A true professional has a domain she has paid for. This is the thought of entrepreneurial artist making products and having credibility, clientage, she is trustworthy. You can go as far as factory manufacturing of art, so big business. Money makes the pro, large sums of money. To play with this idea is the it thing. Money glorifies you, gives you credit, credibility and room to play with, toy around. Paid in full, money used is proof of effort, possibilities, resources, impeccability for some reason or notoriety, marketable quality, sign of investing in one’s career and wanting to be a true pro categorically in business.
These MBA-rules nowadays apply to artists. Any sign of hobbyist is bad for your career, so don’t screw up because it looks bad in a world where looking so good in the most important thing. One question one can ask is how much space this leaves for art to renew itself when to make conflict is essential. Business likeness, of course, does not say anything or much about the contents, quality and what one’s art is all about or what does it take to become an artist and endure. Or maybe it says all and that is enough. What is the work about when you do art? What is art. Surely MBA’s have a manual for how to be an artist, don’t you. This is funny as hell.
Website can be an art installation itself, piece of art. Giving advise how-to gets interesting. I obviously look like I need advising. The-right-way-to-do-art-instructions are everywhere, always there (do not do wrong because you will be a bad artist) and those who like to tell you your art is not art, family for example. What is the correct way for art to reveal itself? When is art at right place?
Do you get it? Do you really get it? Art is validated via wealth and having means which makes art luxury and narrows the odds for art to be everyday thing.
What is disapproved professionalism? I highly recommend a kind of disapproval which goes strongly against the establishment and status quo, against those who repeat old truths, truths of theirs. Something out of the ordinary is scary and fear is instant, out of the cult of professionalism, out of the book of solid truths, something to believe in strongly must be put under scrutiny. I strongly disapprove professionalism which sees through corruption, misconduct, sloppiness, carelessness, ignorance, arrogance, unwillingness to make progress, unwillingness to see oneself as student forever such outrage and lack of humility should be disapproved in larger scale there where power to make professionals is and people who can’t take criticism and learn from it. Pedestals oh pedestals, too much respected and feared, way too much.
Disapproved professionalism is something which has moved away from something known, corrupt and repetitious, away from something which sees itself as perfection that can’t be overshadowed, critiqued, put under microscope and be revealed as it is. Unprofessional is to behave badly against other professionals, without a good reason other than those feelings. To look down on and think you are so much better than is highly normal. You want to feel empowered and demonstrate this power position of yours with violence. Maturing is tough, admitting falsehood, doing wrong and failure is difficult, almost impossible. We all have met these kinds of people. They are the menace and sign of ruin of the power structure and themselves. Such thinking costs you, you narrow-minded fools. So never fall into the trap of arrogance and false pride. There is always someone better and other ways of doing. To find out which one’s are the best is a competition where there almost never are winners. To win is what professional competition is all about unfortunately.
To be proud of one’s work is what we should feel, be unashamed, whatever the work. For artist it is a battle especially when the most often thing to come by is rejection, contempt and hate. Art community should by default understand that artists face a lot of discrimination and negative positioning like the artist was the ultimate loser and threat. All you need is family which does not approve what you do. This can’t be too much emphasised. Be empowered and privileged is something many aren’t entitled to. Quality of work is another thing and what is it is the contents not how much your camera cost you and where you are BASED. Those who have reached position which gives them right to look down on do more harm than good. No wonder they are easily hurt, professional emotions are so vulnerable. Most damage they do is at schools. Which I have wondered why assholes and idiots get to teach.
Something which does different from the approved form of status professional? A connoisseur of practise, of thought, ideas and craft, how much does this have to do with feelings? We must feel satisfaction of doing something well and be rewarded for this. We need collective acceptance to be uplifted, respected and valued. This image and game, play or how should I call it, rivalry, fight for right to be a professional, is of course passionate and exclusionary, shutting out those who do not match credentials of the profession. Which is understandable. Sometimes, especially in art, such game of who can and who can’t get interesting proportions and this has got to do with gender a lot and where you come from.
Is there something such as professional pride? Pride of doing one’s job as well as possible, as well as one is able and knowing what it means to do job at hand well, any job? I have come to learn that such pride is not what it used to be, when work was your signature, pride and measure of worthiness in the eyes of those who enjoy fruits of one’s labor. Are we so spoiled already that work is not who we are in the meaning that it only makes it possible for us to live and express ourselves outside work? Is that what being spoiled is, to have free time to express oneself and feel free? I think it is. How does this effect the way we work and do our work and most importantly appreciate as work? Work must make a decent living, be valued as craft and expertise, worker be valued as someone whose effort is noticed and appreciated. Someone who just has a job is not enough, we want more than that because we are fully what we do for work. Job must be something which can be valued as modern and an achievement, an extension to one’s personality, fulfilling ambition, one being able to show talent, capability, proof of all this existing in this one person.
Fair enough, we are entitled to this luxury, aren’t we. Be appreciated and be paid for what we are worth, what our work is worth, our labor input. What other things follow hopefully are plusses. We are entitled to search for fulfilment via work and be tormented when this does not happen. It is unfortunate when work does not involve exchange of money, it is possibly not considered work but something else, a service. Naming is important, exchange is too, interaction. Is what you feel important in this matter? Money is there in one form or the other, work as money possibly. To work and make can be seen as means of exchange, value is in what was made and done and how the exchange happened. Our values are largely bound to money as is our way of living, making money is valuable as such, having money, looking like you have money. How is that the biggest one value there is and why there does not seem to be enough ever? Money gives value to people and money only? Is how much the most used question and basis for understanding value? Value of work done where does it lie? Important seems to be who does the work: gender has an important role in creating value.
My quest is to understand professionalism and how we understand what it is. For most the pay check is proof enough, the title, education, network and being busy, accomplishing and achieving, making progress such as getting more money and more fancy titles, getting ahead on career path. I have been wondering this issue because there seems to be a huge misunderstanding or collective mind-set, one-way path, what it takes to do one’s job well, what is achieving something, having a path, pursuing goals and why this pursuing goals which self-evidently belongs to choosing careers is important to take up and obey, choosing up one’s career. What is a career, who validates it, is it given or taken?
Interestingly rules for professional in business are tightly tangled with art which makes it curious to be an artist when to create something new constantly and being one’s own boss, at least for me, are at risk of becoming something else. Artist should be a brand, a product to sell her art. Ways of becoming a brand and product is very business culture obedient more and more. That is not good news for art. Something goes missing easily which is personality, uniqueness and following path of one’s own despite what happens, doing what I want to do contradicts the business savvy heavily for a reason. What is expected of you is to obey.
When art is an investment what are the expectations and when art pursues not fulfil expectations but move further what happens? When the interest lies in ways of presentation, what and how expensive one’s equipment is, who do you know and where you live, are based, as it is said nowadays, where are we based exactly, where do we base our priorities? What is lost in this kind of interest in showing off and thinking the tools make the art more than you ever can, professional emerges when one possesses the right kind of kit? Yuk. Freedom of making out of scratch, out of nothing without need to impress by things, places and domains, play a role in making something worthy nowadays. Sure to look nice even presentable is what you are looking for go for it, but to expect that be the professional way is corporal setting and harnessing, waste of something good and turning into mass product, likeable and following instructions for professional outlook to impress as professional. Who is the artist in this picture and why the need for grandiose and expensiveness is so important to make an awe, an effect, spectacle and produce value which is bloated ready to explode? Is it business as usual we should have?
Size of one’s studio, sizes of cameras, how does an artist look like, what is the street credible look for an artist, in which city to dwell, where to show one’s art and what kind of art to make? Large prints, monumental paintings, what is the it thing, if it interests anyone? Maybe the contents will tell the value??
I also ask because to come across people who consider themselves professionals due to positions they have been granted, things they deliver and give back do not often strike as well done, having done one’s homework kind of thing at all, quite on the contrary. Professionalism is one issue where trickle down effect goes wrong, something gets in the way, like lack of will to share and contribute. So where is the professionalism when you have to put yourself on the line, your career and what does it mean to do one’s job so that there is pride, ability there in the right way, not in the way that the work serves only you and interests of yours but something larger and as we do not live alone in the world, our work affects others too pretty profoundly.
I can approach this topic by how I have always been viewed by people, commented and stared at. Pushed into a role of female which is highly narrow and limiting, refusing this is irregular and not wanted, to understand power of feminine attraction is awkward, what power, and which one thing one should understand is how to exploit this situation, to see the whole picture over and over again unchanged can be defeating. To me it has been traumatising no less to figure out how trapped we are by visual pleasure instantly and how women do not have power because our thing is to please and via that get attention and be liked, loved, noticed, approved, hired etc. It is sad as hell. By kissing ass and doing as we are told we do not get power, we do not have power, ever.
To be female in a shallow profit driven world and succeed is to accept how one-sided women should be, are desired to be, not try build more dimensions and possibilities. Assumptions and options which repeat the same stay boring and have nothing to do with progress, intellect, human rights and dignity or my line of work when one tries to change the state of things and one’s life, tries to change the expected. My worth as a maker is in the work I do, not on how I look like and what I have under my clothes. To pay attention to my looks when I work is pure sexism and I do not tolerate it, not from women and not from men. I am many times left out because of my gender and looks play an unwanted bizarre role, sexism functions as limiting and exclusionary like picking the fruit to be eaten. I do not play games which sexism is all about and expects to play along. I do not accept my role as all pleaser which is the part of women and rules of this game are set for women. We all are scaled out through and through how attractive we are which tactics is wrong and hurtful in many ways not only for the people but for progress within society.
Attractiveness is subjective and the easy breezy simple way to see and judge people, why on earth is it so? Stereotypes live on as do behavioural patterns, models of thinking. It is far too easy to think and stick on to the view that women who are attractive are stupid, available, weak, deaf, easily led, want certain things, can be manipulated and to overcome this bias they must work harder, look ugly, learn to say no, work harder than those who do not have the burden of looks and sex, burden of sex is the expectation, assumption and the ready-made image which must be met. Yes a burden because whether ugly or beautiful we are judged by it completely and it is waste of time, human resources, energy, unnecessary bullying and repeating of old thinking patterns which do more harm than good. How to be objective and be sure to get accurate results is obviously very difficult task but it is not impossible. It is not enough to be impressed by work done, we must be impressed by character and habitus, to please and like are more important than what has been accomplished. What comes to doing one’s job well, is it a matter of gender and appearance because cock has more valid info and capability than cunt? We live in a corrupt world where to understand laws of corruption pays off. I must grow myself a cock. What do we do to end corruption is not play with it.
In business and in art where you come from, gender and appearance strikingly have big roles still, looks and gender can tell of intelligence and talent usually lacking which correlation to me is pure fascism. That is the most comment sparking thing about me I appear and I am not what you expect me to be, such issues which concern me as a human being are almost solely about my surface from head to toe. Best thing is of course to say so that I can hear that I am fuckable. Oh yes fuckable of course, how else can someone like me be understood and set to one’s place but naked and legs apart. I am trying to be a professional artist but it fails for many to behave as professionals somehow (is there piss in your heads?) who think they are professionals when it comes to gender roles and how women are treated and perceived within the industry. Someone who looks like I do cannot be talented and her looks must be commented because that is the compliment, right. I don’t find it flattering, I know what I look like and I do not push my appearance to be the most important thing in me.
One more thing: when photographing an exhibition, it is more interesting to photograph the artwork than the artist. When I say I don’t like to be photographed, please don’t insist because I mean what I say and I am showing my work not myself. For me this has a huge difference whether you get it or not. I’m not into posing with my art, it is fucking lame.
Surely you know the lyrics, but what does it mean in real life, come as you are? You are welcome and accepted as you are by those who maybe have invited you or when you just appeared and said hello. Who feel invited in a culture and being complete creations of their own and part of culture? What is the problem and what does it mean to be part of a culture? Is that even a valid question anymore? I think more valid than most. To find the end of the problem often brings the solution. Cultures, people holding culture as their own, tend to resist change when they think they are complete and safe. How can anyone say they have made themselves and their lives, by themselves, and who are those people who are accepted as they are, as they are in any culture? Body and soul, mind and will, knowing oneself is to want something for oneself and be something, be special preferably but not too much. Isn’t it a fantasy and utopia to be accepted and have luxury of finding yourself? Today it seems so that we are to complete ourselves by training (we are guided online through and through) especially our bodies and our mindsets to fit in, what to want, what to be and how. Every part of us tell of us and are parts of us but we mould the image of us by what we see, to match what we have seen and be something more than what we are. So we are influenced all the time and we like to think we are free. We are free to choose, at least in Finland, up to a point. It is still like someone have made decisions for us because the fight one must endure and go through wanting to be you can be terrifying. It is always up to a point you can go astray. When there is that point where you must think it is not enough and correct what you have found or are given, begins going against. Free to be what we want, feel what we want, say what we want, thinking we are masters but underdogs.
Why should anybody accept me as I am, is the question obviously, to be myself is too outrageous and unacceptable, I don’t know why. To me it seems we do not accept ourselves as we are at all or others as they are whatever they are because whatever is not acceptable. That is key to development and progress: constant dissatisfaction, enduring uncertainty, dealing with no’s, disagreements and refusals and abandonment, not belonging and feeling something is missing can be a blessing. Life would be a lot easier if we were one and content. What would we be then? We need understandable and clear packages to feel safe with, people as objects which is one thing to fight against. Easiness to subjugate and think it is the right way. Everything which is off beat, is not known, is suspicious and must be repressed. Accept yourself as you are and do what you want to do is a human right? Many people want to party and bully and think it is acceptable and that represents freedom to them. It is the most difficult thing to do, be you within the norms, as you are in front of other people without hiding anything, at least for a woman and a girl, and when you are not as all males are supposed to be, a stereotypical male, difficulties are very likely to occur. Difficulties like not desirable enough, not manly enough, not straight enough. You must know what you are, you can label yourself, name yourself, stand your ground and accept yourself but what if no one accepts you? To believe in you and present yourself as you are as this creation of yours but you want to be wanted. So we must know what and who we are and how do we learn to know this? Strangely many know what other people are without knowing what they themselves are truly. To present oneself is like acting a part. We can’t be not as we feel but what we are expected to be and what are the rules for presenting yourself. Be funny even though you are not funny, be fluent even though you are not fluent in presenting yourself by the rules. It is confusing, so the best thing is to abandon the guidebook.
What are you and how do you become what you are? Defined by what you do and who do you know, who knows you, what we know in general and are interested in. How do you define yourself and where does you begin? Is it from desire to be and dreaming? What are the things that come first to your mind when you think about what you are? Is it something someone else has said for you to be and you believe it to be true or can’t shake it off even if you wanted to? Have you found truth of your own about you but can’t say it? Why is it the truth and unsayable? People we are surrounded by, environment, history, country and our biology telling what we are is the truth of some kind, reality I suppose. It is there and we should know it. For other people I am firstly my gender, I am almost completely perceived from that angle, what that gender does for other people. There is always something to gain and women are taken for granted, they provide the pleasure and comfort. It has been difficult for me to comprehend what it is that women are for since they are not nearly enough ever, they are partial but necessary, useful handy. They can’t be granted full rights to existence, full human rights meaning the same as men. That has been how I have been looked at, compared to men I am disabled but I complete the other, the other does not need to complete me. I have learned that this is the primal thought, how useful it is as a strategy and idea to live: resentful, and this other human called man to me is useful when he protects me and bonds with me, wants me, I suppose. Don’t you want to be wanted?
To feel what I am is what I refuse because irrational is the most successful way to go wrong and rules for women are irrational and without factual base. It is clear women are the unknown. There is also the song where a woman says you make me feel like a natural woman. What is that and how natural are we, hippies, trolls, fairies, natural woman, natural man, natural human in natural habitat doing natural things? Natural is something good but we refuse it because it leaves very little room for our contemporary desires and ambitions. Natural is dirty and manipulated is something more, it adds tons on you, artificial and something more to feel connected with and be personalised. Contemporary desires: we can be whatever we want to be and we feel let down when we aren’t having what we want, but we have the right to pursue what we want, I guess. It is a disturbing though to be able to pursue whatever.
To be true to one’s vision of oneself is to be ready to confront all other opinions and definitions about you, and there will be plenty. In crossfire how strong and capable will you be being yourself doing what you think is what you must be doing, being your own woman or man, gender and sex of your own, your creation after you were created by other people and a bundle of other factors like bias, traditions, expectations, sexism, chance, randomness and culture. How our own are we? When we have right to opinions and have a discussion we can find it out, freedom of ours is in the expression. It is about difference not necessarily belonging, if it is never belonging but being an alien because society and other people push us to be something and we want something else. We are pushed and pushed, dragged. To what we must settle and what is it that must not be accepted? To have liberty to be yourself is a curious case of freedom and limitations. What are limitations to desire? To me limitations have been set by other people, legislation and daring. If scared of consequences limitations are pretty strict and often rightfully so. I cannot wear that, I can’t go there, do what I wish for work, I can’t swear, I can’t disagree and question, there is a huge pressure by men and women for men and women, it is still minor issues of proper and major if it is about what is regulated. When I disregard rules for women I become despised very quickly. Lines for odd and the unknown are painted with warning signs. Word goes out, people didn’t like what I said because it contradicted their views, I spoke inappropriately ( uh I hurt your feelings, well I guess that was partly my meaning because you hurt my feelings) what nerve. How are your feelings more precious than mine and how is your life more important than mine? Let me know.
Majakollektiivi Timanttimetsä 