified one at that. In the end, the roundtable decided that "established" and "emerging" are always relative terms, and that perhaps it’s better to think about the making of artworks and cultural objects less as a product of fixed categories and more as a long-term process. Of course, this doesn’t mean art is created in a social and political vacuum. The conversation kept returning to the question of the artist’s changing relationships to the institutions and communities that provide varying degrees of resources and support for her or his cultural work.

The roundtable was held on April 21, 2000. It was moderated by Alan Gilbert, Senior Editor of FYI. Amy Hufnagel, Senior Program Officer heading up the Education Programs at NYFA, sat in on part of the roundtable. The artists invited to attend included Lawrence Brose, Tim Griffin, Martha Rosler, Gwen Smith, and John Yau. What follows is an edited transcription of the conversation.

Lawrence Brose is an experimental film artist who has created over thirty works since 1980. His films have been shown extensively at international film festivals, museums, and art galleries in the United States, Europe, and South America. His film series FILM for MUSIC for FILM—a collaborative project with contemporary composers (most notably John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Conlon Nancarrow, and Frederic Rzewski)—has been presented with live musical accompaniment at several international music festivals. His most recent film, De Profundis, has screened internationally to critical acclaim. He currently serves as Executive Director and Curator at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art—CEPA Gallery—in Buffalo, NY, where he resides.

Tim Griffin is art editor for Time Out New York, and was a founding editor of ArtByte magazine. His art, literary, and cultural criticism have appeared in art/text, Art in America, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Purple, Spin, and Nylon, and he is an art columnist for Paper magazine. His poetry has appeared in Fence, Explosive, The Hat, and elsewhere. His multimedia plays have been performed in New York, London, and Amsterdam. In the fall of 1999, he co-curated The Production of Production at Apex Art in New York City, and he will curate the exhibition Compression scheduled at Feigen Contemporary in New York City in the winter of 2000. He recently contributed an essay about Julian Laverdiere to the Greater New York show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City. He lives in Manhattan.

Martha Rosler is an artist who works primarily with photography, video, and installation. Her art encompasses a wide range of fields, including documentary, urban studies, women’s studies, performance, and critical theory. A major retrospective of her work has been touring Europe for the past year and will travel to the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the International Center of Photography (both in New York City) in the summer of 2000. A catalog accompanying the exhibition is available entitled Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (MIT Press). She currently teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. She lives in Brooklyn.

Gwen Smith is a photographer. Work from her series Relax was recently included in the Greater New York show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City. Her photographs have also been included in two-person exhibitions at Camera Oscura, in San Casciano, Italy; Limbo in New York; and in the group exhibition Mutois in Naples, Italy. She lives in Brooklyn.

John Yau is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and art critic. His books of poetry and fiction include Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974-1988; and more recently, My Symptoms; Forbidden Entries; and Hawaiian Cowboys (all from Black Sparrow Press). He has published studies of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns entitled, respectively, In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Ecco Press) and The United States of Jasper Johns (Zoland Books). He is also the editor of Fetish, an anthology of erotic writing (Four Walls Eight Windows). His poetry, fiction and art criticism have appeared internationally in numerous magazines. Forthcoming is a selection of essays on art and poetry from the University of Michigan Press. He teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art and lives in Manhattan.

Alan Gilbert: Perhaps we could begin the discussion by talking about the relationships between artists and the artistic communities and cultural institutions with which they are affiliated, and how these relationships might change as one’s life and career progress.

Lawrence Brose: I’m frequently confused by the word community. I never know exactly what it signifies because the term has been used for many different purposes. Arts organizations that fund the arts started using it in an effort to help funding sources talk about art as a kind of social practice and social good. I think in some ways it’s been useful and helpful, but in other ways it deflected the idea of artmaking and art as a practice that has a kind of intrinsic value, which is harder to talk about in a more common language. In trying to add up numbers to prove to governments that there are these facts that are measurable, the term community came into existence within the arts. And then I’m always confused by the question of where I fit in. I work by myself in my studio, and there are very few other filmmakers in Buffalo. Though I realize there are certainly other ways in which to define the notion of community.

Martha Rosler: Actually, I love your answer because it forces me to confront once again that I’ve fallen for the rhetorical tricks of our current cultural moment, and I’ve forgot that the term community was partially a funding category. In preparing for this roundtable, when I began to think about this issue of community, I wasn’t certain how to identify my community. It’s exactly because it doesn’t exist in the ways in which it’s implied when we talk about it. One of the things I always hated about living in Los Angeles was that to see a friend you had to get in a car and drive like crazy, and so it was more difficult to create communities. At the same time, it was a way of not facing the fact that I don’t always find a community in New York City, a place where one sometimes has this fantastic notion—left over from about 1954—that artists still had to meet with their friends. Partly it’s a problem of late- or post-modernity, but part of the problem is that you can’t get there any more. We experience such phenomenal speed-ups in the context of our lives that our relationships with our communities are often completely theoretical and imaginary.

Tim Griffin: I think it would be interesting to take a grassroots approach. Maybe communities is less the word than circles, as far as my own experience goes. I came to New York City specifically to look for a community. I went to Columbia to study writing, and encountered the poet Kenneth Koch. It soon became very clear to me that whatever kind of writing I was going to do would be involved with art. If you went into the Philosophy program, you encountered Arthur Danto, and again it was art. Going out into New York City, I discovered that art and writing were two fairly disparate camps. There was a real disconnect between the two sets of conversations taking place. The challenge became one of bridging these two camps. At the same time, it becomes a practical question of how to negotiate how many nights a week one gives to art openings and poetry readings, when supporting your poetry friends means going to readings, and supporting your artist friends means going to openings. To reconcile them, I began to think of art as a kind of cultural production, which at this point in time for me means going into technology. It’s one place where that dialogue between art and writing begins to occur.

Gwen Smith: I initially think of the support institutions provide artists as financial support. And at this point in time, there haven’t been many institutions that have given me that kind of support. It struck me as an interesting question because you think the institution is supposed to support you, and they do provide a place for people to show their work, which is great, but that doesn’t mean they’re paying your electricity bill or paying your rent. I keep seeing the institutional dollar sign, but it’s not really coming my way.

Lawrence: That’s interesting, because I hadn’t thought of my relationship to this roundtable as someone who comes from CEPA Gallery as an institution that does provide support. One of the things I’ve really been pushing for as Executive Director of CEPA Gallery is to raise as much money as possible, and to give as much technical support as possible, and financial support, to the production of artwork for artists. It used to be: "What we can offer you is opportunity."—

Gwen: Right.

Lawrence: —"Here’s gallery space. We’ll throw a party for you." But it’s been my mission to create resources for individual artists, especially since other funding has gone away for visual artists. Now that technology has changed so much, we also have a really good technology center to offer that kind of support, too.

Alan: Are there distinctions you as Executive Director of CEPA make in your mind between "emerging" and "established" artists when it comes to providing resources?

Lawrence: No, not really. I think there are younger artists who are more familiar with technology, and so that mostly entails just opening the door to provide access to the technology. Other artists are just beginning to realize that there are ways of using technology that can benefit them, and in these instances we’ll offer more technical support.

John Yau: There are two institutions I would mention as far as my own development goes. The first is the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the other is the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I came to New York in the ’70s, and the Poetry Project seemed a place to gravitate toward because I knew other writers were there. I met people by attending writers workshops. It was a way of lurking around a table with other people who were also lurkers who didn’t quite know how to talk with each other. But now my relationship to the institution is that I’m on the Board of Trustees and have to raise money for it. One of the things I find interesting is the way we’re trying to incorporate other points of view we might not necessarily agree with. For the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, it seems to me that the writers were able to define themselves among their own groups. There were workshops for Vietnamese writers who wanted to write plays, etc. I think it also allowed younger Asian American writers who didn’t feel as if they could take a workshop, given the ways in which the discourse about writing existed—if they didn’t necessarily want to write, say, autobiographically, which is how many Asian Americans are expected to write. They could work in their own way among other writers they felt comfortable with. So whenever I’m asked to teach there, I do it, even if it’s only for the cost of subway fare. I feel it’s my responsibility, in some ways. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has also managed to raise money to produce anthologies and publish authors. They have somehow—and I don’t know how they’ve done it—raised a lot of money for publications, and I think that’s great because it enters this object into the discourse. There’s this anthology called Black Lightning where Asian American writers are interviewed about writing. I thought it was important, because of the 25 writers who are in it, none of them agree with each other. There is no hegemonic notion about ethnicity or related matters. I think it’s important for a younger generation to become aware of that.

Amy Hufnagel: One thing that comes up for me is that a lot of people these days are referring to artists as entrepreneurs. I can’t figure out whether it’s positive or negative, because the connotation of an entrepreneur is that they don’t want that institutional or larger organizational structural support, because they’re out there on their own, that they’re forging their own way. Is it that artists are choosing to say that artists are entrepreneurs or are the institutions saying this, which allows them to back off providing support?

Gwen: It depends on your definition of being out there on your own and forging your own way and making basic survival issues concerning paying your rent, or making a print, or framing your painting. In this sense, I guess I might be considered an entrepreneur. But as an artist I’m not a good businessperson, and for me entrepreneur implies some sort of way in which you’re succeeding in becoming financially successful on your own, though this isn’t the main reason I’m an artist.

Martha: It’s hopeless to survive strictly as an artist. The vast majority of us don’t support ourselves on our work.

John: I agree.

Tim: I think there’s an important cultural dynamic this discussion touches on. As far as the word entrepreneur goes, there are a number of artists who have actually gone into the corporate sphere. With the nature of business today and where capital is really being generated, if you look at any number of Internet companies, many of the people who run them—for instance, in Silicon Alley here in New York City—have art backgrounds. They not only work in a designing capacity, but as recently as 1995, they saw the work of generating companies as a kind of conceptual art, which was quickly subsumed by the larger industry because of the kind of commodity that was being created. There’s also an interesting dual scenario where you have conceptual artists like ®™ark adopting a corporate model in order to critique the corporate model.

Martha: At the beginning of this conversation I wrote down the word hyper-commodification, which along with the idea of individualism helps account for the idea of the artist as entrepreneur. Whoever thought we could jump to this hyper-stage so quickly, where everyone agrees that the task of neo-liberalism is to have each of us perform an identity at every moment, that every object perform its identity at every moment, and therefore there’s no distinction among them? Speaking of ®™ark, their Web site is marketing a videotape called Untitled #29.95, which someone sent me because they thought I’d be upset about it. In fact, I’m promoting it. It’s totally great because it’s a critique of the hyper-commodification—though this isn’t their word—of video art, and the removal of video art from any public venue. The idea was that video, of all the media, would be a communicative medium, and it’s since become a major art object. In a way, it’s the ultimate symbolic commodity, something like a poem, in the sense that it’s an object with no intrinsic value in the normal scheme of valuation. It exists to communicate something beyond the normal ways in which one communicates, yet it’s in a language that’s accessible to everybody, because it’s the vernacular of our time. But then someone buys it in an edition of one, or an edition of three, and they put it away because they own it. So when I talked about this with my students—and these are graduate students—they had no tools for thinking about this. They said things like, "Well, patrons have done this forever. They’ll pay any amount to get their name on something." I said, "But they don’t take a manuscript and lock it in a drawer. Publishers publish it." At that moment, I felt like retiring. Quite seriously. I thought, my work is done. I can no longer speak across generations. Then I decided that, no, this wasn’t true, that, in fact, the students were at the edge of their seats, because the whole discourse concerning what art is about and what it’s for had already passed out of their purview, and they were actually very energized to think again that there might be a community of meaning in which they aren’t simply entrepreneurs who think, why shouldn’t I make $100,000, because isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? That’s why the term "community" evoked for me the question of hyper-commodification. That we are pushed to being performers of our individuality. If everything is leveled, either there’s no hope for us, or that’s the moment when a group like ®™ark or the people who made Untitled #29.95 are going to say the whole discourse here is completely skewed, and we’re forgetting that we actually have another purpose. What I’m trying to say is that the demands of the new economy are such that they tend to impose incredibly powerful models, but very few artists actually want to or feel comfortable saying this is a model that describes me. And I think it’s one of the things that the people who made Untitled #29.95 have to do, or I have to do, is to reaffirm once again that I don’t define myself in terms of the meaning imposed by the market. And I also would say the same about those categories of "established," "emerging," "older," "younger." What the hell is that? Do any of us feel comfortable with these categories?

Lawrence: I don’t know when I’m emerging or when I’m . . .

Martha: In what ways is this related to what we do? Where does this language come from? And yet it’s very powerful. Lawrence had an answer right away, because he helps run an institution.

John: It’s a kind of curatorial language to speak of "emerging" and "established." I don’t know. What does "established" mean? Who’s to determine A or B? Why not something other than A or B?

Lawrence: But it would be nice to think that artists are always emerging in terms of their practice. One way I was reading the idea of "older" is that as an artist ages, like everything else in our culture, the work is less valued because it’s being used up, as opposed to the way I’ve always thought about art-making, which is that people improve, they build on something. Hopefully, art is this constant challenging of oneself to continue to think and to continue to refine a more informed body of practice.

Martha: And also you know everyone behind the artist’s back says, "Oh, yeah, their ten good years are up."

Tim: Ouch.

John: Really? I never heard that phrase.

Martha: What? Their ten good years?

John: Yes.

Martha: They whisper it. They don’t write it down.

Gwen: Then you get the questions behind their back. How do they make money? Do they sell?

Lawrence: It’s certainly the common language by which success is measured in our culture. Even i unified field when in fact it hasn’t been a unified field in a long time. There are multiple art worlds and situations, and multiple communities, that intersect, overlap, and also ignore each other. I went to a Poetry Society of America dinner where we were all supposed to be polite and nice, which we were. I felt as if there were groups within this room and individuals that really didn’t want to know anyone else or other people who were in the same room with them. But we managed to be polite, anyway. Then I realized that, of course, no matter where in the poetic community you are there are always a number of communities within that situation that are getting along, but I wouldn’t say they are necessarily supportive of each other. That they’ll eat each other’s food is, I guess, the level of support. Maybe attend a reading; but it’s pretty fractious, I would say, on some level.

Martha: Hasn’t that always been true? The new part is that they’re willing to sit in a room and eat food together. In the past, they wouldn’t even be in the same room.

John: That’s true.

Lawrence: I find it to be similar in the film world, also. I make queer, experimental film, and many of the gay and lesbian film festivals won’t show the work, because it’s too marginal, it’s not entertaining enough. All of these film festivals have changed, and especially the ones serving particular communities, in that now you’re providing them with a product that they are then using to market in order to attract larger audiences so that they can become an institution that is surviving. It’s this very weird cycle. Places that would have shown my films because they believed in this sort of edge of something or other, or challenging the audience with notions of their own sexuality or whatever—now they won’t do it.

Martha: They want a blunt edge.

Alan: I’m glad everyone’s willing to interrogate and problematize some of the basic concepts of this roundtable, such as "emerging" and "established," and the relation of these to "institutions" and "communities." I would like to point out, however, that when I was contacting all of you about the possibility of participating in this roundtable, Gwen was the only one who somewhat identified with one of the categories—in this case, the category of "emerging." Would you like to speak to that?

Gwen: I’ve only had one exhibition in New York City, which is happening right now, and it’s a show about being an emerging artist [the Greater New York exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center].

Tim: The exposure question.

Gwen: Exactly. I’ve been making my work for over ten years. At the same time, I’ve always felt uncomfortable about calling myself an artist. I thought maybe someone else could say I was an artist. But I couldn’t say this when I was asked what it is that I do. It’s still hard for me to say I’m an artist.

John: I’m sorry, but why was this difficult for you?

Gwen: I guess my idea is that society gave you the title artist. You can’t just say you’re an artist. It has to sort of be bestowed on you.

Martha: I agree with that completely. This question is an artifact of the struggles of the ’70s, and the idea of artists’ self-definition; and we struggled mightily over what to call ourselves. The term "cultural workers" is from the ’60s, and came from the notion of solidarity with people who worked, but it was also a way of avoiding the term "artist." And so we used to say, "We make art," or, "We make photographs." Photographer was a more comfortable category than artist. The word had a certain aura about it that you couldn’t call yourself an artist. You had to wait to be designated. I still feel that way, to some degree. There’s a hubris involved in saying, "I am an artist!"

Tim: I also feel as if structurally there’s something of a flip side to the coin of conceptual arguments in the ’70s occurring now as far as calling oneself an artist. Because in the ’70s a variety of artists tried to create something that wasn’t commodifiable, was somehow ephemeral. Now you have artists working on any number of platforms in a way that creates a set of networks that sprawl out and leave the original event obscured or even non-existent. This creates a different status for the commodity. That’s why I’m saying it’s a kind of flip side. In regard to the concept of "emerging," the idea that the artist is everywhere and nowhere is intriguing when, for instance, you have someone such as Eric Zimmerman who produces a video game for his art. I think this is tied in with the rise of design, and the dialogue between art and design. Vito Acconci no longer calls himself an artist. He’s a designer. It’s where you pick a specific platform, and then dismantle it. When this flows out into the larger culture, you come back to the notion of artist as entrepreneur.

Martha: The idea of the artist disappearing is, of course, from Marx, and it has to do with a utopian situation in which everybody has access to all social goods, and therefore they can become a hunter in the morning and a poet in the afternoon and a painter in the evening. So it’s about all members of society having equal access to all possible expressions of self. But it also arises from a time when that hyper-commodification of self and personality did not yet exist. Speaking of the categories of "older" and "younger," "emerging" and "established," I always felt as if I was too young, too young, too young, and then I reached a point where I was too old, too old, too old. That’s my definition of them. Having passed that moment I would say that in a way the world of art as it presents itself now is the revenge of the commodity on the dreams and aspirations of the ’60s. We may be cynical about it, or we may pretend we don’t care, but I think many of us still very much do care. What I felt from my students was that after an initial moment of shock at having suggestions regarding what art is about be re-introduced, they care about it, too. That there is still some disjunction between the model of the entrepreneur who’s just peddling something versus somebody who’s actually doing something—that is, socially meaningful in a way that evades not the categories, but commodity distinctions.

Amy: I’ve always looked for teachers or mentors I could listen to or ask questions. In fact, I consider this relationship crucial to being an artist. I’m curious if any of you have had this response. Is it something you look for? Do you find yourself in the role of teacher or student? John talked a little bit about this when he mentioned how he felt he had to go back to teach at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. It’s not about the money; it’s about giving back as someone who has a set of knowledges, as someone who feels there’s something to be cultivated there.

John: I’m not alone with this because I’ve talked to others about it, but as an Asian American growing up on the East Coast, I didn’t really feel a sense of community. When I became a writer, finding the access to deal with my life—without commodifying it or exploiting it in a way that I felt it had been exploited by other Asian American writers—was really difficult, and something I felt I had no help in. And so at a conference of Asian American writers in Berkeley in the early ’90s, a number of us met for the first time. Hanging around with each other over the course of four days, we talked about the need for anthologies that would show, or demonstrate, our differences, rather than our similarities. And that we had to emphasize these differences as much as possible. Of course, you had major arguments, because people were left out of these anthologies. But, I thought, at least the arguments are taking place. We were finally going to argue with each other, and we felt secure enough finally to argue with each other. Instead of being like, oh, it’s "us" and "them," it’s like, let’s argue about this "us," whatever it is. And show that maybe the "us" isn’t so easy to figure out. I thought that was really great. A similar type of thing occurred when I taught a workshop at the 68th Street YMCA with some Asian American writers in it. And again, I thought, this is really important, because we had to not be afraid to show our variousness, and not retreat into any stereotypes that had been projected on us by mainstream society as a way for us to assimilate. I was against assimilation, in fact. I feel that in different ways this argument is taking place and is ongoing. In my mind the notion of community is a bunch of people sitting around a table talking, in the way that we’re doing today, and disagreeing. I try to do that where I teach.

Alan: In relation to the concepts of "established" and "older" artists, I’m wondering if anyone would like to speak to the difficulties in continuing to make art as one gets older. Is it more difficult to continue?

John: I always tell my students that being a writer is a matter of stamina. It’s not a matter of publication or anything else. It’s simply a matter of writing every day, or writing however often, and asking oneself, do you really want to do this for the rest of your life?

Lawrence: I agree. There’s this idea of longevity.

John: Right. If you’re forty and you’re still doing it, you must mean it.

Lawrence: It becomes integrated into who you are and how you live.