Comment on 'Amateurism'

I think that the shifting fashion for the amateur aesthetic in American art is perhaps symptomatic and cyclical. To start with my formulation of the difference between American and European social/relational art is that American social practice, to me, always seemed rooted in a DIY punk/hardcore aesthetic. A part of Nato Thompson’s mythology has always been that he started as a Bay area punk/political activist, and following from the argument that I always use in respect to myself its simply that everything I learnt about self-organization was learnt from the years with BSR. (Or in other words, the punks all had to grow up and get jobs and art was the place where their specific skill set became valuable)

It’s a natural progression from making cd’s, posters, zines, organizing shows to social practice and the art world. In a similar vein are the Chicago collective Temporary Services who were one of the earliest practitioners of a socially engaged art practice in the States who were all West Coast punks in the 80's and early 90's. Then there is the director of the first Social Practice MFA in the US, Ted Purves, whose book ‘What We Want Is Free’ (with its title taken from a hardcore punk song) seems to contextualize the social practices within a DIY, grassroots aesthetic.  I think you can track a seminal moment in the history of social practice in the US with the ascendancy of the career of Nato Thompson, and he acknowledged it himself when he moved from MASSMoca to Creative Time, that it was a shift of the cultural capital accrued over two decades of DIY production, to the hegemonic capital of New York to be co-opted, hollowed out and commodified with big budgets. 

In an interview, he doesn’t like to talk about his own politics much, but he acknowledges that there is an anarchic, D.I.Y. aesthetic to most of the artists that he shows, one that dovetails with the all-hands-on-deck ethos of big-box movie production.

As you say, there is no place for the amateur or DIY in the specific conditions of capitalism where the entrepreneur rather than the engineer or scientist is the locus of innovation. I guess we need to go back to the earliest theorization of a ‘bricoleur’ aesthetic it is a direct response to conditions of scarcity and is rooted in the engineer rather than the entrepreneur. I like to formulate it as if Schumpteter is the economist who represents the entrepreneur as the engine of innovation in dynamic capitalist economies then I think Schumacher is the economist who could represent the DIY amateur aesthetic with his positioning of ‘appropriate technology’, and grassroots, indigenous knowledge as an equally important economic driver to offset capitalist centralization. In Melbourne it is simply the case that there is not enough money circulating within its micro-art scene so artists respond accordingly, and over time it gets fetishized as an aesthetic in itself.