Rupture & Practice - A Manifesto
As we built RuptureXIBIT, we found that our ethos made the space, and holding the ethos built the community, and then the community was the ethos. We are Rupturists.
A spilling a fullness an over fullness a bursting forth a rip a tear a Rupture.
Jonathan said the Covid was an Epoch
A Rupture
And the epoochs are
Unique and rare
That’s maybe what makes them epochs.
And ART responds to
Epochs
By changing the world – by changing the art world – by disregarding it and spitting it out –
Changing the gestalt
Moving the lens
Speaking in tongues
Dada
Futurism
Insanity
And communities happen when aretists are under duress and
Pushing back
And those communities become movements.
And movements disregard the hierarchy of the now
They run right over it
Do what they want
Trust the work
Have something to say
We are in a Rupture.
We get to write the history now. It is year 0. There are no rules. What do you do?
People confuse young with new. New is new. Young is young. Sometimes young is new. Rupture believes the Truly New most often comes from archival knowledge and acrobatic critical thinking, which can hold two polemics concurrently, to see between them to a third event, created by the interaction of the two knowns coming close to each other, creating a vibration from which a third thing arises. That is the New, that which is trembling, generative, created, something from nothing. But not from nothing, because there is always a thread the artist can trace back to the connections which allowed the New to arise. The thread leaps the Gap from hmmm to Ah-Ha. Graham Harmon discusses this at length in the Circus Philosophicus, and this Manifesto is indebted to his concept of objects as intrinsically autonomous.
Rupture sprang to life from the following questions: From where does the work arise? (answered by the artist personally), and what are the conditions which allow this to happen? (answered by the practice, which often requires space, and the details of that space create certain conditions which either aid or hinder the generative process.)
Rupture believes that hierarchy is dead and boring and is antithetical to the arrisal of the New. Rupture believes that commodifying work in anticipation of creating it robs the work of its autonomy and thing-efies it. Rupture believes that work is the detritus of practice and that detritus is sometimes commodifiable, but first, it must be the Work, and some of that work may exist in the New. The Work, all work, including the rare and Truly New, comes from practice. Not as in practice-makes-perfect, which is the realm of skill acquisition, but as in Practice as moment-to-moment life: something sacred, evolving, a scaffolding continuously erected and torn down to its foundations, foundations checked and scaffolding rebuilt, always resisting, challenging and in search of the new, even within its own boundaries.
The boundaries of practice are often polemical.
Polemics can be nano-particles apart in original relation, yet will still create a third thing - the new - but this new thing will only be observable by someone with the depth of curiosity and archival knowledge, or pure attraction between the autonomous, discrete New and the Viewer. It is possible that the experience of the New may be New to the Viewer and not to whichever hierarchical sharp end of art valuation you consider to be imminently qualified to value work. Rupture believes that this moment of impact, regardless of whether it has been experienced previously by others, holds value in and of itself, and holds the actual value of the work.
The ability of the viewer to have a relationship with the work is unrelated to the viewer’s education or social status. Attraction and resonnnance occur outside education. So called ‘social status’ commodifies social “standing” as personal and political capital.
So the New is this third thing, which only arises (first as a type of thought, almost like a memory of a dream, which solidifies as you look away from it) if the conditions and practice can arise, which later becomes realized, is “good.” It means that it exists in the realm of the generative, which may, indeed, belong to the New. This New may also be commodifiable, however, that is, and must be second to the point of the work, and if considered ahead, can be the greatest death sentence the truly New could consider. Generative spaces must find a way to be free of commodification. Commodification is an important aspect of an artist being able to survive and obtain materials, and while these may be some of the conditions which should exist for the new to arise, they are not the primary or sole conditions, and in fact, must be the last conditions, as when placed first, no other conditions can exist, as we have left the realm of the generative and entered the realm of the Art Store, death and captivity.
RuptureXIBIT (+Studio) exists to remove some of the financial risks to enable artists to fill that gap with risk in practice: the ability to fill the space vacated by financial risk with the risk of showing that which may be or lead to the New. The space created by the gift of a lighter financial burden when showing should not be ignored, or taken as breathing room, there is no breathing room.
There is no time. Fill that space with practice, not with what you hope people like enough to buy. Your show is not a shop. Your show is your opportunity to understand your work in a wider context, to allow your wonky teenager to stride out of the house, shockingly self-possessed, or fail completely. Your show is an opportunity to observe your work in the wild, to understand not if it is liked or disliked, but if it is functioning. There is only one way to know if your work is functioning. The work must be seen.
Artists must show: the work must be seen, and discussed outside of the conditions in which it arose to understand if it has autonomy or is dependant on the artist: is it, indeed, Work, or is it something that will lead to work: in other words, is it the detritus of practice, complete and discrete, or is it labor made visible: the accumulation of the parts of practice which lead eventually to Work which can speak on their own, or is it what you know someone will buy, or is it something else?
What are you trying to say? What are you trying to make? Why are you trying to make it? How do you value yourself, and your work? Why do you make work? These are the questions we need to trip over, but if they are never present in your practice because it’s expensive to show, so you show what you know will sell, you murder your practice to survive to create more of the Same, while the New languishes, unimportant. This is a practice of commodity making and precludes the existence of the New. This is a wheel of suffering, and an act of violence against your practice.
Artists believe a fallacy about their work: first, you show in a coffee shop, and then, you pay to play: you enter group show open calls, and if you are “good” enough, you’ll get into a small show, and later bigger ones, along the way you’ll get judged, and maybe even win money. If your work sells in the show, the work was good enough to sell. This is a misunderstanding of worth, art, the artist's brief, of value, and commodity.
The myth further continues, that you’ll get picked up by a small gallery and then continually trade up; every time your work sells for more, you set a new benchmark of worth, but not of respect for your practice, as your practice is led by “the market” whichever market it is that you have access to, and you are selling your understanding to feed a piece-producing machine, and not to feed the engine of the New. You do this in the hope that one day you can catapult across the invisible but very real chasm from whatever this is into the “real art world” where you will have funds, access to space, and can finally make Work.
From this place, the thought goes, you will know you are successful, that your work is good, that it has value, and therefore so do you, as an artist. And maybe, in the worst-case scenarios, you also hope that this will finally prove that you have worth as a person. Nothing in these thoughts is related to the generation of the New; it is all related to necessary obsessions with survival and, acceptance, validation.
This myth is written backward from the point of view of a viewer seeing people who have been able to support themselves as “successful” artists, forgetting that many artists whose work is valued in the present, collected in museums and visited by thousands of people every day may not have merited the artist any recognition or financial gain at all during their lifetime - they may never have known that their work held monetary value, and yet, it persists, it survives, either because it has been validated by a chain of experts or because it resonates across humanity in a way that forces us to consider why we develop feelings around Work, in relation to having experienced Work, and seek out Work to come into contact with. Conversely, there have always been popular artists of their day whose work sold very well, but which has not withstood the test of time - continuing to vibrate and activate as people experience it - as having intrinsic value.
Rupture believes that artists should make money selling their work. I hope everyone makes piles of cash; that would be great. Money makes it easier to find the space to make work and can solve a host of common problems (while creating others). Capital itself does not generate the New; it does not guarantee longevity, safety, or happiness. Acquisition of money must be a by-product of the practice, not its aim in order for the practice to even exist, and have a chance of spinning the New out of Nothing. More importantly, Rupture believes that items that are created for the purpose of sale are not Works that are for sale, but Commodities that may contain artful qualities. They, therefore, undermine your practice, destabilizing it and pushing the Truly New further away.
Why does this matter? Because if we like what is familiar to us, and we only engage with what we like, we are only engaging with work based on if we like it or not, and we miss the experience of having a relationship of curiosity and dialogue with a work that stops us in our tracks. NOT because we like it. Because it stopped us.
We cannot be stopped in our tracks, on social media, we can be piqued, and made intrigued or turned off, but when we share our work on digital (social) platforms, (this is not a physicalist essay, we believe in Digital work, we also believe the same applies: if it is made to sell, it is a Commodity. If it is made from practice with the engine of discovery and polemical risk at its foundation, it is in the vein of work) which measures social capital in “likes,” and artists value their work based on that commodity, and produce more work that has been “liked” (remember we like that which is familiar (attr. Phil Allen in tutorial with Kate) in hope that it may sell, believing they will be seen as “successful enough” to jump the gap into the magical land of galleries that create safety for artists by signing them to contracts and selling their work to collectors. The desperation to feel safe is so powerful that most artists do not know that the brief is not to “be artistic and create objects which can be sold, some of which may be opaquely “important” and sticky in the timeline of art, but entirely foreign to all of these ideas.
A collaboration between an artist and a gallery or curator can be a powerful engine in a practice beyond the financial possibilities it lends to the artist, and, more importantly, to the generation of the New in that practice. It is this partnership we should seek, the access to playgrounds we can reach when we collaborate with someone who respects our practice and is in dialogue with our work.
Artists also know that to create an opportunity to find that meaningful relationship with a gallery or curator, they must be visible. Artists must show their work. But Rupture believes that the cost of exposure is overwhelming to the artist, and there is no guarantee that the opportunities you pay for bring the relationships you are seeking to you. And so, the pressure that is put on the work is unsustainable and makes the work a product of Labor and not of Practice. In these conditions, the work, in every show you pay to put on, must bear the weight of the responsibility of the artist’s survival rather than existing for its purpose: to be Work, the production of the artist’s practice, an autonomous, discrete object ejected from the relentless practicing of your Practice. The work’s aesthetics are immaterial to this discussion.
For artists, it is daunting to think that every chance to show might be the last time they are asked and that to survive to practice again another day, you must sell at your show, or it wasn’t a success. Here is the first intersection of confusion regarding the “worth” of the work and that of the artist: that your work has value if it sells. This is the same as me valuing you for what I could get selling off your body parts. It is one measure of worth, but surely so short-sighted that we don’t even consider it when we meet another person. Because you can buy a person or their parts does not mean their worth has been calculated accurately. Would it be helpful if it sold? Sure. But that can’t be why it exists, or it is not Work, but a commodity. Why does this matter? Because you can not grow toward the New if you work through the lens of the commodity. You cut your practice at the knees and leave it bleeding on the floor.
Art is completely subjective and has always been accessible to, and the gap-jump market of which we speak is defined and driven by those who can afford to collect. Their act of collecting marks the work’s worth as a commodity and reassures its validity as a Work of Value. The impulse to live with it, have access to it, or grant access to others to it is the thing that should, Rupture believes, begin to create the idea of the work having worth. Its cash valuation is, like its aesthetics, a separate speculation. The intermingling of these two lenses from which we can view the production of work creates the unhappy condition of the muddy familiar Same, and so to find the New, we must insist that there is a way to pry them apart, gain critical distance and ask ourselves, what is the brief? What am I actually trying to do here, and are the choices I’m making in service to the evolution of my practice and thus the possibility of approaching the New, or antithetical to it?
In summary, the fallacy occurs when we believe that our worth as artists is measured (or only measurable) by who sells our work, which is the main driver of who buys our work, which is the main driver of what the work can be valued at in cash, and, most devastatingly, that the worth of the work is equal to what the work can be valued at in cash.
Rupture exists to give artists space in which to value their Practice as the scary, unknown space in which some of the conditions may arise, which allows the artist to understand where their path to the New may arise from.
Rupture believes that the brief of the artist is as follows:
If loving looking at work is equivalent to loving watching someone speak in a language that you don’t understand, but really enjoy watching and hearing someone speak it, and sometimes, you may even think you understand some of what they are saying, making work comes from an acceptance that, as each of us are ultimately alone and unknowable, we speak not in a language of marks which convey the meaning in place of words, but in acceptance that we speak a uniquely alien language, singular to ourselves. Therefore making work is the act of speaking that language with the clarity and confidence that only we can have (as only we know the language) and what is left behind as we speak it becomes the Work that people may enjoy experiencing, even thinking that they may understand some of what the artist was saying.
This openness is essential to the work being autonomous, and, therefore accessible to relationships with others. If work is produced in the hopes that our language is truly decodable, and knowable and that to create “good” work is to create work that someone can look at and, finally, the artist will be “understood” or “seen,” is a different approach to making work, closer to the realm of art therapy, and by its nature remains closed.
The work comes through practice, and practice is life. So your work is already encoded with your life, with you, the work is of and through you, and so imposing the responsibility of being the translator of you and your trauma to passers-by again overburdens the work, closing it, and making it opaque. This work is often self-referential and heavily derivative, as far away from The New as work produced specifically to be purchased. It is a commodity still, an emotional one.
Rupture exists to clarify the treacherously difficult to-locate tear in commercial concepts and expose a path to the New: to get out of the way of your work, to not have to stand in front of your work with your body or your words, not to need to first establish yourself as viable by selling yourself into the limbo of the likable, to allow fear to be a guide, to risk, to present a fighting chance for that rarest of things, the bubble of the new, to rest upon its surface for a moment, just long enough to focus the lens of practice, and dive in again.
Kate Howe
London 2022
RuptureXIBIT (+Studio) is, first, a working art studio and, second, a flexible exhibition space designed to give artists a free place to expand and further define their practice by showing their work and talking about it across disciplines and communities. RuptureXIBIT (+Studio) exists to help artists build practices which are preoccupied with pushing into the New.