Amongst the indigenous peoples of North America the Kwakw_ak_a’wakw have a word meaning “a gift from the supernatural, a gift from the creator”. We all have these supernatural gifts, but in the western world we would call them our talents or special skills, we might be very aware of animal habits and become great hunters, have sensitive taste buds and love cooking but we might also be artists. These gifts are what individuals offer to others in the community and feasts are often held in order to celebrate achievements, a celebration that is associated with what is often called potlatching. This involved the giving away of or even destroying wealth to demonstrate status, reaffirm lineage, remember special achievements and mark life events like births, deaths, or marriages. "Potlatch" means "to give," and the practice, once banned by white governments, centres on generosity, community, storytelling and the redistribution of resources. It is a cornerstone of social, political and spiritual life. The reason that when white people showed up, they tried to stop tribes from potlatching, was that it was outside of any understanding of commodity exchange within capitalism; it was, like the idea of Communism, a threat to a particular way of thinking, in this case it seemed paradoxically that people were giving away everything that they had, in order to become wealthy.
When you have children you instinctively gift to them your time and energy, as you know that the family community will benefit from this. If you have any special gifts, such as an ability to play a musical instrument, you will gift this skill to your children by teaching it to them, thus passing on cultural capital and building the family's riches. You freely give away your time and energy, if you feel others will benefit. The Kwakw_ak_a’wakw tribe operates like a family and hosts celebrations to mark the various times that these gifts have been given. Lewis Hyde asks us to think about this type of exchange as being an alternative to the one we see operating when art is regarded as an investment, it is a gift that builds social capital.
I have occasionally received money for my work, but at the most just a few hundred pounds and there has always been a sense of exchange beyond the monetary value, people wanting to have an object in their house that represented a certain sort of idea, in a similar way to why you might buy a book. The money being more to do with a recognition that without some sort of exchange, it might be too hard for the maker to continue making. I have like so many artists kept the wolf away from the door by doing other things as well, such as teaching. I still make things and think about what it means to make things, this blog being one of the main channels through which I do my thinking. I do occasionally check to see if anyone picks up on what I do, as much as anything to see if what I do is of any use. It's good to hear from people too and open out conversations but sometimes a little research is useful. This is why I was looking recently at why other writers might have referenced my writing and came across a very interesting text on hair hanging as a circus discipline. It was illustrated by the writer's drawings, such as 'Feeling the roots under my feet grow', the image that opens this post. I found the text very interesting as it represents an attempt to fuse what a complex situation might look like together with how it might feel, an issue that I have had to work with during my own work on visualising interoceptual experiences. Trikka Georgia's text, 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release' had at one point referred to my blog post on horizontality, as this had helped her think through the issues she was dealing with. Hopefully what I had written had supported her thinking, just as in the same way what she had written helped me. This is what I mean by the gift; it is given freely and as it is received by others it allows them to do more and what they do then enriches us all and so by giving away our time and energy to create things, we eventually all profit.
I first looked at the politics of a non-monetary economy, when a group of us were developing a model for the Leeds Creative Time Bank. We developed a set of ethics, which were put into a poster form, which was itself at one point shown at the Tate Modern Gallery in relation to the ‘No Soul For Sale’ project. LCTB operated under a belief that we could use ‘social design’ to change social realities such as poverty or social
isolation, which we saw at the time, as factors that were already impacting not only upon the
creative sector in Leeds, but on all the city’s communities. Hyde's text was one of the gifts that we took from others to help us engineer the Timebank's structure.
However the politics surrounding non-monetary economies can be rather murky. The idea of the potlatch is a powerful one, but one that has come into being as much by desire as by reality. Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a system of banking and a means by which prestige is maintained, the potlatch is a central anthropological concept. Christopher Bracken in 'The Potlatch Papers' shows how the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them, the government had invented something that people actually wanted. As Bracken put it, what had been invented was a mirror in which to observe not “the Indian,” but “the European.”
The idea of the gift still has traction, because unlike money and traded goods, things like love, hope for the future, faith, beauty, the sentiment of a poem, the feeling tone of an image and the construction of an idea; you don’t have less when you give them away. Indeed, they are made to be given away and you feel better when you pass them on. As your gifts are passed on, somehow the world looks a little more like the one you would like it to be and you feel better about yourself. This reflection on the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism, doesn't perhaps help a starving artist put bread on the table, but it might explain why as artists we sometimes need to become involved with ventures outside of art making and how we might think about the role of the artist community and the objects that we make. I can remember a conversation from some years ago when I was part of a group exhibition and prices for our various works were being discussed. One artist put forward an idea that they thought their work was worth as much as a fridge. As they did others began to pitch in what sort of commodity their work might be seen as being as useful as and therefore as valuable as. Was a painting as useful as a carpet? Both have aesthetic qualities but one also keeps the room warm and softens the floor's impact on the feet. Therefore argued another, tapestries ought to cost more than paintings, as they could also be used to help keep a room warm. But argued someone else, an artwork is an idea and what people are buying is intellectual property and this is surely worth more than any single commodity. This was countered with, "Yes but counting backwards is also an idea, but its not worth anything."
I don't have an answer to this, except to say that if at some point someone came along and said this blog is interesting enough to be published as a series of books and asked me if the content could be therefore sold in printed form, I would probably have a real dilemma to face. On the one hand the ideas contained in these posts might be disseminated even more widely and that would be a good thing. But by turning these online posts into hard copies that would have to be marketed and sold, they would join the rest of the commodifiable entities that the capitalist economy embeds within itself. As is often the case I'm lost and puzzled as to any answers to the conundrums I give myself, which is probably why I make art rather than write philosophy or engage directly in politics.
An anti-slug votive at work
I will be showing a few anti-slug votives in a small exhibition at the Trapezium Gallery in Bradford. At the end of the exhibition, I will gift the votives to anyone who feels they need a little other worldly support in their efforts to maintain a garden."That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price." Lewis Hyde: The Gift
References
Trikka Georgia: 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release
An interview with myself about the Leeds Creative Timebank
Barker, G. (2018) Leeds Creative Timebank: reciprocity for sustainable social design, Expanding Communities of Sustainable Practice Conference, Leeds Arts University, 16 November 2018 available at https://www.academia.edu/87392269/Expanding_communities_of_sustainable_practice_symposium_proceedings_2018
Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.
See also:
Drawing and the principles of permaculture
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