Uncertainty

I’m not sure that I often write these entries as a direct consequence of the Thursday discussion, but this week has given me a lot of food for thought.

I think it’s because the conversation ranged across a lot of things that I have been thinking about a lot since I started this course: provisionality, experimentation, risk-taking, and openness. But it also, interestingly, touched upon other concerns: privilege, structural inequality, and power.

I was very clear when I pitched for a place on this course that I wanted to really interrogate my practice. As a later-in-life learner, I am probably quite typical in that I bring a lot of existing skills to the learning experience. I have spent many years managing projects, evaluating data, and making weighted decisions. These are things that I have brought to my practice, and they have served me well until now: I can always tell you what I am up to, and I always hand in my work on time.

This doesn’t even mean that I’m no good at extemporising. Twenty years of corporate blag means that I can always make something up and bodge my way through a difficult moment. I can improvise perfectly well when I need to. What I find challenging is the idea of welcoming uncertainty. Of actively making room for it, rather than simply dealing with it when something goes wrong. I suppose there is a difference between being able to respond to uncertainty and deliberately inviting it into what you do. I am not particularly wired for the latter.

And yet, that is what I am trying to do. I wrote in my last entry about throwing away my drawings. I am rewriting my study statement to address a more experimental approach to discovering how images might appear (or emerge). I want to become less concerned with knowing what something is going to be before I start making it.

This stuff interests me. It’s sometimes tantalisingly out of reach, and I wonder why.

I feel like my work could probably be more intuitive, more fun, and less resolved. But then, I don’t know, I find it hard. Really hard. There are things that I can do. They might not get me where I would like to be, but I can do them. I know what they involve, I know how to begin, and I have a reasonable idea of what might happen. There is something quite reassuring about that, even if it is also possibly part of the problem.

And that’s just me.

Then there is always the phantom of privilege that haunts what we do. Experimenting costs money, time (also money), materials (also money), and ideas (maybe money, but I guess they might just be bad ideas). Uncertainty is fine, it might even be an aspiration, but how easy is it to embrace uncertainty when you don’t have the safe harbour of certainty to sail back to?

And then, more than that, what if uncertainty causes you anxiety or simply doesn’t fit with your other commitments? What about structural inequalities? Who has the freedom to experiment, to fail, to waste time, or to make things that don’t work? And who has to be much more careful about how they use the resources available to them? There is a difference between choosing to take risks and having risks imposed upon you. Can we all really just busk it?

Well, no, we probably can’t.

What I have been trying to do is find ways of introducing uncertainty into my practice, but it’s not easy. I talked in a previous post about the idea that you can vary the route but end up with the same (or similar) outcome. You can change the process, introduce chance, abandon the plan, or work in a completely different way, but somehow the finished thing still looks like something you would have made anyway.

I don’t know what you do with that. Am I not being uncertain enough? What does that even look like? Is that just my style? Is the uncertainty actually there, but somehow absorbed into the way I make things?

I am doing what I can afford to do. I am reducing the cost of being uncertain to a point that I can tolerate. I am painting on card. I am telling myself that I can paint over these experiments if they don’t work out. In other words, I am trying to create the conditions in which I can take risks without feeling that I have very much to lose. Which is perhaps a slightly contradictory way of approaching uncertainty, but there we are.

And I still feel uncomfortable.

The art world (and the art school system) seems to obsess over ideas of disruption, discomfort, and uncertainty. These things are often presented as inherently desirable, as though pushing ourselves beyond what we know is necessarily a good thing. But I wonder whether we sometimes take for granted the circumstances that allow people to do this.

Because, as I say, these are all privileged positions. It is much easier to celebrate risk when you can afford failure, to welcome uncertainty when you have some security, and to embrace discomfort when you have the option of returning to comfort.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t experiment, or that discomfort has no place in making art. Quite the opposite, really. I am trying to do these things myself. But perhaps we should be a little more careful about treating them as universal aspirations, without acknowledging that the freedom to pursue them is not equally distributed.

And perhaps that is what I am finding difficult. I want to make work that is less controlled, less predictable, and more open to whatever might happen. But I also want to make that uncertainty manageable. I want to take risks, but I want to know that I can afford them.

I don’t know whether that is a contradiction that needs resolving, or simply one of the conditions under which I make things.