I have been thinking continuously, feverishly, voraciously about what to do since November 8th, 2016.
Yesterday, I finally resolved myself to what that is.
…
It began with a normal morning of news briefings to be aware of reality before checking back into my usual work flow. Call it a bitter blessing, but I have an unusually high tolerance for stress, so usually I can cope with the level of anxiety each headline gives me.
But this was different.
“Plans to Eliminate National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities.”
Post headlines likes this usually whip a distinct, audible crack of sadness, a painful sadness — a sadness that I am usually able to bear in a blessedly bitter sense, so that I can recoup and rethink about how to proceed.
This headline did not whip like other headlines. Instead of the audible crack I’d grown numb to, this was a preemptive strike with a clear, underlying message:
“Artists are not valuable to society, and they do not deserve funding from society.”
Words cannot describe the emotions I felt when I read this headline.
The closest I could conjure up was this:
“Alive.”
…
There is something strange about growing up in a society that, at large, never seems to accept you into its larger notion of normality, no matter what you’re naturally capable of.
I’ve experienced this kind of rejection in different iterations, and have experienced it the longest as an artist in a world of globalized commodification and consumerism.
Artists do not fit nicely into this kind of world because artists are fundamentally juxtaposed to a commodification and consumerism of critical engagement, philosophical exploration, and emotional expression.
Artists are imaginative, inquisitive, and inventive. We are musical, verbose, and mesmerized by the possibilities beyond what reality currently dictates — possibilities of despair, and possibilities of dreams.
We are also survivors, for by virtue of the fluidity of our imaginative, inquisitive, and inventive existences, we have also navigated societies that reject the fluidity of our imaginative, inquisitive, and inventive existences in favor of logic, order, and rules in the form of commodification and consumerism.
Time and time again, we have experienced rejection of our worth and capabilities: that what we are able to do artistically is not valuable to economic progress, that it is only valuable when it is categorized towards that kind of progress; that we are ‘too emotional and too illogical’ to be proper functioning members of an unemotional and logical society; that there is no funding to pay us for what we can create, yet we are expected to create the highest quality of work without any compensation beyond a possible ‘thanks’ at best, or no credit (outright piracy) at worst.
In spite of all of this, artists continue to exist because we know that we are worthwhile of dignity and respect.
Artists are some of the strongest, most resilient survivors you will ever meet because our very existence is largely rejected by most of our modern, globalized world.
…
There are many ways to resist what is surely many institutional waves of devaluation, erasure, and privatization of public good, space, and thought.
For me, it is to remember that I am many things, but that I am fundamentally an artist, and that I am alive in spite of a larger, crueler reality.
I am alive in a society that has largely rejected what I’m naturally dispositioned towards, what I am inherently passionate about.
I am alive in a time where artists are again being pushed to the fringe of equity because our contributions and capabilities are considered even less worthy than what was insinuated with previous cuts from previous decades.
We are used to being considered ‘non-valuable,’ and this recent action is nothing we haven’t experienced before.
We are capable of imagining, inventing, and inquiring of a world that is and does better than its predecessors — qualities that oppressors will never be capable of harnessing, no matter how much they try to consume and commodify everything around them.
We are dangerous to oppressors because we fundamentally think forwards as opposed to the status quo or, in some cases, backwards.
We have the courage to imagine possibilities as opposed to limitations.
So in this unknown path towards an unknown future:
I will be resisting distinctly as an artist — as someone who dares to imagine, invent, and inquire of a better world, of a future distinct from our current reality.
I am one of many artists, and we will not stop existing.
Bring it on — we’ll be here.
In resistance,
Q. Le