Future Past Jesse Darling on rethinking the relationship between art and life, questioning the place of learning, and reimagining the past in the present to arrive at a future that is defiant, joyful and attentive to one another.
Jesse Darling interviewed by Chris McCormack
Turner Prize 2023, installation view, Towner Eastbourne
Chris McCormack: What are you doing? Jesse Darling: I’ve decided to use this time to cut some apples for cider. It’s labour intensive, but I don’t mind a bit of unalienated labour. You are about to start work at Ruskin School of Art, is that right? It’s a full-circle thing, because I grew up here in Oxford, so now I finally get to enter the institution from a different direction. It turns out that a job seemed like a good idea suddenly. I’m 44 years old and I’m competing for the same gigs as 25-year-olds who have more creative energy, and they should get them. Let the next generation come. For me, I’ve got a kid to feed and I got tired of hustling. It’s interesting hearing this perspective given the amount of disruption and anguish in art education at the moment. Of course I’m aware of what’s happening across the sector but I’ve been doing gig work for as long as I have been working. Artists make their money these days through a lot of different kinds of work, and it’s all precarious. So teaching here is sure to have its ups and downs, but for me, at this moment, it sounds more relaxing.
How do you view the role of art education? I’ve always had difficulty with the art world and the art market. At this moment, it feels like a ship that’s sailed, one that’s ever more decadent and miserable. But art education can be an incredibly good training for life, especially for what we are facing now. I’m interested in this kind of experimentation, when artwork is a proxy for a kind of inquiry into what it is to be alive. To deprivilege the idea that we’re solely ‘making art’ and instead attempt to access a way of being. Could you say more about what you think we are facing? All the old structures are breaking down, and some of them are – for all kinds of reasons – really ripe for abolition, or ripe for collapse. They’re not fit for purpose and that includes the edifices of, let’s say, gender; like when gender becomes self-evidently slippery – not that it has ever not been slippery – then sexuality gets weird, domesticity gets weird, the financial or institutional structure of the family also gets weird. Of course people are freaking out. I understand that.
It’s no accident that TERFs more or less originate in the UK – on Mumsnet. Without being too simplistic about it, I believe this has to do with the dereliction
Art Monthly no. 479, September 2024
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