What is the practise of art?

What is the practise of art? Does it serve a function other than beauty?

My conversations with thirty artists is a pleasant artificiality. From the hundreds of individuals involved in making art in Hamilton during the Inc’s thirty-year tenure in the city, thirty were selected to have their thoughts inscribed. Hamilton is a city which disallows mythology. Coinciding with the pragmatic nature of the subject material, this process was not an explicit one of inclusion and exclusion. Rather, selection fell the chance of availability. I felt that a systematic and archival approach would betray the true history of the Hamilton Artists Inc.

The art community in Hamilton is one which struggles against itself in many ways. Toronto’s shadow looms over the psyche of many local cultural producers. This proximity to the wealth and potential and mainstream cultural interests seems to doom the city’s art community to a degree of provincialism and hermetic insularity. Arguably, it is precisely this inferiority complex which gives the artists of the Hamilton region their strength of co-operative enterprise.

Hamilton has long been a labour town. The spirit of collective endeavour was fundamental to both the formation and the continued success of the Hamilton Artists’s Inc. Tapestries are woven by the determined execution of a simple idea. Likewise, a local institution precipitated by a co-operative of local artists. A frustrated and determined entity came out of their initial attempts to show their work in the mainstream channels, which seemed determined to ignore them. Democracy is always DIY, and in this spirit the Inc has long sought to hybridize the permanence of institutionalization with the flexibility of populism. Work precipitates from personality; to work otherwise is to fully bureaucratize an organization.

The Inc has long served as a resource centre for artists; allow one lesson to be learned from its thirty year history. Art is not a mythical or romantic process, but rather one of doubt subsumed into practical application.