INTANGIBLE ASSETS///
Like many people I’ve been thinking a lot about making work alone at the moment, which has also meant re-evaluating how I make work more widely.
Two thoughts:
The most important parts of the work I do involve being with others, and not only is it really difficult to do this remotely under lockdown – I also wouldn’t want to. We’ve got to get through this so we can get back to hanging out on cruise ships/licking each other’s faces/whatever we were doing a couple of months ago (I can’t even remember).
I do remember, of course. In between all the travel and work and rent-making, we were dreaming of a better world and doing our own little bit to try and make it happen. Sometimes this involved action, but sometimes it just involved thought and discussion, which can surely happen over Zoom, right?
Image: Draft script to Walk (2017)
The pic above shows the text for a film I made a couple of years ago. I wrote it, but it was based upon shared conversations which happened whilst travelling across London overnight with the straight-up inspirational Inua Ellams and others. There’s a magic that happens when you’re winding through side streets with a group of friends who were strangers a few hours ago, the last tube’s a distant memory, and you have nothing but the sky above and a loose instruction to make it to a waypoint, and then another and another, until dawn. I saw the city I called home in a whole new light because of conversations we had that night.
Being there physically whilst we were travelling together across the city had made it possible for others to trust me, take a risk that the film would turn out okay/be worth being in, and just generally make it easy to take part. I wrote as we travelled, turning the results into a script/poem which was voiced by the ridiculously under-appreciated Saabeah and a few others. The finished film, made that night and based on the above, is here if you’d like to see it.
Second, the current crisis has made me appreciate that lot of my work is done alone anyway. After writing increasingly desperate-sounding funding applications I’ve had time to attempt more creative writing in the past few weeks – don’t worry, I’ll spare you – and it’s been really great to hear about friends doing the same, doubtless with more profound results.
This solo work, much of it thought-based and intangible, can still happen. But access to it isn’t distributed evenly. My own (tiny violin) attempts had to largely wait whilst I spent a month freaking out about how I was going to pay the bills (and a description specifically of the way this problem affects performing artists is available here), but just by virtue of being an artist I’m in a privileged position. Millions of people are going to work in the NHS, care, logistics, the food supply chain and so many other things that are essential right now. When do they get to sit down, take stock of what’s happened, express it to others, or even express it privately?
This right to self-expression, and the related private sphere where we even formulate what we’d like to express, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s an essential ingredient of mental health, and physical health too – fighting diseases of despair that literally cause their sufferers to die early.
It’s also an essential ingredient of a free and fair society, where we make decisions together and ensure everyone has the tools they need to have their say. Once this is all over, there will be a million-and-one things we all agree should happen – an adequate PPE stockpile, and a higher minimum wage, both spring to mind.
But somewhere on that list, our new society must make space for every member to have the time each week to process personal and social issues, to think and formulate ideas. And then to meet, in a pub or cafe or park or wherever you like, with friends. To share ideas, see the world anew, and imagine how it might be changed for the better. To write it down, draw it, or just shout it towards the sky. Like I, privileged artist, got to do that night a few years ago.