Constructs and Intrinsics

An attempt to start to explain why I'm no longer interested in thinking of myself as an artist, and why identifying as a walker might be a better option.

I’ve become increasingly interested in differentiating between intrinsics (in my connotation, aspects of life or being that are naturally occurring as opposed to culturally derived) and constructs (things that humans have created, as part of culture, in one way or another). My sense is that we often confuse constructs with intrinsics. Of course there are also many combinations of the two, but largely, for me, those things still wind up in the construct category.

One example is the way we think about and organize time. I’m not talking about the language we use to frame time, which of course is entirely constructed. I mean the units of time that language is used to describe. So, for instance we have natural time durations based on solar system operations like days, months, and years (none of those things is exactly correlated to the sun and moon but are close approximations). Then we have seconds, minutes, hours, and weeks, all of which are pure constructs, humans decided on them as ways to delineate the already existing, naturally based time frames. That is all fine and often useful (though at times also potentially oppressive like in the case of children’s school schedules), as long as we can understand the differences, and to realize that we could have settled on different versions (ten day weeks, twenty hour days, 100 minute hours, etc.) Many societies in different time periods and geographical locations have used alternate versions of time measurements, or none at all. The ones primarily used globally now are pretty recent inventions within the scope of human history.

This mixing and confusion of our understanding between intrinsics and constructs is everywhere and in everything we as humans in contemporary society engage in these days. As a result, it can seem like someone is intrinsically an artist, or most other kinds of profession, but from my perspective that’s not possible. The idea of an artist is just a construct, and so is art. Which, obviously, doesn’t make those things bad, just not intrinsic, creating very different societal and personal understandings of the identity, expertise, status, value, social responsibility, etc. of art and artists.

The reason I find it liberating to not consider myself an artist anymore is because, even though we might think of artists in positive ways, there are also constructed limitations to what the idea of an artist is and can be. As a younger person I was drawn to art because it allowed me to avoid engaging in a more conventional academic education and a potential nine to five type career. I wanted to think of artists as people who could be supported to do whatever they wanted to do, on their own schedules, with minimal rules and expectations, etc. I spent decades working on and arguing for that position, but, as it turned out, mine was always an extremely marginalized view.

Most people, even artists themselves and certainly people who run the art world—gallerists, curators, art historians, college art department administrators, etc.—believe that artists and art need to conform to various standards that fit within a system that mostly values art commodities and the structures that support them. That version of art has never been of much interest to me, but regardless of how I feel, it is the dominant model. The process of offering an alternative approach is exhausting and comes with few rewards, so I’ve concluded at this point to stop trying (well, maybe I’ll try a little bit here and there), and with that comes a great sense of liberation and freedom. Without a need any more to have art world support or activity I am much better able to explore my interests just as a person, with minimal identity categories causing societal or personal restrictions and expectations.

At this point in my life, I spend much more time cooking than making anything that resembles conventional art, but I don’t have any need to call myself a chef either. That also goes for most of the other activities I engage in much more than “making art” including gardening, reading, swimming in rivers and lakes, napping, shoveling shit at an animal sanctuary, etc. I do spend a lot of time walking, at least a couple of hours each day, sometimes a lot more than that, and I kind of like the sound of the identity category “walker,” which is, I think, also actually intrinsic to who I am at least at this point in my life, (if I were to lose my ability or interest to walk that would change) so maybe, as mentioned in my first post here, if I need a term to identify myself with, I can try that out and see how it goes.

What are the expectations of a walker? Since, for the most part, walking is not seen as a profession (though there are some intriguing jobs that involve a lot of walking, like being a postal worker) there is no assumption that a walker needs to make money from their identity (which could be a problem if making money was an issue for someone, but also questions if one wants their identity to be based primarily on the activity they do to make money.) Do the walks have to be documented to count? I don’t think so, but you could if you wanted to. Are there frequency, milage, or duration requirements? Nope. Do you need special equipment? No, and in fact people are often confounded that the shoes that my partner Sarah and I wear to walk in look like slippers (we just think they’re the most comfortable shoes to walk in). I’m sure there are various other questions like those, but from my experience the answers are always along the lines of “do whatever you want to do” which is my kind of identity, and in many ways what I thought being an artist would be like before I realized, as noted above, that it wasn’t, at least not for me.