Why do one thing
all your life, when you might do different things, as many as you like,
whenever you feel like it ?
It may be that
this question is no more applicable to art than it is to any other area of
life. Why be married and faithful when you might have any number of sexual
partners? Why stay in one job when you might try others, or live in one place
when you could move or go travelling ?
Such questions are
crude, marked by exclusions and failure of empathy. They assume choice as a
right and take consumption as the model for agency. They are also
self-defeating, since, if choice is open, the decision for singleness or
consistency will be as legitimate as any other.
No doubt mistrust
of a single practice is the legacy of romantic notions of the freedom of the
artist, of an effortless creativity, a constant self-invention. Investment in
the idea of the artist as exception remains strong in a society where room for
manoeuvre is still limited.
Why continue to
make one form of art when you might develop or invent different practices at
different times ? While such a question might begin in a genuine puzzlement, it
would be unreasonable to press it beyond a certain point. Where art is
concerned, interrogation should always be secondary to a genuine effort of
understanding, to an attempt to inhabit the problems, to see a practice from
the inside, with some sense of its advantages as well as its restrictions.
