The recent death of Steve Jobs—visionary icon of the fetishization of rebellion that testifies to the porousness of the distinction between hegemony and counterculture, if not the latter’s complicity with the former—is as momentous a time as any to re-examine a subject position inhabited by numerous cultural workers of varying degrees of expertise that over the years has been growing more and more visible: that of the Independent Artist. The surprising number of festivals, platforms, grants, and residencies that have been sprouting all over the world that cater to the work of independent artists—in short, the amount of institutional support independent artists have been receiving of late, whether tokenist or sustainable—be it in the visual arts, music, film, theater, but especially dance, renders the task relevant not only to artists themselves and the cultural technocrats artists engage with but also to taxpayers and consumers who indirectly finance the support independent artists have been receiving and sustain an emergent economy that positions a particular mode of production within relations of cultural exchange and capital-accumulation. Simple Questions for the Independent Artist: A Handbook is one attempt at such a re-examination. The outcome of discussions between Filipino choreographer-curator Donna Miranda, Filipino poet-critic Angelo V. Suarez, and Australian dance artists Nikki Heywood, Matthew Day, Sam Chester, Alexandra Harrison, and Dean Walsh within the span of a 3-week residency—curated/provoked by Julie-Anne Long and implemented by Emma Saunders—at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Australia, the booklet is meant not so much to disprove the existence of this subject position but to investigate the conditions that allow such an aporetic construct to come into being. The investigation, however, is by no means complete, and the lack of a conclusion—consciously kept out of reach—is foregrounded in the deployment of interrogatives rather than declaratives, each question appearing simple enough to be answerable by yes or no without losing the density of critique.
The writing—let alone the printing—of Simple Questions for the Independent Artist: A Handbook would not have been possible without the support of Campbelltown Arts Centre, directed by Michael Dagostino, and its dance program, curated by Emma Saunders. Our gratitude goes to Julie-Anne Long as well, Ms. Saunders’ predecessor as curator of the dance program, for inviting Donna Miranda for participation in a residency platform whose focus is “to challenge and explore existing thinking and practices around the context of working as an independent artist, both inside and outside ‘institutions’” and for providing the impetus to critically reconsider the relationship between independent artists and institutions. That this handbook is a product of such a relationship needs to be underscored. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance extended by the Australian Embassy in Manila.
