The Artistic Imperative for Revolution: Make Your Art Mean Something
Written by Spurge Carter
Photo by Nikki Cardona.
Since the start of the national COVID shutdown, my mother, aunt & grandfather have had a weekly rotation of housing my grandmother. Living with advancing Alzheimer’s, she increasingly needs care that became unfeasible with the risks of COVID exposure for older people. Stuck in my apartment in New York, I felt a strong desire to go spend time with my family in order to help out, and simply because I missed them. My days in my apartment sped by, some of them productive and others spent only being able to exist, unable to motivate myself to do much more. Processing this traumatic year while still living it has made it difficult to properly function. This op-ed, for example, should’ve been written weeks ago but each time I sat down to write, I couldn’t form the thoughts I wanted to express.
Talking to friends and those around me, it seems to be a widely shared experience, in feeling small and insignificant compared to the blatant negativity of this year, I question my existence daily. How important is what I’m doing? What effect is it really having if I’m just a laborer pawn living at the whims of some oligarchs’ Games of Thrones style power struggles? When I think about the lives unnecessarily lost from Trump knowingly downplaying coronavirus, or the officials in Beirut knowingly keeping explosive materials on a ship next to the city, I often become paralyzed trying to physically process facts like these.
After a delay, due to getting sick with COVID, I spent my first days home in June tied to my phone, witnessing. I arrived the same weekend national protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery & Breonna Taylor ignited. Confined to the house with my grandmother and parents, I felt helpless, unable to physically protest. After participating in previous moments of civil unrest, this time felt bigger but, at that point in time, I still didn’t expect much to come from it. Having experienced several societal returns to normalcy after international outcries to murders like Trayvon Martin or Freddie Gray, I was skeptical.
Online engagement surrounding the issue, like the social media blackout effort, felt immediately performative to me. I find the gestures largely symbolic. Nothing actionable is accomplished from motions like this. However, for many people, acts like these feel like enough to justify getting back to life as we knew it. Systemic issues aren’t solved after a post of a black square or an Angela Davis quote, yet I saw a lot of this on my timeline with minimal action otherwise. True allyship for any cause goes beyond simply acknowledging the issue. One must be actionable to be an ally.
Narrowing the focus on to myself & my creative community, I posit a similar thought in regards to allyship: The artist, now more than ever, can’t simply comment on or document their reality. Art is a consequence of life. For many, it’s an avenue of escape or a chance to create spaces that feel removed from society. I find joy in the practice of creating precisely because of this. Time can be twisted, two hours can feel like fifteen minutes. I’m very present with the space I’m in and feel hyper-connected with the people I’m communicating with. The act of creating can feel like an escape from how we normally relate to society. However, art doesn’t exist outside of society. Very influential societal elements, like money & power, are almost always at play within creative industries. Issues like access & inequality are at play as well. While the creative process and creative products themselves may be abstract & intangible, we, as artists, can’t ignore the interconnectedness between the systems we live in and our way of life as creatives.
I don’t think there’s room to say “I just make art” and to feel justified with that being the extent of your involvement in society. There is privilege in creating and stopping at simply acknowledging the realities we live in. It’s the same energy as throwing up a black square on your socials and thinking that’s effective.
This is the modus operandi of many contemporary artists, live the creative lifestyle and make the art, yet there’s very little involvement in our shared reality. Observing creatives in highly gentrified cities like New York, so many of them trounce around from party, to concert, to their apartment rooftops claiming they moved to neighborhoods like Bushwick for inspiration, yet they don’t know the name of their neighbors. Many of us live defined so strongly by our individual artistic pursuits that it clouds us being aware of anything outside of that. It can stop us from being a human before being an artist. As an artist, that’s a disservice to humanity. Artists are a key element needed in shaping our future as a society.
Back in Baltimore, during that first week of June, I was calling and signing petitions with an all-consuming fervor. The whole world seemed to be in accord for a moment. Somewhere in this routine, my on and off girlfriend, Rand, asked me a specific government related question. Rand didn’t grow up primarily in America, and she’ll ask questions about status quo information that I feel many other Americans feel too shy or proud to ask or further investigate. Proving just that, I started to explain my understanding of the answer before realizing I didn’t properly know the correct answer. Taking that realization in, I began to ask myself, “what do I know about government?”
Having never received a civics class during my formative education, my concept of the government is mostly what I’ve absorbed from those around me and what I consume from the news. I have a vivid memory of watching School House Rock in third grade, but I couldn’t tell you how local government is structured or how power is divided between the various levels of governance in this country. I didn’t know how the appeals process worked in our court system or that there was a form of legislative body on the state & local level. These things have influence over all of our lives. Working class Americans are primed to trust these large structures & institutions without being taught how they work. This is similar to how during medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church held access to literacy & asked commoners to trust that what they read from the Bible was the truth. We all can fall into the tendency of comfortably functioning off information we trust without asking further questions, especially if it doesn’t seem to directly effect us in that present moment. From this realization, I identified a way to be productively actionable.
Design by Rebecca Wilkinson
I spent the rest of June researching and creating a 30 page primer on the US government. I hoped to reach those in my network in the same way that I hope this call to action will. I know so many smart, compassionate & creative people who could find this primer information as useful as I have. For myself, I wanted to understand this concept of US government to make it more accessible to empower citizens, like myself, to engage with it in a more efficient & informed manner.
In the midst of my doing research for the primer, I noticed something interesting. The majority of heads of police in cities are appointed, not elected. This led me to look at the position and understand that it is a civilian administrator role. I knew New York had recently changed the selection process for most city officials so the possibility was there for other positions. This led me to create a petition to make the position of the NYPD Commissioner position an electable one.
Police Commissioners have to answer to many different groups: the mayor, the citizens, the police force & police unions but can only be removed by the mayor. To me, that meant at the end of the day they only had to prioritize the agenda of the partisan mayor. What accountability to citizens is there really for this position? Making this position an electable non-partisan one serves the interests of the community as the position will have to answer to the community itself.
It’s a simple ask but also one that is achievable and would bring one more level of accountability to citizens. For me, identifying actionable goals towards change is what’s most important. If we can vote in a commissioner, I think it opens up the possibility for non-cop administrators that can work from the inside to gut out the force and work towards altering the police force all together. I see it as another way to abolition. I don’t believe reforms & bias trainings are effective and casting away the entire force in one fell swoop isn’t the only method to changing our system of consequences and community engagement organizations. Mixing existing strategies like Camden, New Jersey’s restarting or Denver, Colorado’s STAR program with this electable commissioner initiative will result in a different organization all together.
Questioning the commissioner selection process felt obvious to me due to how I approach problem solving and my unique perspective I brought to the information at hand. And to me, this instance illustrates why creatives are needed beyond just making their art. Creative-minded individuals should be educating themselves about the issues and systems we want corrected and applying our unique perspectives towards creating actions that aid the ultimate effort of creating a fairer, more equitable world for everyone.
Every person is different in regard to how they approach applying themselves to action. I don’t think everyone needs to go and start an organization or dedicate every minute of your life to combating social injustices. It can feel like that is what’s being asked of you or that level of dedication is needed when looking at the monstrous size of the issues we’re addressing. I feel that. It can feel like you have to choose between your own personal aspirations and joys, or completely giving yourself towards efforts for collective good. I do think more creatives should strive to be in positions of social influence, like leading activist groups or in governmental positions, especially on the local level. However, if that’s not your calling it’s not healthy to force that. You’ll burn out or potentially convolute the effort and possibly lead others to an incorrect direction.
Design by Andrew Boudreau
I see examples of creatives finding ways to be actionable in the people around me. My friend Nikki Cardona, a photographer & founder of Cuba Analogica just organized a yard sale fundraiser for three organizations, Imaginary Futures, Gaza Emergency Relief Funds and Cuba Analogica. In creating my government primer, I worked with Baltimore-based initiative Design For Black Lives where the organizers aggregated a list of designers willing to do pro-bono work in the name of social justice (thanks Rebecca Wilkinson). Another friend, Sienna Berritto, an event producer for Offline Projects & Cosmic Rhythm, has been making masks, delivering food and is looking to run for city council in the future. Myself and other friends are participating in neighborhood mutual aids, an idea that’s become widespread after the pandemic shutdown. You can find your niche and use your creative skillset in ways that will be mutually invigorating for you.
I don’t expect the career politicians we lean heavily on to have the capacity for the imagination needed for a better future. Politicians’ time should be spent civically engaging. It’s a politician’s job to listen to the people they represent (many have failed at even that). Artists and other creatives spend time learning to manifest the ideas in their head into whatever form of art they practice. It is creatives who have built the muscle for imagination and the ability to problem-solve, turning abstract ideas into reality. That skillset can be used directly in efforts to change our world, not just creating art around it.
While we’re all checking in with our definitions of existential meaning during this moment, make sure to be thinking about adopting or emphasizing the imperative for revolution behind creativity and artistry. We need to shed the capitalist ideals, the fallacy of the “did-it-all-on-my-own” style of thinking that molds so many of our artistic journeys. Art doesn’t supersede life. Art is a consequence of life, and society doesn’t need more good artists who are bad at being decent humans.
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