It's been a while since we wrote about validation outside the gallery, we went off the boil so to speak. I think we decided that we were not that bothered about been externally validated by art world institutions and then it seemed a bit silly keep going on about it. When we went to visit Francois Massarto we talked a little bit about cultural capitol Francois didn't really like the idea and attempted to persuade us that we should move on from weighted labels such as artist or activist and I suppose just get on with stuff. At the time we were a bit put back as we rely quite heavily on the category "Artists" to do what we do, or at least find people to pay us to do what we do.
When I first stepped away from the kitchen sink and returned from my glorious wilderness years of child raising I did some training at BEAM in Wakefield. The facilitator had been a dustbin man back in the utopian days of the galvanized bin , soon to be replaced in the fresh flush of post-modernity by the wheelie bin. He talked about emptying the bins into the wagon and said that you would hit the bottom twice - what was left in was stuck and no amount of banging would dislodge it. I like this analogy when it comes to remembering things that are significant, the shit that sticks. When I think about the great debate about validation there are two lumps lodged in my memory. The first is the idea that self validation isn't actually validation and the second is that the idea of what is valid is about who has the power to validate.
At the moment many artists sit outside conventional systems of external validation even in Danto's post historical art world the structures are structures of control. I have just tried to re-read Raymond Williams Base and Superstructure, I normally find Williams fairly ok to read but I struggle with this text, I feel like I'm missing something but I also feel like it holds something important for us to think about in the context of feeling validated. I quite like this bit
"So, we have to say that when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process, and not a state [....] We have to revalue ‘superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced, or specifically-dependent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from [the] notion[s] of [either] a fixed economic or [a] technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real, social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations, and, therefore, always in a state of dynamic process"
I think I'm thinking about this all now as myself and Kate seem to be making and doing art at the moment - perhaps we are part of the base, the level of production and in this space of making and doing a different type of sense making emerges and within it a type of affirmation which is a type of validation. Perhaps that's the key to how artists validate themselves beyond the gallery, they are in a state of becoming, an actuation, perhaps the only possible validation is personal the creation of self, the base and William's dynamic process of interchange with the superstructure that validates, rather than the Midas touch of curator, collector or critic.
The analogy of bins and what sticks suggests that what needs validating in artists practice outside galleries includes the detrius. Self validation is part of this - if your practice feels nigh on invisible and is within an area of practcie that is marginalised, then you may have to do more than an average amount of validation yourself, in order to keep going - that's human, we need self-worth; but I think the validation debate is also about the people who take part in your work - participants, contributors, co-creators, however they see themselves and however you see them. So that the separate bits of validating that are going on - in your heart and head,in your practice, through commissions, through contributors, can be seen, understood and joined up.
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