We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sam Heydt a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sam, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
As an artist committed to a full-time creative practice, I’ve had to grapple with the inherent tensions between making a “living” through my work and resisting the commodifying forces that can constrain art’s emancipatory potential. While the notion of financially sustaining myself through creative expression could be viewed as framing my practice within the market’s regime of exchange value, I refuse to let capital’s monopolistic grammar of speculation and accumulation fully determine what I do. My work must fundamentally remain a gratuitous expenditure beyond mere utility or self-interest.
At the same time, I cannot disavow the realities of material precarity that artists face under current socio-economic conditions. The ability to cultivate spaces of non-alienated labor and collective autonomy remains and essential front of struggle against total subsumption by capital’s wage regimes. My aim then is to sustain a praxis that exposes the contingencies by which certain practices become institutionally codified as legible “art” and others don’t. Metrics of fame, wealth or professional accomplishment risk reinscribing that commodifying reification my opposition must refuse. And yet, I won’t embrace glorified abjection either, as that spiritualizing disavowal of materiality has so often been marshaled to rationalize dominance. I seek to create infrastructures supporting dynamic, place-based art practices and communities resisting enclosure.
Success for me is not fame or lucre, but simply opening the time/space to inquire into how art can help us perceive new modes of belonging altogether, outside capital’s exclusionary horizons. If I wake up able to participate in that desirous refusal of the world’s present categorizations, then any other solidarities that emerge are just potentials for deepening that praxis further. I’ve already “won” by centering an ethico-aesthetic commitment to resistant world-remaking each day, rather than chasing after capital’s privatized visions of success.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
As a socially engaged, recycled media artist, my multidisciplinary practice questions norms and boundaries around identity and representation. Drawing from global experiences across New York and residing in cities worldwide, my work denaturalizes dominant frameworks shaping how we perceive ourselves and the world. In 2012, I launched Jane Street Studio in Manhattan, providing photo, design, marketing and art direction services to an international client base. Parallel to this, I’ve attended residencies documenting environmental exploitation, and undertaken authorship, production and activist work rooted in social and ecological justice. Across film, installation, photography and more, my practice employs unconventional materials and techniques to disrupt interventions that expose the fictions and cultural contingencies underlying social reality itself. Whether documenting the vicissitudes of environmental exploitation or the spectral haunting of our present by history’s spectral revenants, my palimpsestic imagery unfolds as an abstract theorization of time and being – a chimeric amalgamation that dissolves categorical binaries and reveals the porousness of all identitarian boundaries. In this way, my practice operates as a form of political performativity – using the aesthetic arena to iteratively rework and resignify the oppressive norms and regulatory schemas that have materialized a world of intensifying precarity marked by ecological devastation, ascendant authoritarianism, entrenchment of racial-sexual hierarchies, and the hollowing out of emancipatory politics. My juxtapositions of ruination with the tarnished vision of the American Dream crystallize our era’s existential contradictions – confronting viewers with the derealizing violence inherent to narratives of progress that have condemned whole swathes of the globe to systemic deprivation, immiseration and social abjection in service of rapacious capital accumulation. Ultimately, by channeling art’s critical and utopian capabilities, I forge an aesthetic-political vision that can rupture complacent nihilism – apprehending the radical openness and transformative possibilities pulsing beneath our reified reality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
While the rise of NFTs and digital art undoubtedly represents a significant shift in how we conceive of and interact with artistic production, I would caution against any reductive technological determinism that posits the supposed “dematerialization” of the art object as an inevitable endpoint. Rather, we must understand this burgeoning domain as the site of an ongoing performative negotiation and resignification of the material conditions and discursive frameworks through which art comes to be valorized, circulated and consumed as such. On one level, the blockchain cryptocurrency architecture underlying NFTs can be read as the latest entrepreneurial effort to create new regimes of speculative financial accumulation by enclosing and extracting rent from a previously uncommodified artistic commons. The digital scarcity model powering this appears to be little more than a superstructural simulation of artificial scarcity conditions to protect monopolistic rentiers. And yet, at the same time, we must remain attuned to the contingent possibilities that have been opened through this process of digital resignification – the evolving potentials for new subjectivities, temporalities and social relations to emerge through these novel techno-aesthetic practices.
What new modalities of creative expression, communal belonging and economic subsistence might they enable?The radical performative capacities of online spaces have already been amply demonstrated through their deployment as sites of political activism, consciousness-raising and the prefigurative modeling of alternative socialities. Could NFT ecosystems come to operate as cultural laboratories for exploring post-scarcity economies of collaborative creativity freed from extractive capitalist logics? Moreover, we cannot discount the abiding power of ritual, fetishistic investment and symbolic materiality within the spheres of artistic appreciation and value-formation. Even as digital workspaces become more ubiquitous, the hunger for sited, embodied encounters with physical art objects is likely to persist in dialectical relation to their virtual counterparts.
Art’s transformative potential has always hinged upon its ability to open ineffable rifts and productive contradictions within our reigning epistemological and ontological enclosures. As such, rather than rendering materiality obsolete, the NFT phenomenon may in fact reinscribe and newly complexify the social and political performances through which the boundaries of “material” reality itself are negotiated. So while the terrain of digital art remains inchoate, we must adopt an ethics of openness – one that refuses to foreclose the emancipatory prospects of this emergent cultural paradigm, while vigilantly contesting its corporatist capture and acceleration of financialized alienation. For it is only through such a criticality that we may collectively cultivate new modes of radical imagination and co-create more liberating and sustainable artistic futures.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
As someone who has experienced the artistic landscapes of both the United States and Europe, I’ve been struck by the stark disparities in how each context structurally supports – or fails to support – its creative communities. While the American mythos glamorizes the ideal of the struggling artist paving their own way through grit and self-reliance, the relative robustness of public arts funding and subsidies across much of Europe points to a more communally-oriented ethos that recognizes creativity’s vital role in cultivating an enriching, dynamically pluralistic social fabric.
Of course, we must avoid reifying these contrasts into simplistic binaries. The heterogeneity and uneven development within each region renders any monolithic characterization deeply problematic. However, what seems clear is that many European cultural policies have been shaped by a recognition that the arts not only generate immense social value, but serve as a key vector for modeling more equitable, sustainable and liberating modes of collective existence.
By providing a financial bedrock through grants, living wages, affordable studio spaces and production resources, publicly-funded arts programs invest in creating the economic breathing room for artists to take creative risks and engage complex aesthetic investigations freed from the conforming pressures of the market. This facilitates more daring experimentation and the nurturing of subversive vernacular traditions outside the circumscribed boundaries of the mainstream arts establishment.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.samheydt.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samheydt/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeydtPhotography
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samheydt/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamHeydt
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Samheydt
- Other: [art] www.samheydt.com [studio] www.jane-street-studio.com
www.kitsch-art-bodega.com [photo] www.heydtstudio.com [artsy] https://www.artsy.net/artist/sam-heydt
Image Credits
HEYDT