🍋📚🎨
London is a city that’s very good at making itself feel like it's yours, its streets curling around you like it knows your name, like it knows where you're going. But it's a stranger wearing your clothes, pretending it belongs to you when it never really does. The city breathes in pulses. Early morning, a soft inhale of fog and buses, the low hum of shop shutters dragging open. By noon, it's already holding its breath, people packed into trains, their faces pressed to the glass, staring at a skyline that's never still. The city doesn't belong to anyone, least of all the ones trying to make it their own. Every corner presses against you, every new café you duck into raises a steeper price on your head, asking the question: do you even fit here anymore? I tell myself the art is alive too, breathing under its skin, bruisable. The best art, the real kind, has to be vulnerable, doesn't it? Like it's waiting to be hurt, or cracked open, that can wound if you look too closely. I try to write about art in this way, like it's a body in the room with me, something fragile, something with weight and heat, cautious as if I've stepped into a space that isn't really for me, but I'm still trying to make it my own, testing the edges, seeing where I can push before it pushes back. The art world, the city, all of it pressing against you, and you trying to find the gaps, the cracks where you can breathe. Because it doesn't belong to you, but you still want to live in it, to survive it, even when you know it's watching, waiting to see if you'll look too closely and fall through.
For the last two months, my neighbour has been leaving messages and drawings on our street. Late at night, she scatters photographs onto the pavement and pins little messages to the trees on the road. She only uses two Sharpies: red and green, and she signs every message with her name in all caps DONNA. I never see her in action; I can only imagine her. Other neighbours are annoyed, some have even complained to the Council. I don't mind it, in fact, every morning, as I make my way to work, I look forward to encountering her creations. It's unorthodox and unusual, but it has moved me more than any of the art I have seen inside museums this summer.
DONNA left me craving more, and unexpectedly, The White Pube's new book Poor Artists became a place to satiate my hunger. Co-written by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, the book is a strange amalgam of fiction and non-fiction, that invites us to explore art, not through the eyes of the gallery, the funder, or the curator but through the eyes of the artist. The story follows Quest Talukdar, a recent art school graduate, who slowly starts to unravel the peels of what ‘the art world’ really wants from them; and how that is in direct opposition to the reason why they became an artist in the first place: for the pure joy of painting.
Poor Artists is an educational journey that sources facts from real conversations with artists, invigilators, and Turner Prize winners, amongst many others. The story mixes anecdotes with strange, vividly descriptive scenarios, and examples of real-life art pieces and its style is fully eclectic: from Art Attack to Michelangelo, there is no stone left unturned, which makes the experience of reading it quite bizarre at times. Yet, the coherence of the ideas presented holds it all together in the form of a manifesto for hungry artists.
As the story progresses, and as Quest learns more and more about the precarious industry that they are trying to break into (no prospects, no financial security, no future, no success), they evolve into what I would classify as an ‘art world carer’. In the same way as a carer has to fulfil their tasks through the institution – with a deep reliance on the systems that enable stability – Quest develops a vision of the art industry that is self-aware, relentlessly critical and too invested in trying to fix a broken system from the inside. It's a survival strategy that I recognise in myself and other artists who are just trying to make something in a world that doesn't really care if you do.
“The fact is, most artists we know are just getting by,” Gabrielle told me. “They're scraping together work and barely paying rent, and all the art world wants from them is their identity to sell.”
Speaking to Gabrielle and Zarina, they relayed their approach to writing the book perfectly: “You know, there's only so many words in the English language to describe smells, so you have to get fun and funky with it. The lack of perfection when it comes to talking about art in language opens up new avenues for creative potential that we can exploit.” This book is an exploration of those avenues—new ways to talk about what is often locked up in systems too rigid for the messiness of creation.
But this isn't a neat book. It shouldn't be. As Gabrielle says, “We had to get weird with it to speak through that existentialism. And it wouldn't be true to art, I think, to have written it any other way.” Gabrielle and Zarina wrote Poor Artists for the people making art in between things, in between places. They wrote it for artists whose studios are on the bus, who scribble ideas on the backs of their hands or in notebooks stolen from Tesco, for artists who don't have studios, who don't have time, for whose art is squeezed out between shifts, between other lives.
I've made things on buses, too. Scribbled notes on the back of receipts during construction shifts, building the very city that now threatens to evict me. I left that job to write, to make art, only to find that writing doesn't pay rent, not in this city. Not in London. And now, I'm scraping by in the gaps between all the things London demands from me: rent, transport, food, space. I'm looking for a flat, waiting to be evicted from the one I have. I'm a freelancer now, which makes me a “liability” to landlords. I don't have savings. I'm not viable as a tenant. To sleep with a roof over my head, I am a liability. To have four walls around me, I am a liability. To live, I am a liability.
Gabrielle understands, telling me about the compromises she's had to make, too: “It's that thing, isn't it? How do you genuinely survive if you've made the decision to forgo a 9-to-5 stable income so that you can have more time and freedom to make art? The financial compromise to support my mental health only goes so far and then you get a toothache and the whole facade falls apart.” The White Pube doesn’t just comment on the struggle—they live it, and so does their protagonist Quest Talukdar in Poor Artists. Quest lies their way through the art world, padding their CV with exhibitions that never happened, residencies they never attended. And why not? The art world is built on illusions and pretence.
Poor Artists isn't a fairytale. There's no gallery representation, no cushy grant waiting for Quest at the end of the road. Quest moves back in with their mother, and leaves the city they love. They compromise because that's all they can do. Yet the book doesn't leave you hopeless. Gabrielle put it like this: “It's like Quest is constantly trying to figure out how much they can get away with. And that's something I think all artists should ask themselves.”
It would have been easier for The White Pube to present the thoughts and ideas they have been fermenting for nine years in essay form. Instead, they took a risk and decided to rely on surrealist scenarios to place the system into interrogation, thrusting a broken neoliberal Britain into the limelight, and making us bear witness to the unseen aspects of labour that hold the art world together. Muhammad and De la Puente have done so without shying away from a true representation of what this island has bred: precarity, inequality, exploitation and at times, even death. “We've been very publicly, loudly distasteful about authority,” Zarina explains, pointing to her cowboy tattoo. “That's a polite way of putting it. I feel like a cowboy interloper, in and out. Critics often hold power and authority, but our approach to criticism has been somewhat avoidant of that. It's strange to consider existing in the art world on our own terms while still engaging with institutions. There’s no happy way to calibrate a relationship with the art world. Even Quest's ending isn't a happy one; she makes several compromises. It's the least bleak way to conclude, but there's no positive relationship to be had with the art world from our position.”
While Poor Artists undeniably opens a new panorama for those who may not know the inside workings of art as a money-making industry, the book is so UK-centric that at times the value of the ideas presented may be lost in the specificity of Quest Talukdar's perception a British artist. Some of the assumptions made, such as the way in which artists need to sacrifice their own interests in order to get Arts Council money, or how the art scene in London is mostly made of people who care about art “as long as it's useful to their social standing”, are not universal.
It would be unfair to expect The White Pube, a critical outlet very much embedded in the British art scene, to also explore the international scene. Yet, when Quest attends a lecture delivered by an artist called Daisy inside a pool, all I could think of was the Mexican project La Albercada, which, from 2020 to 2022 repurposed abandoned empty pools in the city of Cuernavaca, Morelos as exhibition spaces.[1] One of the artworks presented by artist Juliana Alvarado showed a shovel pushed into a mound of dirt. The shovel reads: “Cuernavaca, segunda ciudad con más albercas en el mundo. Morelos, segundo lugar nacional en feminicidios”. [2]
As Quest dipped their toes in the water, I thought of this example, and of how, in countries where there is less available funding for the arts, the institutional restrictions and precarity have not led to the extinction of art altogether, but instead, they have led to work that is intrinsically political not because it's been labelled as such, but by its mere act of existing. As I correlated Quest's pool to the pools in La Albercada, I wondered, what would happen if Quest left Britain? Would they even exist?
Despite this, it is a breath of fresh air to experience the art world through a non-white body; full of uncomfortable gaps and empty promises, Quest's character is used to showcase how profitable it is for museums to tap into identity politics. More importantly, Quest allows us to understand (physically and emotionally) how it feels to be ‘othered’ and tokenised for the sake of the institution and the collector. What is most refreshing is that despite unveiling the hard reality of life as an artist, Quest's journey does end with hope: hope for a world that acknowledges the need for community, with art as the tool that can breach the gaps that individualism has created, art as “the weeds that emerge through the cracks in the pavement.”
Because that's the lesson Poor Artists leaves you with: refuse to cooperate with the reality that's been handed to you. Rewrite the story. Gabrielle elaborates, saying, “I think that's what art is mostly—fiction. It's people creating and making things up in their heads. So why not lean into that? If we all did it enough, we could lie our way into a better world. I don't want coping mechanisms because I don't want to have anything to cope with.” Or, as Zarina said at the end of our conversation, “Fuck it. Let's just lie. Big mad lies.” Maybe Quest doesn't get their gallery show, and maybe I won't get the flat, but that's not the point. The point is to keep moving through the cracks, and keep making things in the gaps. DONNA knows this, too. It's why I keep looking for her messages pinned to the trees, why I keep showing up every morning, hoping to see what she's left behind. Poor Artists throws us back into the world with full awareness that there is precarity in the arts and with the hope that perhaps, armed with the knowledge of this reality, we may be able to revalue art as a tool for active resistance and transformation. And as a consequence, we might change the way in which we perceive ourselves, the so-called ‘poor artists’ as standalone individuals, but as a whole ecosystem.
“I think one of the points of Poor Artists is to remember that community can be as rich as wealth," Gabrielle tells me. "There are many people in life who have no savings but they've got the most amazing friendships and family and neighbours around them.”
I finished the book feeling consoled by the knowledge that my artistic practice does not have to become a career to be valuable; it is embedded into my way of being. I should buy a copy for DONNA. After all, she is a veteran, a stubborn artist, making art against all odds. Using the street as her canvas, freaking out our uptight neighbours and giving some of us something to look forward to each morning. As I walk down the road, and I slow down to really notice things around me, I embrace this newfound sense of rebellion. There is no doubt, art tastes better outside the walls of the institution.
[2] “Cuernavaca, the second city with most pools in the world. Morelos (the state where Cuernavaca is), the second place with most feminicides in Mexico”.
Interview and additional writing by Bryson Edward Howe
Comments