I've been thinking about what Donald Kuspit coined the “lifeworld” of the artist. One that generally starts as a teenager, spanning their 20s, 30s, 40s, and onwards. I'm in my 40s, so I have a particular perspective on this as both an artist and critic. I'm trying to see it subjectively and objectively from different viewpoints, one personal and one more general.

The personal aspect is difficult to discuss, because there's an element of loss in it. Loss being: my generation began their lives as artists with all this energy and naivety fuelled by irresponsibility and freedom. We pushed through that energy and naivety with irresponsibility and freedom, making work without much reflection or nostalgia. We pushed through, or over, never looking back. We moved with momentum and speed and, if we were lucky, generosity and validation from our peers for what we were doing, even though we didn’t really know what we were doing.

We built upon that momentum, 20s through 30s, before life started to get in the way. By life I mean responsibility for what accumulates as the necessary and the selfless. Especially if you become a parent, a homeowner, a car owner, an animal owner. We became more conscious of the other people around us—those we love and those we feel responsible for. Artists make work within a life that disavows them as being artists in the lifeworld. That's where the personal comes in; as time persists you feel you have to fit into a world that rejected you, or you rejected, or resisted until you couldn’t anymore.

This personal perspective, one I've experienced as a husband, a parent, a homeowner, a greyhound owner, becomes pivotal on the ball and shift of the artist’s feet through time and space. An artist is an artist in relation to the lifeworld, not just the artist themselves, and the choices the artist makes in life and art that allow them to continue on as artists in one pure or diluted form or another. Some artists are lucky in life, and unlucky in art and vice versa. Never the twain shall meet if the twain of life and art fail to incorporate one another.

And yet the artist continues to be an artist no matter what the lifeworld throws in their way of being an artist. Artists have to remain artists because, as artist Miranda July says, there's an element of self-help in art, the same way as in philosophy. An artist can't separate themselves from the need to make art.

Art objects are just a bi-product or bi-proxy of this need. Artists are umbilically tied to the making of art, not its bi-products, which are for strangers they will probably never meet. They need art yet they produce art for institutions whose cultural value is based on the bi-products of process they present to the world of strangers. Artists have to produce things and become things for the world, not for themselves; they never wanted that responsibility, deadline or disappointment. Yet that is what artists have become or always were, orphaned objects. Orphans are objects without a subject.

So what does cultural production mean to me as a forty-something artist when nostalgia for the past is more present than the hopes for the future. What next?

I'm in the middle of reading artist Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours. At the time of writing the novel, 2022, July announced that she and her husband were separated romantically, although they continued to co-parent and, till recently, shared the same residence, each with their respective girlfriend. All Fours is a fictional autobiography that mirrors July’s family triad of husband and lone child, with an implicit feeling of emotional tolerance, assumably inherited with respect to her marital relationship, and agitated by an emotional intensity for her child amidst the fracture and fantasy of the burgeoning detachment with her husband, which in real life became divorce. But beyond those echoes of life, which echo with less and less fidelity like a shout into the dark of a dream invariably does, All Fours reflects the artist at the threshold of a past and future about to collide in the throes of a midlife crisis.

July’s decision to take a road trip alone in the novel is made on the back of her husband’s insight about “Parkers and Drivers”:

“Well, in life there are Parkers and there are Drivers… Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don't need applause for every little thing—they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that's enough… Parkers, on the other hand … need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. “Bravo,” someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot. “Amazing.” The rest of the time they're bored and fundamentally kind of… disappointed. A Parker can't drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies… They like to save the day.” Miranda July, All Fours, 2024.

I watched ART 21 documentation of Miranda July performing at a gas station (Episode: Friends and Strangers). Dressed in a chequered pencil skirt and ivory blouse, July steps from her L.A. home in the L.A. sunlight equipped with a roll of ribbon. She ties the ribbon off to a gas station fence, and traverses the forecourt and pumps, handing it to people in cars queuing, with the plea and directive: “Can you hold this please and let go whenever you feel like it?” which forms a web, pillar to pump, risk to reward. It’s a beautiful and brave artwork — if we can call it an artwork or a gesture…

This performance came after July started to think about the work relationship between audience and artist, and how the artist has to put in all the work, while the viewer passively consumes. In Friends and Strangers and other works July invites the audience to put more work into the making of the artwork. In some ways, or its best way, contemporary art is about getting the viewer to work more than the artist, so the artist becomes a kind of slacker, challenging the viewer to become an artist in their thinking if not making. There is a natural handover between artist and audience in the public sphere, if not the private one of process, which the artist needs, not wants.

Among other things, July’s All Fours parallel parks Friends and Strangers in its handing over responsibility to the audience, while the artist lets go of the strings, or ribbon in July’s case. Miranda July, now 50, wrote All Fours in her late 40s. She's asking these questions of what an artist becomes in their 40s after all the energy and naivety of youth dissolves into experience and reflection. What is an artist in their 40s? Do they retreat into research, or try to engage the LIVE present, even if it is not their temporality anymore?

What artist Andrea Fraser calls the “artist myth” questions the very existence of the artist as fact or fiction. The art object is all that matters to culture. Further, the lie of biography is the ribbon that binds and brings vitality to the art object in the artist’s absence. Biography makes a subject out of the orphaned object. Fraser and July ask questions about the artist and their relationship to the world, artworld and lifeworld respectively. Through the thoroughfare of being an artist in the lifeworld, sacrifice, choice, opportunity, loss and love determines and defeats the artist’s trajectory, transformation and survival in the long run of career and the lottery of legacy.

As a male artist and stay-at-home dad, I became a critic in the early years of entrenched parenthood. I became, weirdly enough, a viewer, an audience member, who worked more than the general audience as an art critic reviewing exhibitions as a subjective outsider. When I went on an American road trip in an RV with my family last month while reading All Fours, I started to think a lot about this stuff more deeply— being a slacker, being an artist on the road, being an artist in the world without producing objects. Being a Driver not a Parker anymore. What would that look like? What would that feel like?

With these thoughts in mind I looked at the art objects in my studio the other day and how a lot of my work, if I can call it work, is about process not the epilogue of art objects or eulogy of exhibitions. What if the making of art could become a gesture? To do the work without the pursuit of objects, their production values, Arts Council logos, Instagram promo. To opt out of objects while opting for something more with less.

Personally, I don’t know what is next for the forty-something artist, for me. As with all these things, there is a future for the middle-aged artist. Miranda July’s work is usually described as “quirky”, which, in your 40s, July retorts: …”is to say I’m a little girl”. In the end I think artists become Drivers no matter how much they try to fend off the inevitability of the lifeworld which runs parallel to their cultural production. That Jack Kerouac could not Park after being On The Road says something about the fate of the artist—not tied to an institution—as a cultural producer, a Parker whose endeavour is to become a Driver...—James Merrigan