The real creativity of an artistic practice usually isn’t on display in a gallery, fair, or museum. It happens in private, often long before supposedly “artistic” work has begun. We’re talking about processes like negotiating rent; getting or quitting part-time jobs; putting in the hours of writing applications or finding supporters; making or breaking budgets.
Duchamp famously reduced his appetites to a bare minimum, often smoking instead of eating, so that he wouldn’t have to go to work. What are the strategies available to us today? Inventing lifestyles that make art-making possible is the most serious challenge facing artists today. That’s why the ways that artists get by and stay creative is the subject of this survey.
In this collaboration between New York-based SCREEN and Beijing-based I: project space, a group of young artists in New York, Berlin and Beijing will respond with images and links to a questionnaire on their living and working conditions. This survey will be published on SCREEN’s website and I: Project Space’s Wechat channel. The season will then culminate in a three-city screening series curated around the theme of stories of survival.
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