Finding your Feet - pt III
With Leah Thomas and Ben Ashby
Art is often seen as a personal expression of an artist - who they are, how they feel, where they live, their cultural background etc. The default is to treat art as something subjective, an example of how a particular artist moves through the world. But who an artist is, why they make art and who they make art for, is shaped heavily by their relationships. We make art with each other and for each other.
Leah: I wanted to talk to you about whether you think the relationships people have shape the art they make? Some of the most important relationships I have made through making art are with my best mates who I studied with. I don’t think I would be as committed to music if I didn’t have people who I loved working in that industry.
Ben: Brita McVeigh once said to me that “making a career in the arts is just finding your people”. Its a process of working with people and finding out oh you are my people, you are not my people. The hardest bit is the start but once you have started gathering people around you who you think are on the same wave-length, you find the people you want to make your next show with. Having a career in the arts is almost exclusively about your relationships.
Leah: I totally agree. So much of what I talk about in my funding applications for Pōneke Classical Sessions is about community-building; building a platform so people can meet other creatives, build stronger relationships and therefore build a healthier artistic community. What I always forget to mention though is how I needed to build my own personal community in order to build Classical Sessions. I spent four years of my life, and so much money on Ubers and beers, going to gigs but never with an agenda, like I am here to meet people to work with. I compare it to my experience at Law School where if you go to a networking event you are given a nametag and told to meet new people because you’ll get more matches on LinkedIn haha. I feel like since I have been going to music school I’ve been networking unconsciously, and I don’t know if this is problematic, but so much of the art I like is because I like the person who makes it.
Ben: I am the same. I know that I am good at networking because my mum is good at networking. Shout out to my mum.
Leah: Shout out to your mum.
Ben: I think it's interesting because many young artists I know are allergic to networking. You say networking and everyone is run for the fucking hills, its the ugliest thing in the world. But if someone dope like Hone Kouka makes a budget in a festival to throw together evenings of food and drink, I’ll go. It's so valuable - building those personal relationships is building your career. It's ugly to think of it like that and it's kind of a gross feeling sometimes to think “this is a great friendship to have but it's also a tactical friendship”. Some people might be like that's gross, but it's the way it works. Eventually you can get into a position where you get funding, and then you can go to those friends and you give back.
Leah: Yeah you can go “I’ll pay your rent for a month”.
Ben: Yeah I’ll pay your rent for a month cause I like you and I want to make a show haha.
Leah: We are one of few industries where we do get so much choice in who we work with which I think is one of the best things about being a practising artist. Especially after working office jobs and in the legal sphere a little bit, that lack of autonomy over who you spend your day with.. It's such a cliche to complain about the 9 to 5 grind, but I reckon you can lose who you are when you don’t get to choose who you are around. So why shouldn’t that be at the centre of how you work?
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Leah: Okay one last question for you. I want to ask it because when we were in the process of making Running Into the Sun, I think it was show week, you would get the actors and us, the musicians, to think about who we were making the show for. I just wanted to ask you who you make art for? Does it change with each show?
Ben: Aw man. Yeah it definitely changes every show. In a very sentimental way, my grandma Jandy. Because she is the best grandma. When I was growing up, I started playing tennis and she bought me the Rafael Nadal autobiography and when I started doing theatre she would say I need to see you play Hamlet. I know that back in her day she was in theatre groups, amateur ones, when she was in high school and uni. She wrote me a card recently that said “I think you know that you are doing what I would have loved to have done.”
Leah: Awwww. That’s extremely precious.
Ben: Yeah, she is often who I am thinking about when I am making art but actually a lot of the art I make, Jandy would watch and be like “it's awesome that you have made this but I have no idea what this is”. Because I am not making this specific piece of art for her, it's actually for a young artist who is looking to bring about change and hope and drive.
Leah: Yeah, weirdly, we sort of make art for ourselves - young people who need art to be a safe space. As well as for our families, the people who came before us, women who didn’t get the chance to have artistic careers. In Running into Sun, that was a huge theme for many people in the cast. There were a lot of female figures in everyone's family history who didn’t get the full breadth of experience that we have now. I think it's super important to keep them in mind, they are the little voices that tell you to keep going.
Ben: This is a whole other interview that I am about to start but as a straight middle-class white man, I have to take my identity into account when I am considering why I make art and who I am making art for. A big part of the reason that I do community-led work is because my real strength as an artist is in creating a community, an experience and moments of joy. The art that is really important in terms of content that people need to hear and understand and experience is not art that I can make.
Leah: I’m in the exact same boat. I mean you saw it written aggressively into my journal when you were around the other week. “What are the implications of making traditionally European art on stolen land?” Who you are making art for is an important thing to think about all the time because if you are Pakeha and practising a European tradition and you aren’t thinking about it, the likelihood is that you are just making art for people who look like you, or have your experience. That's actually unethical now.
Ben: When you said “Pakeha person practising a European art form” I thought of a conversation I had recently with Hone Kouka, who I mentioned earlier, he basically said that what white people need to figure out next is what is Pakeha-tanga. We are at a point now where a lot of artists are like we need to incorporate Māoritanga and need to have greater diversity and better representation. But if you don’t know who you are and where you come from and what you are practising, how are you going to do that? That's a big question for me at the moment - who am I, what is my history, and how do I bring that into the art that I make. And it's not necessarily about apologising for it, it's about - this is who I am and my culture. A lot of white artists are in danger of being like “oh I’m never going to talk about anything”. No, it's important to be honest about what is my culture, my history and bring that forward in a way that starts conversations.
Leah: The more people go to therapy the more we will understand what white culture is. As someone who is English and is invested in what’s happening with things like Brexit, I’ve come to understand that there is a rejection of understanding what white culture means historically and in a modern sense everywhere - people are so resistant to unpacking it that they will undergo these huge political and cultural wars with each other to avoid answering that question.
Ben: Yeah, who am I and where do I come from. And something for me I have had to acknowledge is that it's not all bad, but it's definitely not all good. This is all the stuff that I come from and I have to own up to that.
