Before he pioneered a new genre of semi-autobiographical writing, the great French novelist and playwright Jean Genet pioneered something very different indeed: a special briefcase for stealing valuable books that he would later resell – after reading them first, of course. “I perfected a trick briefcase,” he later recalled, “and I became so handy in these thefts that I could push politeness to the point of pulling them off under the very nose of the bookseller.”
For as long as young people have dreamed of careers in the arts – as novelists, painters, poets, musicians and other species – they have had to measure their dreams against their economic circumstances. Often they have found a yawning gap between what they hope to do and what they have the means to pay for.
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Incarceration gave Genet more time to read – and during one prison sentence he discovered his true calling as a writer
To fill that gap, aspiring artists have worked at cafes and construction sites, trained to be teachers, lawyers and doctors, borrowed money from friends and family, sought out generous patrons and well-to-do romantic partners and squeaked by on as little money as possible. They have cobbled together income from a truly stunning variety of ad-hoc schemes, from modelling nude and breeding Old English bobtail sheepdogs to, in Genet’s case, practising a rarefied form of shoplifting.
Many of these might fairly be labelled “side hustles”, although the phrase has developed bad connotations of late. In our increasingly precarious economic times, when no career track looks entirely secure and so many jobs don’t quite pay the bills, it has become practically mandatory for even the least entrepreneurial among us to consider hustling a hobby into a side business for some extra cash or perhaps a durable new income stream.
How depressing! Hobbies are to be enjoyed, not monetised. I hate the thought that every homemade sourdough loaf or hand-thrown coffee mug must inevitably spark questions about its potential profitability.
For artists, side hustles have a much woollier lineage. Generally speaking they know what they want to be doing, whether it’s writing sonnets, painting still lifes or composing operas. What they don’t know, often, is how to pay for all the time, trial, error and experimentation such work inevitably entails. As a result, their hustles have a much more wishful, exuberant and often slightly unhinged quality. They are not just trying to pay the rent or send the kids to summer camp. They’re trying to Make Art – and the world simply has to make some accommodations.
Having spent several years writing a book about artists’ funding methods through the ages, I am brimming with examples. Genet is one of my favourites. He was certainly good – but not good enough to avoid getting caught now and then, resulting in numerous short stints in prison, although in a way these were also a boon. Incarceration gave him lots more time to read, and it was during a 1939 sentence that he discovered his vocation as a writer.
Genet was hardly the only young artist who used illegal means to fund his early years. The young Jean-Luc Godard funded his youthful days as a film critic and aspiring film-maker by stealing and reselling valuable first edition books from his grandfather’s Paris apartment, and also pilfering cash from at least two of his employers. One of these thefts landed him in a Swiss jail and, subsequently, a psychiatric institution. While living in New York in the 1970s, Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman pocketed half the cash intake from her job selling tickets at a Times Square pornographic movie theatre. She also stole boxes of 35mm film from a photo lab, later using it to make her first feature film.
Around the same time, a young Kathy Acker was working nearby at a nightclub called Fun City, performing in (simulated) live sex shows with her boyfriend. These and similar gigs paid better and took up less time than “straight” jobs. At Fun City, Acker only had to work one day a week and wrote the other six. The job also gave her a new perspective on society and relationships that proved fruitful for her writing. “You see people from the bottom up,” she said.
Not all artist side hustles have been so transgressive. In the 1950s, the American avant-garde composer John Cage turned a thoroughly wholesome hobby into an unexpected source of cash. The hobby was mushrooms (non-psychedelic varieties), for which Cage first started foraging in the 1930s to supplement his meagre diet as a broke young musician. Over time, he would become a dedicated amateur mycologist, eventually building an extensive collection of books on the subject and joining several societies.
In the late 1950s, while on a six-month tour of Europe, Cage managed to turn this hobby into profit. He was accepted as a contestant on Lascia o Raddoppia (roughly: Double or Nothing), a hugely popular Italian TV gameshow that invited contestants to answer questions on a subject of their choice.
Cage appeared in five episodes in 1959, where he was quizzed on – of course – his beloved mushrooms. At the end, the composer walked away with 5m lire, equivalent to about £70,000 today. He used his winnings to buy a Steinway piano for himself and a Volkswagen campervan for his partner Merce Cunningham’s dance company to use for touring. It was, said Cage, “the first consequential amount of money I’d ever earned”.
Unfortunately, not all side hustles have been so blessed – and many artists have found that even undemanding side gigs can be a drag on their creative energy. A few years before Cage’s win, the young abstract-expressionist painter Grace Hartigan was living in an unheated New York loft, working temp jobs and recording her deep discouragement in her journal. “A whole month gone and I haven’t even lifted a brush,” she wrote on 5 March 1952. “Worked three weeks at a clerical job that was a miracle of stupidity, all the time low, really despairing. And now we’re more broke than ever.”
Some side hustles have also turned into unplanned full-time obligations, to the artists’ horror. In 1913, Canadian post-impressionist painter Emily Carr moved back home to her native Victoria in British Columbia, planning to build a new house for herself with a spacious, light-filled painting studio, and rooms she could rent out to fund her art.
Unfortunately, she put her plan into motion as the first world war broke out and severely depressed the Canadian economy. In the years to follow, she had to pour all her energy into running a fully fledged boarding house that still didn’t cover her expenses. To supplement that rental income, she made pottery to sell to tourists and bred Old English bobtail sheepdogs in her back yard, selling the puppies to men returning from war. Needless to say, her painting career suffered terribly.
So what can today’s underfunded artist learn from the side hustles of earlier eras? For one thing: if you’re not making money from your art, you’re in very good company. Many brilliant and groundbreaking artists barely drew any income from their work, especially when they were starting out, yet they sustained the belief that their artistic instincts were worth following.
And the way they paid for life along the way may have exerted a subtle influence on their creativity – or at least exercised some of the same muscles they were later to flex at their studios, workshops or desks. It is not difficult to imagine a connection between Genet’s love of shoplifting and his transgressive fiction. Cage never made much money from his music but he did eventually earn a decent living travelling around lecturing about his ideas, drawing on the same charisma that made him such a natural fit for Italian TV.
In any case, these stories remind us that being an artist isn’t just about making the novel, painting, opera or whatever. It is also about getting yourself into the position from which you can make the thing. That means acquiring the life experience and emotional maturity to create original work. It also means developing a deep knowledge of the history of your field and what your contemporaries are up to. And, crucially, it means finding whatever amount of material stability you need to do what you feel called to do.
In other words, being an artist is not primarily about talent, inspiration, or having the best idea – and it’s certainly not about attaining the imaginary perfect conditions for your dream artist’s lifestyle. It’s about bringing something to life with the time and resources you do have, however imperfect and finite they may be. That may be a lesson we can all embrace, whether we’re trying to realise an artistic masterpiece or bake a perfectly unprofitable sourdough.
Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life by Mason Currey is published by Swift Press on 9 April
Source:
www.theguardian.com
