Weediness as a quality of Art?
something i wrote down while I was at work
When I was walking in the town I saw some cool graffiti, and I thought, Hmm. Graffiti is a lot like weeds. It pops up in neglected and overlooked places, and thrives until someone destroys it in routine maintenance.
Like an ecosystem, art is a living system.
I quickly began to think of ways that graffiti and weeds are alike.
It is perceived as worthless or threatening economic incentives.
There are active efforts to destroy or eradicate it, which are eternally futile because of the aliveness of the system.
It appears in areas of active, violent neglect, disruption, and abandonment.
Its absence or presence can be a visual signal of class.
I thought, what are some other "weedy" artforms?
Fanfiction could be a weedy artform.
Huh, I thought. Are there domesticated or cultivated artforms?
It became clear to me that the answer was yes.
There are two types. One type is the crops: those plants that have daily necessity for all people. They are often monocultures, often highly exploitative, but they are a daily part of existence.
In art terms, this is pop culture and mass media: popular music, movies, tv shows.
The other type would be the ornamentals: those that are cultivated because they are perceived to have intrinsic value or beauty. These are the poems, paintings, sculptures, the arts that are seen as more intellectually important and more restricted in who has daily access.
Well, I thought then, are there "wild" artforms? And I thought that the answer once again had to be yes: that's textile arts, woodworking, pottery, basket making, arts that are often considered according to their practical value and not given the same consideration as fine arts. They are often romanticized and thought of as artifacts of the past to be preserved, and sometimes they are brought into cultivation (appreciation as fine arts), but they can lose their context and everyday usefulness. They are considered as threatened by economic incentives and efforts to protect them are perceived as wasteful.
Graffiti and fanfiction are weedy artforms. Are there others?
In addition to the qualities of weediness I listed up above, there is another quality: They get some of what they are from their antagonistic relationship with the mainstream view of what has value. They emerge in a space that is "owned" by another entity and thrive because there is no economical way to destroy them all faster than they can emerge. Likewise, Weeds are inherently (by some definitions) disrupting the intent of a space: they exist in defiance of what that space is "supposed to" be.
Fanfiction could be compared to weeds in an agricultural crop field: they spring up in the monoculture of popular media franchises and become more powerful and compelling than the environment that created them, even though many people will overlook their value.
Graffiti could be considered like lawn weeds: its presence has intense connotations of class, and the extermination campaigns are intense, but lawns that are neglected long enough (just like the walls of an abandoned building) can become places of diversity and thriving.
Weedy art could also be any art you create for yourself without special skill or economic incentive to do so, purely through intrinsic motivation. Many people kill these weeds before they grow into flowers, thinking that a common weed without any cultivation could never produce a beautiful flower, but if you let them grow you are often surprised. Doodles, drawings, anything you create could be weedy art.
Weeds are invincible on the evolutionary timescale, impossible to fully eradicate. They are our friends and have sustained us in many ways throughout human history. I read in a paper once a theory that true monoculture is only an idea in the human mind, never able to be truly realized, because weeds will always emerge and disrupt this false idea of perfection.
Certainly, our ecosystems are held together and sustained with life within this gap between how we imagine the world should be (clean, perfect, without weeds) and how the world really is (weeds! weeds! WEEDS!). Without weeds, the biodiversity in the world around us would crash dramatically.
Is this also true of weedy arts? Is the art we value the least and often actively try to eradicate, necessary for sustaining us as creative human beings?
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