The Hyper-Local Artist

I’ve stated that I am a hyper-local artist, and I see two aspects of what this means.

First, I am a geographically local artist, a person who does creative work in my suburban neighborhood and attempts to connect the work to the life of the neighborhood. True, I am still in the planning stages of the Facelife door-knocking campaign, which I’ll be starting as soon as it’s under 100 degrees by 5pm, probably next week if we’re lucky. My daughter JPG starts school next Tuesday, which seems as good a time as any for me to start my own autumn adventure.

Because Art refers to a broad, shape-shifting array of activities, artists have perfect freedom to give whatever form they want to their practices. My own values of community living, grassroots engagement, and making affordable artwork all feed into this hyper-local shape I’m giving to my practice. At this point I know what I think is important to leading a worthwhile life and I have a good idea of the kinds of artwork I want to do, but as I proceed with my values guiding me, my oeuvre could look and sound and feel like pretty much anything, and I love the sense of adventure in that.

Next, I’m a local artist on the web. Because of its virtual nature, the web is simultaneously vast and local because all web content is a mere URL (and maybe a password) away. As I do what I do here, my goal is to reach out to my geographical neighbors here in Garland and to my virtual neighbors here on the web. Reaching out to fellow internet-users is a big challenge obviously, because my web content comprises a near-undetectable trace of all the information on the web. But, as anyone who has started a business from scratch will tell you, of course it’s all hard work, and it may all come to nothing, forcing me to seek a living elsewhere. At this early stage of my conquest I am still full of optimism that persistence will win the day for Jim Public, that as I pound the cement pavement outside my front door and the digital pavement beyond my computer monitor, I will nurture this thing and make something that is meaningful to enough people that I will earn the privilege to keep doing it.

There was an article this summer on Glasstire, the Texas-based art site, that discusses the lack of urban density in DFW and the impact of this lack on the art scene. The author suggests that it takes geographical and social density to create the kind of energy that gives spark to a vital art scene, and that Dallas’s art scene isn’t so vital because the city and its inhabitants are too thinly and broadly spread. Reading that article was a signal moment for me. I think it was the tipping point that helped me to gather my ideas about what I want to do as an artist and put those ideas into action, rather than tuck them away in the corner of my mind labeled “crazy” and continue pushing for a more conventional art career of making expensive artwork and wiggling through the social channels to get it seen by the right people so that the wealthy can fee secure in bestowing a purchase on this youngish, strange artist among many young, strange artists.

I believe that by going hyper-local, both in the neighborhood and on the web, I can make artwork that means something to people and that makes me the kind of modest living that will let me keep doing this. And don’t mistake my talk of making a living for a call to support you local artists or whatever. An artist is owed nothing by his community, and you should feel no obligation to support him just because he’s locally-based and engaged in some socially special activity. Art is like anything else: if you like what I do and you want some of it, you can choose to buy some. It is my job, the artist’s job, to make something that people care about, not the public’s job to care about what the artist is up to.

That said, talk to y’all next time!