Artist Running From

It’s July. I’ve been watching Game of Thrones — a documentary series about empirical catastrophe, in 73 parts. It’s been okay. Though the chatter surrounding GoT’s bespoke allegories about societal collapse once helped me understand “What is a Reddit?,” they don’t really hold anymore — this is clearly an artifact from the before times, when spoiling a plotline didn’t carry the same weight as spoiling the idea of a future, or when “feudal” simply felt more novel to say. Climate catastrophe? Why bother with CGI edgelords made of ice when you just lived through 18 months of rapidly converting bandwidth into kWh, while voluntarily opting into “Speaker View” on Zoom? (Every conference call with six participants generates emissions akin to a ten-mile drive in a beater Buick, I read, somewhere on the internet.) My binge-watching is really a technological marriage plot, and the courtship ritual outlines a relationship between myself and whatever part of my reflection I catch in the laptop glass as I carelessly attend to a Fifth Season episode arc that curiously substitutes each use of the term “postcapitalism” with “blood magick.” 

“Are Zoom Video Calls Destroying the Planet?” Uncertain, but the other day, I did see two vanity license plates an hour apart. THX ELON and DSMVLOL. Any carpool is a weapon, if you hold it right (as idioms go). 

Screenshot. <https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/us/pregnant-woman-hov-lane/index.html>. 11 July 2022.

 I mostly keep GoT running in the background of my days as a perverse measure of time, during moments in which I feel more personally and professionally unhinged than ever before — a dragon hatchling spits fire like a broken Bic lighter lifted aloft during a Paula Cole set at Lilith Fair in 1998, which is the mood I summon from prestige television’s take on a made-to-measure crematory pyre, filmed on location in the Mtahleb Valley, Malta. Meanwhile, it’s 2 am, and I’m curled in the fetal position on the futon, tabs open to archives of the New York Times Crossword, strictly Wednesday editions (“Congratulatory gestures,” five letters, type it faster, somehow “ASSES” isn’t working), and a JPG close-up of Armie Hammer, the actor accused of sexual assault with cannibalistic overtones, selling timeshares at an office in the Cayman Islands. He once played both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. “Do something with that later,” I tell myself. 

telekoo54, “Not Today Game of Thrones Arya Stark GOT Night King Targaryen John [sic] Snow T Shirt,” eBay.

The next morning, the laptop is on my pillow, battery life perpetually stalled at six percent, and I’m finally able to quell my anxiety about living in the year 2022 into a half-sleep, except the sound editing is terrible, even with “dynamic theater” adjustment. Every fifth minute or so, all those Valerian-steel swords clashing resemble an FM synth patch in a Detroit techno remix, a soundtrack I will later replay as I read about my new student loan service provider. Click-click-ping-click-click-clash-ka-ching. 

I’ve been doing some organizing lately, as one very small part of the Art Institute of Chicago Workers’ United (AICWU), a union first established last year by AIC/SAIC staff, which many non-tenure-track faculty at the School, including yours truly, hope to join. To succeed in GoT, you need: an army, some dragons, a surplus of white savior complexes, soft patriarchy (permed hair or suede sheaths, yes; primogeniture or sadism in the service of dowries, no), chain-link armor, entirely different showrunners, and sad cello. To succeed at organizing, you need to be open to the idea that reassurance can’t be a priori — that even with shared strategy, intention, and conviction about the necessity of certain structural changes, you cannot know when you will break. By that I mean: you will not be able to intuit how many of capitalism’s saddest torch songs you have woefully internalized, and how unconsciously and how oft-well you have strum them to yourself, until you reach something resembling the limits of your political imagination. Organizing, to me, is the moment when someone else can step in with the shock of history and jolt-remind you that critique is only ever the process of articulating something real, by which I mean, shared. (By which I also mean: it ain’t gotta be this way.) If someone else can see it, phrase it, do it, another way — and you can too — then rest assured, it is already part of our reality.

openAI and Garrett Laroy Johnson, “the faculty of the school of the art institute of chicago celebrating their successful unionization in front of” [sic], 2022.

 In the midst of this collective organizing, I start to wonder whether I’m exactly sure I understand what, precisely, the term “artist-run” articulates. I’m more an expert at artist running from — which is maybe a polite way of talking about political depression, which is neither an oxymoron (impossible contradiction) nor synonymia (the repetition of synonyms for overemphasis), though strangely enough, it feels like both. The gnarliest and most structurally bound lacquers are often the most addictive to peel, I want to say, but that is a manicurial lie; still, the contradictions that uphold systems — political-economic and rhetorical ones, alike — do come bound by particular rules that govern their recognition. How many drinks will it take before you pick and dismember all every finger’s worth of gel polish in front of an audience of strangers? How long can your internal conflicts continue to catalyze into what the clinicians might call tremendously too much goddamn feeling, Merriam’s definition of numbness, if I’ve ever heard one, Webster, while you continue to keep things quiet, My best, talk soon, 37 Email Sign-Offs that Will Up Your Parasympathetic Nervous System like the Steel Bitch You Are? — I’ll wait, as one does, while the paint dries.

Here is a brief list of what this artist is running from: tenuously binding one’s humanity to the outcomes of Supreme Court jurisprudence; anything that fires, by which I mean, canonically: managers and guns; the binding relationship between neoliberalism and the fast-casual-restaurant-to-cell-phone-repair-franchise downward cycle of gentrification’s predictable displacements; the conversation next to me between a FedEx store supervisor and her interviewee about employee picture day; my own best impulses; stasis in the form of “commitments,” broadly construed; using the phrase “I administrated” in a sentence; “Perfect! Thank you so much!”; hitting refresh on Zillow instead of other, more psychically robust systems of divination; elder millennial adjunct precarity; any pants whose fastening requires metallic clicking sounds (snaps, buttons, zippers); members of the Republican party who drink Dr. Pepper on camera during televised hearings aired on basic cable, not that I have it; calling anything but a defunct suburban ska band a “Meritocracy”; the world we live in, which I continue to misconstrue as different from the one, any one, in which I might exert meaningful and transformative changes, then whimper, and jazz hands; the caption “A Distinguished Business Address” on the American Bank Building in downtown Portland; making definitive choices about parenthood; un-starring (and thus acknowledging) emails I starred during the months of April 2021 to May 2022, i.e., the darkest ages; my cat’s mortality; my parents’ mortalities; a high-functioning skin-care routine that might include confrontation with my own more self-deterministic contradictions; sometimes, the truth, or even the idea of it.

“Hand-writing the word ‘meritocracy’ on a blackboard,” royalty-free image from user thinglass.

I first learned the word “affect” in 2005, probably from Lauren Berlant, whose mentorship sent me to therapy for the first time, during a year at the University of Chicago that birthed my then-nascent class consciousness in all the worst and most outwardly symptomatic ways: unwieldy new vocabularies accompanied by toxically spiteful jealousies, disproportionally extreme self-consciousness, and a commitment to freelance emotional eating. I say this because when I think of political depression, I first think of Feel Tank Chicago, and the incredible John Kerry-era work on our collective anesthetic shruggery, from Mary Patten, Lauren Berlant, Debbie Gould, Rebecca Zorach, and others. The reality is that I almost immediately follow this thought up with the experience of not feeling seen by one of our foremost theorists in cutting through the proto-capitalist-detritus, and what it felt like to be jolted out of my orbit by this misrecognition — and how deeply I internalized it. In GoT, even mid-way through the series, it’s still pretty confusing, outside of costumes, who continues to worship the old gods, and who is busy ushering in the new.

“A PhD in English isn’t just writing virtuosic essays — it’s a hard life. Go be an artist.”

There’s a part somewhere in those 73 episodes where Doreah (a member of an indigenous tribe of nomadic plains-dwelling warriors, whom the show terms “a handmaiden”) tells Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons, an origin story: once there were two moons in the sky, until one of them moved too close to the sun, and it cracked open, birthing thousands of dragons and spilling them down to the world below. Go be an artist. Sometimes I still stare at the second moon and try to make sense of it. Like, what the actual fuck?

The moon’s two faces.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/LRO/Arizona State University.

I mention this because there has been and will be many moons and much running to come — together, and alone. 

The term “artist-run” really speaks to a different kind of movement. I worry sometimes that it can inadvertently be reduced to a management style, overly focused on circumventing structures of ownership and production, in the pursuit of something — anything — outside of the pain of the labor we know. But at its strongest, artist-run rather specifically inverts much of that narrative: it’s about artists running toward, and though we’ll easily spend our lives long trying to untether who writes the checks and to whom, from who we are and what we value, certain material conceits remain. Follow the money, they say. Run the jewels. Profit, comfort, surplus: easy misdirections, yet we are running toward something, just the same — whether the collapse we earlier intuited is over our shoulders, or yet to come, and despite or in spite of whether we recognize ourselves reflected in the IPS-type LCD displays we use to mute and tare our realities into something that looks different from consumption, straight up anti-glare-filter stans we all are. Sometimes, too, we might just be running in place — such are the perfunctory fictions and paralysis we hold close to our hearts. Running toward something sounds hopeful, though, and that’s not a word I sow lightly. It sounds possible, but unlikely, like being born rich, likely why it continues to compel us, and Reader: I did, and it does. It may very well also sound exhausting, but only in the way anything requiring the reassurance of one another always does.

In lieu of a listicle, I’ll just say that in the weeks and posts ahead I’m looking forward to gathering some instances of artists running toward a shared reality: in the archives, through the production of materials and experiences and pop-up community meals, toward the sacred communities of ritual and practice, and even in farewells — because how we exit the institutions in which we take shelter and care and grieve and fight for one another has much to convey about the terms and conditions we bring with us to whatever it is that is waiting for us, arms akimbo on the other side, one or two or 73 episodes into whatever informs our world to come.  

Kristi McGuire is MDW Atlas’ Editor-at-Large.