What do artists do all day?

Ten years ago, Mason Currey collected 161 routines of creative thinkers in Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The book’s subheading is a bit of a joke – “how artists work” gesturing to both how artists toil, but also how they function. We are supposed to believe that in these vignettes of daily habits we will discover the mechanics of artistic genius, like a kid taking apart a clock to study time from loose springs.

Patterns do emerge – waking at dawn, watching the daybreak, consuming endless cups of coffee and cigarettes – but also splinter and slip away. For every spartan breakfast, there is one like Georgia O’Keeffe’s: scrambled eggs, bread with savoury jam, hot chilli with garlic oil, sliced fruit and tea. For every Haruki Murakami – who woke at 4 am, ran ten kilometres a day and likened novel-writing to “survival training” – there is the indulgent counterweight of Andy Warhol shopping all morning and David Lynch drinking thick chocolate shakes at Bob’s Big Boy, or that of the unbalanced horizontal artists: Proust lying in bed taking caffeine tablets followed by sedatives; Capote lying on the sofa, “puffing and sipping,” shifting “from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.”

Rather than a formula for genius then, here we have two competing models for what creative work is – monkish self-discipline, versus extravagant pleasure-seeking. Law and order versus chaos and chance. “I never realised I was so set in my ways until now, but I guess I have tons of rules,” Chris Offili told the New York Times in 2005.  “Occasionally, something sticks,” Arthur Miller told The Paris Review in 1999: “And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.”

 

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This tension is right there in Currey’s title too – hovering between “rituals” and “work”. The clash almost sets up a “choose your own adventure” game: follow “work” for a conception of the artist as creator, painstakingly carving something out, or “rituals” for the artist as a conduit, waiting for “it” to strike.

Is it possible to reconcile the two? Well, another book has long claimed to treat routine as ritual, and also ground creativity’s “magic” in daily practice: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. This infamous instructional claims to demystify the question of how art is made; how daily work becomes The Work. It is a plaudit to process. It is also a hodgepodge of homework, self-help and spiritual guidance. Inspired by the Alcoholics Anonymous model, the book offers a programme for “artistic recovery”, which supposedly all adds up to “a teachable, trackable spiritual process”. People swear by it, as they do with therapy and faith.

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life,” Anton Chekhov wrote, and this pretty much sums up Cameron’s approach to creative “unblocking”. Monkish discipline takes on a romantic bent – becomes devotional. To be an artist, live as artists live. Do as they do, imbibe what they imbibe, and you may create how they create.

 

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This spirit is popular right now. Take Studio Cookbook, published last month by Hato Press. Here, everyday labour is wedded with ritual in the form of the recipe: a mug of hot water, or a tomato and lettuce sandwich are not what they seem, for here they are what artists eat. Marie Jacotey’s studio lunches “mainly involve lots of fresh greens, good olive oil, bread, cheese and garlic.” Celia Pym eats a cheese, houmous and cucumber sandwich with one hand. It’s an evocative way to render artists’ working lives, and a nod to the desire to pull back the curtain, look at the puppet-strings and springs. It is also part of a wider trend for the artist as lifestyle guru: artists’ meals as food inspo, their studios as interiors inspo, daily habits as general life inspo. In the words of Sarah Brouillette, “a romanticised image of the artist’s oppositional work has become an attractive model for general self-fashioning”.

And yet, at the same time artists’ lives have become the stuff of cookbooks, self-help guides and magazine spreads, a different model of “how artists work” has infiltrated culture at large. Self-reliant, singular and committed to flexibility, an idealised vision of the artist as free agent has now mutated into the ideal of the flexible, autonomous neoliberal worker.

“So-called new-economy companies took the rebellious, anti-institutional conception of the artist and imported it into their working worlds,” Brouillette writes in Literature and the Creative Economy, “in the form of the social insecurity those artists often endured.” Similarly, Andrea Fraser suggests that under neoliberal capitalism, “artists have become the poster children for the jobs of insecurity, flexibility, deferred economic rewards… and geographic displacement”. How do artists really work? Often for long hours, and little pay.

It’s harder to romanticise advocating for fair pay and working conditions than it is to eulogise asceticism or creative divination untethered from economic demands, but perhaps that’s no bad thing. Perhaps, rather than transforming routine into ritual, what we need is a less romantic, religious or therapeutic conception of creative work – one that attends to the actual conditions of contemporary labour (greased by caffeine and sedatives, coffee and martinis as it may be).