ARTIST AS NOMAD

Artist as nomad

In my research of my first nations heritage I was surprised to find a model of a nomadic life style that I had not encountered before and one that offers an insightful metaphor into the artist as nomad.
The first nations people that I am descended from call themselves the Mi’kmaq. They are one of the first people here to have first contact with Europeans. But it is their recorded nomadic life style that I would like to discuss here. The Mi’kmaq made their homes out of tree poles, spruce roots and grass mats or birch bark. These wigwams were easily moved around. The Mi’kmaq migrated following the appropriate seasons. In the winter they live in small family clans alone in the forest. In the spring they would move to a planting area. And then in the summer months they would relocate at predetermined places along the coast. They would settle into the same area and form a tribal community. The leader or chief was chosen out of the heads of the larger family units, and was a temporary figure for the summer. In the fall they would break up and trek to their own harvest grounds and then retreat in smaller family units into the forest for a winter of hunting.
It is not hard to see how this social model not only speaks of our liberation from property ownership, but also of a need to be both social and individual, a need to form our own territories and to find ways to share these meanings with others. As Delueze and Guattari point out, in a capitalistic society our desires vacillate between the two poles, schizophrenic and paranoiac.
We see in the Mi’kmaq way of life that the two disparate poles of desire take the lead at different times of the year. Paranoiac desires requiring social codifications are fulfilled in the summer months. Objectives like the coupling of young people would be accomplished. The winter months seeing the schizophrenic need to be alone and revolutionary/anti-social being fulfilled. This is the time for self expression through art and writing. Yes the Mi’kmaq were known to have a form of writing that they kept secreted in birch bark boxes.
How does all this relate to artists? If we look at some of the problems with artist groups and collectives this soon becomes apparent. There have been many attempts to organize artists. We have seen groups that tend to work more from the paranoiac pole (group or mob mentality) which has resulted in artists being forced into boxes of someone else’s choosing. Someone else’s idea of what art is or should entail, or what should be shown in order to get the most points for grants or institutional notoriety. They are asked to jump through stylistic hoops or be judged from within their peers. The structure of group codifications dictates a subversion of individual freedoms to allow the group to function.
As Andre Malraux makes clear in The Voices of Silence, artworks are to be understood in the context of the artist’s body of work not a larger grouping. Making what we have come to know as the “isms” ineffectual to adequately describe a work of art. Asking an artist to conform to group mentality runs the danger of adding a condition to their own plane of composition. It would be like adding a prerequisite to their creativity. A creativity that already finds value in the context of the induvidual artist.
We need to see artists as natives, nomads, free to create new percepts and affects. Artists, that are aware of, but unfettered by outside codifications, artists as the winter hunter alone to define a new spring becoming.
But in reality artists like the Mi’kmaq people can not survive alone in the forest forever. Artists depend on accesses to the outside codified capitalist world for their survival. A survival that is well recorded through out history to have left the artist crippled and marginalized, artist’s groups or co-ops being a recent attempt to empower the artist. This resulted only in empowering organizations and their membership’s definitions of art.
I think that if we look at the Mi’Kmaq model for inspiration we can come to an understanding of how to group artists without compromising their individuality.
If artists use the codes of their society to organize themselves they will inevitably be victims of these codes. Codes that are set up for socialization and not artistic individual goals. Think tanks, chat sites, sweat lodges, or roundtables can be open groups where everyone is equal in their intellectual input. Perhaps it is time the artists formed nomadic partnerships and met in sweat lodges instead of galleries and boardrooms. Modernism pointed out the individuality of the artist but failed to insure it. Postmodernism pointed out the equality amongst artists/text but failed to create a bridge between the individual understandings and society.
The nomad is free, part of the land not owner of it. The nomad seeks and doesn’t build. The nomad is constantly moving and not growing roots. The nomad is not alone but part of everything. The nomad eats, drinks, thinks, and makes love. To embrace the nomadic in thought and action is to start to truly create what is yours/ours.

by chriseddy