the master's tools
...and Audre Lorde will never dismantle the master's house.
Friend,
How are you?
What’s been going on?
In the week I found something I wrote 2 years ago, during the harsh lockdown here in South Africa. I was so worried, and guilty, that I wasn’t doing what I “should’ve” been doing. I don’t know what it was exactly that I thought I should’ve been doing.
I definitely know I was ashamed for not experiencing the same level of struggle and pain that everyone else was going through in the world…
But two years has passed, and I still carry that feeling.
Things are somewhat different, I’m no longer an Honour’s student or a 22-year-old. I’ve got a job, and things should be carrying on I guess, whatever that means, but I still feel like I should be doing something more worthwhile, more useful…
I’ve recommitted to art and making, very fully, after walking away from it when I graduated from art school. It felt frivolous then because I couldn’t make money with it right away.
All my classmates seemed to be getting jobs or studying further. There was this collective sense that this thing we had just spent 4 years pursuing was not enough; that we had to get more - teacher’s certifications…master’s degrees. No one said, “yay we made it guys, now let’s go be artists!”
Those who did pursue art (the 2 or 3 out of 28) started making more popular kinds of art, and selling it on social media…thousands of followers to their accounts.
I decided to just get a job. It had the least risk. Marketing wasn’t all that hard to get into and it got me a lot of praise and affirmation from my family and friends.
I was in the working industry. I was earning money.
I was finally doing something real with my life, after 4 years of telling people I was studying Fine Art and them looking at me like, “oh you’ll grow up some day…”
This desire in me to prove my usefulness to the world feels like it can only be described as the desire an ignored-child might get, looking at adults and thinking, “I wan’t to be in that world, I want to be heard...”
It felt like I became big somehow. I was working a “grown-up job” in Johannesburg, talking about clients and meetings…and payslips.
I also felt like I was drowning.
It was wildly, and still is, disorienting because everyone else seems to do it right…Everyone gets a job and they may not be having the time of their lives in it; it might not be what they would choose, but they keep at it…
Why couldn’t (can’t) I?
I packed everything up, and came back home. Thought I’d try my hand at art once more. This would be my job now…making money from doing what I love; drawing, writing, painting..just making.
But the answer seems to be, what I love to make, no one wants to buy. At least not in my immediate network.
Wait, what now?
If I couldn’t cut it in the corporate world, then I should start my own business selling art right? I have a product, so why can’t I just brand it, market it and put a price on it, someone should buy it right…everyone is selling, they all have buyers, why not me?
I was trying to break the master’s house…with his own tools. One of my faves, Audre Lorde said,
What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.
My issue with work, and not just corporate and advertising, (I worked as a PA to an individual, and a project assistant at an NPO) is that it takes up the most days in the week, a full 5 out of 7 days.
Ands so I start to chafe against the lack of hours to write, or paint and draw. And that frustration builds up until I can’t help but walk away.
I thought my freedom was in making money with my art. But in my efforts to do that I started to obsess with what kind of art would sell, what mediums were popular and what people want in their spaces…but see, I was trying to use that capitalist model of branding, and marketing that I ran away from in corporate work to sell my art.
I thought I was walking away from corporate work (and capitalism) by turning my labour of love into something that would fit that same capitalist mould I had walked away from.
What?
Here’s the lynchpin,
I wanted to do something useful in the world.
If I couldn’t be useful at a corporate job, I could make useful art right?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with having good intentions, and wanting to be of service.
That’s the whole point of life, at least for most of us!
But I’ve been thrown a curveball by a German philosopher, Josef Pieper, and I’d like to gently pass it your way too…
What if useful didn’t always mean hard labour, or a financial plan…or some sort of organisational structure?
Pieper, in Leisure: The Basis of Culture, suggests that the only chance for humans to actually reach some kind of fulfilment or enjoyment is to seriously do things that don’t necessary translate to “usefulness.”
“Not everything is useless,” he asserts, “which cannot be brought under the definition of the useful.” (Pieper 1952:30).
I’ll leave you with Goethe,
I have never bothered to ask in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognised as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result.
Express what YOU FEEL is good my friend,
the rest will take care of itself.
Maybe that’s where life on the margins kind of starts? When we’re not trying to serve any agendas (even good ones) so desperately?
Yours,
Siphumelele
P.S. I never could explain what this collage series was about, it was part of my graduation exhibition. But it’s what was asking to be expressed by me then, and I honoured it.