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[...] So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

Virginia Woolf, A room of one´s own

Since the beginning of the year I´ve been wanting to write about this, but I lacked courage, because it’s a subject that never ends. I couldn´t avoid it forever, but I did. Then, now – besides a series of complicated situations that happened to me over this time and made the matter even more urgent – this book fell into my lap again, Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, which I had read a long time ago. And it came back taunting me.

Starting by the occasion: at work. I work for a publishing company and, among other things, I have edited books about accounting, entrepreneurship, management, whatever came my way. I was taking a first look at an original, a word came up, I went searching for it and after an accidental click I stumbled upon this book. An unauthorized PDF[1], for which the translator and the publishing company didn´t receive a cent, but it was really important to me at that time.

The book compiles two lectures she gave about Women and fiction, besides some parts that were written specially for publication. About this subject, as she explains, instead of sticking to more theoretical issues of literature written by women throughout history, she insists on the argument that a woman needs “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.”

In fact, she realizes that the fiction written by women carries the marks of the life they live – she refers mainly to European literature from the 17th century on – that they wrote amidst conversations with aunts, having to sew and embroider and play piano, needing, most of the times, a wealthy father or husband who would support this addiction for literature. That art has dependency written all over it, and that when this conversation becomes important for all of us, the so-called independent artists.

…

In this CV down there, it´s different, but I used to put it like this: “independent artist residing in Curitiba…”. But, along with it some questions always ringed in the back of head: “Independent? From what? Cash? But if I´m alive, it means the money is coming from somewhere, isn´t it?”

Time went by and I found an answer that solved the problem. It was like: independent artist is the one who is not directly attached to any institution. And I would go to meetings and debates and say: independent artist is the one who is not directly attached to any institution. It´s funny nobody ever asked me, but I asked myself: “But doesn´t the money come from some institution, always?”

Seriously, bear with me: out of what do you live nowadays? Out of art? Where does the money to live out of art come from? Mom and dad? Where does mom and dad’s money come from? If you live by doing other jobs, isn´t it in/for/to some institution? If you live out revenue? If you are able to sell your work directly? If you have a maecenas? Ultimately, even if you take food off the garbage, it was sponsored by an institution, wasn´t it?

Actually, it´s not funny nobody ever asked me about this. I think it´s kind of sad, because underneath this unasked question, there is a lot of cowardice. There is a pathological fear of not being artist-martyr. And sometimes there is also fear of looking frankly into one´s own life and acknowledging who actually sponsors it.

Because it´s hard. The daily life must change. It becomes harder to borrow a CNPJ. It´s harder to apply for sponsorship from some company that steals from everybody. It´s harder to accept some cash from mom and dad. It´s harder to teach some classes at a private school with doubtful principles, in a public institution, make some cash doing publicity, working as a waiter, waitress, anything. If you look too deep into it, there is always some dirt involved. Like a salad buffet.

And, I´m sorry, but there´s no solution. That´s what I have to offer, problems without solution, that have left me pessimistic, old, ill-humored. To get an idea, this is how I was going to start this article:

“There are four kinds of artists: poor-idealistic, spoiled heir, successful crook[2] and ex-artist. If one doesn´t fit into any of these categories, time will take care of it.”

Even if I´m aware of how irresponsible this classification is, there´s still something that interests me, which is examining those who produce art from the perspective of money, the origin of the money, which is something real that affects everybody. Which is intertwined with what is produced, how it´s produced and for whom it´s produced. People and shows change depending on who finances and who buys them.

And the bitterness in that statement comes from observing how people settle one way or the other. Be it in heroic illusion or comfortable pragmatism, we end up settling down and stop thinking about it.

…

I started to write this text some time ago. I stopped, I came back, I stopped again. I knew the writing would come out dull, difficult. On the other hand I wanted to see if something would come up in these scribbled lines, something to hold on to, a little window to open.

And I just managed to talk about this again because I´m taking many liberties. I know I´m all over the place, that I´m not developing a specific issue with propriety and coherency. That maybe I´m not collaborating to a more pro-active attitude. I started out wanting to define independent artist, I jumped to the money issue, and so far, I haven´t contributed to anything and I didn´t clear anything up. I´m too involved.

It´s just that, at least for now, I can´t separate “independent artist” from “money”. One can´t be an artist without being a person and no one is a person without being part of a system, a system that is also economic. Hermit, bum, volunteer, monk, baby, everybody is part of an economic system.

In Virginia Woolf’s case, she also runs from the subject. They proposed she talked about women and literature. But how is it possible to talk about women without talking about women and money, in world that was, and still is, so sexist? How is it possible to talk about artists and independency in such a “moneyist” world? Things are pasted together, since they are matters of art, but mainly of life.

And it seems to me, a first step to estimate what this independency would be is to look honestly into the things artists depend on. For example, they depend on money, on institutions, on other people. People to consume their work, paying or not, people to talk to, to observe, people to pay for the continuity of their work. It´s not very different from any other profession.

And what doesn´t he depend on? What is it that sets an independent artist apart from others? I searched on Google and the most common results for “independent artist” are references to musician who are not attached to a record company. I saw, for instance, a headline like this: Janet Jackson drops her label and is now an independent artist. It´s funny because in the contemporary art circles I attend, in which many call themselves independent artist, they would hardly consider themselves to be in the same professional category as Janet Jackson.

I believe the contemporary artists would maybe fit into what Pierre Bourdieu calls “erudite culture” and Janet Jackson would be closer to what he calls “cultural industry”[3]

I´ll briefly explain what I understand of these concepts. He grounds this distinction mainly on the destination of the art produced by each one of those fields. Cultural industry would be destined to the average public – he uses this term. Thus, the tastes and interests of the average public would set the standards for this production. Erudite production is made for specialists, specially critics and artists, it´s produced according to their tastes and interests.

Now it´s nice to make some observations. One: Bourdieu already wrote about this, so it´s good to read the original; don´t settle for my interpretation. Two: he wrote within an understanding of the European market, in which these limits seem to be well defined. Around here, although the existence of both fields can´t be denied, we have many possibilities of intersections, and I consider the intersections to be more important than the limits. I believe the erudite field can benefit from a more realistic market perspective and the industry can benefit from more persistent ethic and aesthetic discussions. Three: for our focus here – which is not the destination of the production, but rather its origin, specially from the economic point of view – these fields are even closer.

Therefore, I can assume that what Janet Jackson has in common with someone who calls himself an independent artist in Brazil is the fact that neither receives a regular payment for doing their art work. This means that many artists, commercial and erudite, fit into this category. I stress “for doing their art work” because that allows the artist to get other jobs and even have some regular income. But there are inevitably many dependencies in the life of the independent artist.

However, in Brazil, the resources to produce erudite and commercial art come, in general, from the same source, the incentive laws for culture. Again, in a direct or indirect way, we all depend on institutions, which are governmental. Gianecchi and Giovanna Antonelli (well known Brazilian actors) get paid through Lei Rouanet when they act in Globo Filmes’ movies.[4]

The independent contemporary artist will seldom be able to raise funds directly through Lei Rouanet, but maybe through a project selected by Caixa, Funarte – that is, through Lei Rouanet – or some other city or state incentive law. Although a long explanation about the flaws and needs of those laws would be appropriate here, I´ll try to keep my focus on the attitude of the artists, in this case, contemporary independent artists, who are my closest friends, people I can and want to talk to.

…

I mean, there is nothing wrong in getting money for doing your job. Much to the contrary. Essentially, money guarantees survival and without that, no work can come out. Virginia Woolf wrote: “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.” She hadn´t read Bourdieu, but in some way, what she states is that it was the commercial production, not the erudite, that guaranteed that the literature written by women stopped being an extravagance to become a profession.

Speking about Aphra Behn (England’s first commercial female writer, who lived in the second half of the 17^th century), she says: “Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing [...] so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance.”

In fact, if we make a comparison with our context, Brazilian art in the 20th and 21st century, we can realize that, for the most part, the artists considered commercial, not the erudite, were the ones who were more active in the process of making art professional.

For example, all those people who participated in writing law 6.533, which regulated the artistic profession in 1978. People like como Vanda Lacerda, Lélia Abramo, Othon Bastos, Paulo Goulart, Nicete Bruno. It´s possible to imagine the pressure of the artist movements for the creation of a mechanism like Lei Rouanet, in 1991, after the failure of Lei Sarney. The visibility of the cultural industry helps to give credibility for the creation of our public cultural policies. And this kind of mobilization emerges with a good amount of idealism, but it really comes from the need to survive.

But they are specific needs, of certain people, in a historical context that is very different from what we live today. Maybe that´s the main reason why these mechanisms are not able to meet the needs of neither fields.

That is where the importance of that independent contemporary artist, who I see trapped in a weird limbo, lies. Not satisfied by the money he gets and, at the same time, he doesn´t have enough courage to admit they need it and to make an effort to create specific survival resources, which meets the needs of the work. And keeps using, almost exclusively, the same mechanisms and resources he criticizes so much.

Virginia Woolf said: “So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.” She is a woman, talking to women about women. She is asking them to become aware of their role in the world, and what happens in the artistic creation is a consequence of living “in the presence of reality”.

And here, in our case, to live in the presence of reality is not accepting any money, coming from anywhere, in any way. I think it´s mainly realizing that money is one of the inputs of out art production and that both its origin and they way it´s used have a direct influence in what we do. More than that: realizing that it´s necessary to be in the world, that what one does as a person, as a citizen is not separable from what one does as an artist.

Of course it´s not possible to ignore that contemporary artists, including the independent ones, had a more significant participation in the creation of public policies for culture over the last years. In a federal level, this was marked by the segment’s actions with Funarte (National Arts Foundation) during the current government (although it bothers me that the first step was taken by the institution and not by the artists).

Now, I still think that this absolutely necessary action must be taken not only in the government level[5], but also in the creation of alternative means of production and circulation of works of art, through exchanges, trades, donations, whatever. Not that it´s wrong to use public resources to produce and try make a living with art. Maybe it´s nice to remember that artistic production is not the only field that depends on it. Other things, considered to be indispensable, also fundamentally need public resources, like agriculture, importation and exportation, education, scientific research, I mean, everything.

What is bad is to depend exclusively on it, and to depend only on the mechanisms that already exist and were created by other people to meet other demands. Since there is no absolute independency, a smart attitude would be to at least try to choose what and who to depend on.

But how is it done? I swear I wish I knew. As I said before, I don´t have any solution, in spite of having gone through some successful experiences recently, almost all of them involved some limited public resources, but that were mainly the result of the hard work of good people.[6]

However, it seems to me this kind of resistance is scarce and doesn´t solve anything. And, poor me, I have no idea of how to solve what´s left. The only thing I can do here is to say that I think it´s important to keep searching for alternatives and keep up this discussion.

One thing that might help is to share some questions related to my independencies and dependencies. Questions that have been bothering me a lot. Check it out:

• Where does most of the money to keep me come from?

• Do I trust in the institutions that sponsor my life? Do I have any kind of political, ethical aesthetic affinity?

• Can I bring the institutions that sponsor my life closer to my ideals? Have I done that?

• What kind of concessions do I make to survive? To how many corruptions, small or big, do I submit to in order to get money?

• Will I settle down when I´m older? What kind of artist will I be? Will I still be an artist?

• Will I have to keep doing a thousand of small jobs and go through all those droughts between projects until the day I die? Will I be able to retire? Is there a more interesting alternative?

• For how long will I be able to coordinate art gigs and a day job? If I have to choose, which one will it be? Why?

• What other means can there be to guarantee my survival, besides the money that comes directly from public and private institution?

• How can I depend less on the government and more on my own art work? Is it necessary to belong to the industry in order to sell my work?

• What other kind of currency can I use, besides money, to commercialize my work? How can it become a way to survive?

[1] Por enquanto, encontra-se o livro em: http://brasil.indymedia.org/media/2007/11/402799.pdf

[2] Later I would explain that not all crooks are successful, but they ususlly end up being.

[3] BOURDIEU, Pierre. A economia das trocas simbólicas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003. Coleção Estudos.

[4] The don´t live from cinema, but they receive a salary from the TV station. Are they independent?

[5] Then, the industry and the erudite production usually collide. A recent example is a: http://www.vermelho.org.br/base.asp?texto=35271. The smartest thing would be to try to understand that a field depends immensely on the other. All sectarismo is stupid.

[6] Two examples were the meeting “Arte e tecnologia”, promoted by Phila 7, in São Paulo, and “Dimenti – Conexão e Interatividade”, produced by Grupo Dimenti, in Salvador. Two independent events that made me want to keep working, because of the dedication and the diligence of the people who participated in the organization.