The transition from knowing artist to learnt artist is a strange phenomenon. The artist starts out from the locus of “What they know”; knowing being a very localised, dumb & urgent knowing. Then they gather experiences & end up making work based on “What they have learnt.” If we generalise, it would be way better if the knowing artist never learnt anything at all. Why? It is something to do with immediacy & risk. The knowing artist comes first, knowing they want to be an artist without knowing what that means or the risk involved. It is the first & biggest risk. Next they make art that dumbly & viscerally reacts to the moment of knowing. In the beginning they risk everything in their approach, appropriation & approximation of culture. Cultural producers need to cannibalise culture to produce culture. It’s a learnt fiction. Doing what is not yet known or learnt. The learnt artist reflects on history. The knowing artist depends on the animal present. The learnt artist reads newspapers, reputations & obituaries in preparation for the End. The knowing artist has the restlessness of youth on their side. The learnt artist inchmeals a practice. The knowing artist is Sontag sensual. Knowing is joyriding. Learning is dawdling. That is why the learnt artist, with age, slows down to dry hump the lap of research. Words like “practiCe” (not “practiSe”) begin to creep into their funding applications. They become nouns that can’t verb anymore. Their practice excavates history for deeper but slower answers. The knowing artist is immediate; the learnt artist turns a blind eye to the present. As they exhaust opportunities the knowing artist retreats from the urgent & dumb of knowing to become learnt, to become known. It’s inevitable. It’s evolution. It’s progress. It’s survival. The learnt artist has learned from their mistakes, forgetting that their mistakes was the art they knowingly left behind. But let it be known that this a learnt perspective not a knowing one.

Image: Ed Ruscha, Hollywood is a Verb,1979, pastel on paper, 58.4 x 73.7 cm.