'Lately I have been thinking about how my work as an artist could have value outside of the market and the discursive traveling circus in which information and opinion are reified as meaning. In a secular world it feels like art – both the objects (works) and the process (labour) would be massively useless, or worthless, if we stripped away all the commerce and concept. The extraordinary exchange in which ideas become money is quite magical really, like water into wine - and there are plenty of artists who devote their whole study to this alchemy. But me, I’m sceptical of enlightened attitudes to magic, since I feel like we’re a faithful species, always believing in something or other - and like Mulder & Scully, I want to believe.
At art school you’re supposed to develop a practice. I know this because I teach there sometimes. Everyone tries to understand what their practice could be, even though for many people the whole notion of an art-school-standard ‘art practice’ seems like something you have to invent out of thin air. But Wiktionary defines practice like this: “the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it.” I tell my students: whatever you can’t stop doing? That’s your practice.
Wiktionary also suggests that practice could be “the customary, habitual, or expected procedure or way of doing of something.” In other words: a ritual. And then there is the religious associations of a practice, of course: and maybe it’s true to say that contemporary art is a kind of religion, with its own icons, scripture, and epistemology.But since thinking about contemporary art only twists me up in knots, I’d rather focus on the practice, on the habits, on the actual applications: the rituals themselves. Ritual is also a word used to describe the mechanisms people use to calm down or feel more in control; tapping, counting, stimming, washing your hands. When people try to quit their addictions, often they say it’s the rituals around substance use that they find hardest to let go. Rituals are the application of a certain kind of desire: a way of praying through doing.
But since thinking about contemporary art only twists me up in knots, I’d rather focus on the practice, on the habits, on the actual applications: the rituals themselves. Ritual is also a word used to describe the mechanisms people use to calm down or feel more in control; tapping, counting, stimming, washing your hands.'
Epic Text by Jesse Darling - in my opinion