FORCE AMONGST FORCES
To downplay the artist’s own will or agency is not the negation of their capacity to act. Rather the artist recognises themselves as an agent amongst other agents, a force amongst other forces. Yet to release one’s control does not mean that anything goes. Reduction of individual power is not nihilistic or self-sacrificing but instead allows for an expansion of the self beyond purely utilitarian interests and concerns. Between fidelity and surrender, between integrity and resistance. The daring of letting go is not to be confused with simply forfeiting or forgetting or forgoing one’s own practice — the giving up on one’s own ways of doing things. Rather, letting go becomes a preliminary for reengaging practices anew. Welcoming the interplay of different forces and agencies, the artist shifts between action and inaction, between doing and being. Or rather, their practice of being comprises both doing and not doing. Artistic action holds open a space for the copresence and complementarity of seemingly contradictory opposites. Passivity-activity. Levity-gravity. Faith-doubt. Thinking-feeling. The hyphen is both conjunctive and disjunctive — it joins two things together while holding them apart, creating combination or connection without full synthesis or reconciliation. Likewise, the artist acts as the hyphen, an intermediary agent holding a space open, activating the potential in between.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)