Holding Pattern: Practicing Artists and Arts Administration
By cam bush
There’s a tragicomic irony that seems to govern the lives of arts administrators: it’s almost invariably at the end of a particularly grueling workday that some well-intentioned person will intone about “how cool your job must be, how rewarding it sounds, and how lucky you are to have it!” On good days, at least two-out-of-three of those sentiments manage to feel true—and to be sure there’s a tremendous privilege and responsibility in being entrusted to work in the service of one’s peers. But on bad days, it is all one can do to sublimate waking nightmares of being smothered to death under an errant stack of paperwork.
So, it’s probably in everyone’s best interests if we try to shake off the stubbornly persistent notion that there’s an innate prestige and glamour attached to this kind of work (I’d estimate the ratio of ‘successfully pulled-off projects’ to ‘dinners consumed at the office desk’ to be about1:8, if anyone’s counting). The challenges of arts administration—long hours, papercuts, marginal pay, Excel Spreadsheet-induced macular degeneration—are known to anyone who’s worked in the field, but less discussed are the effects this kind of work can have on the psyche and professional practice of administrators who are also artists. There are three primary ways I’ve seen them manifest in both my personal practice and among those of many of my artist/administrator peers.
1. The Shoemaker’s Children Paradigm
The duties of admin jobs often require wild vacillation between the creative and the banal, wherein an afternoon’s work might encompass bookkeeping, design, promotion, custodial duties, grant writing, member services, bartending, advocacy, fundraising, and whatever else happens to rear its head. This kind of multitasking is by no means unique to arts admin, but it can result in akind of emotional depletion that leaves little in reserve for creative output. The notion persists that working admin ‘in one’s field’ must provide an endless font of inspiration to inform one’s artistic practice, but if the last thing a short-order cook wants to do at the end of a long day is make herself dinner, it doesn’t take a giant leap of imagination to consider what the impact of administering other people’s art might be on an artist/administrator.
2. Sunshine, Lollipops and the Quiet Feeling of Having Become Somehow Existentially Unmoored
When governments abdicate their responsibility for arts funding, organizations often find themselves coerced into an uneasy two-step with the private sector. The influx of corporate money is often attended by the slow creep of corporate values (as often as not synonymous with those of government), which manifests in ways that are both overt and insidious. Squeezed between the competing interests of artists (for whom one works), and the ‘return on investment’ obsessed private/public sphere (who control the purse strings), administrators are often shoehorned into the unenviable position of playing mediator (or worse, power broker). To the former constituency, an administrator becomes the gatekeeper to a system that often works against artists’ best interests; to the latter, a doublespeaking cheerleader perennially engaged in
an esoteric argument for the validity of one’s own existence. To all and sundry, they purvey akind of cheery boosterism that, if internalized, can have an emotionally anaesthetizing effect that almost imperceptibly dulls one’s faculties for critical thinking and emotional intelligence (two things without which an artistic practice becomes profoundly difficult to maintain). So please forgive your (otherwise) friendly neighbourhood arts administrator the occasional bout ofgallows humour: it can be as life affirming as any poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch.
3. Friends and Other Strangers
Counterintuitive though it may sound, working as an administrator in one’s own discipline can result in feelings of isolation from one’s peers. Even where programming committees and peer assessment models are exclusively employed as methods of adjudication and decision-making, there remains a perception that administrators influence (or indeed, ultimately determine) just who, exactly, gets what. In a community of our scale, this kind of constructed and largely fictitious hierarchy can really complicate peer relationships—and not simply because administrators are frequently on the receiving end of misdirected anger (or subject to its more demoralizing flipside, brown-nosing). When perceptions of power disparities exist, it can bechallenging to maintain reciprocal relationships free from the kinds of tensions that arise when one party believes themselves to be subject to the will of another.
So why do artist/administrators do it? Financial need, a desire for flexibility, or a temperamental inability to function in the private sector can certainly be a part of it (there’s also a far greater likelihood you’ll never have to endure tales of a coworker’s golf vacation, a privilege that shouldn’t be underestimated). But it seems that most artist/administrators’ motivations ultimately derive from a genuine desire to positively contribute in some way to their community. However altruistic the impulse, work ultimately remains work; art practice remains art practice; and private life something else entirely. These are distinctions that we’d all be well advised to remember.
cam bush is a (re)emerging artist who has worked in arts administration since graduating with a BFA in 2005. He is currently midway through a yearlong admin contract (in a discipline outsidethe visual arts), at the conclusion of which he is equally likely to be using his latté-making skills as his grant-writing ones.