how to create agency – A Handbook for Emerging Artists

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“Creating agency” is one of the three important parts you need to care about when having a feedback session (the other two are “preparing for feedback” and “reviewing a feedback session”).

Even though your work will be discussed by someone else, this doesn’t mean that you should be passive. Strive to create agency in feedback situations: by preparing for the situation (the previous point), by anticipating the course of the discussion, and by knowing that in the end it will be you who will analyze, and thus judge the feedback’s quality.
Consider the following steps:

Record the conversation: Recording the conversation lets you relive and review it at your convenience. This is easily done with your smartphone or tablet, and doesn’t require dedicated equipment or microphones. Before you record anything, make sure to ask for permission; be prepared to explain your intention: to review the feedback, and to more efficiently progress forward. You can even mention your nervousness, which sometimes results in you forgetting what was said.
If you can’t record, consider writing down your thoughts during the feedback session – this is something that is always possible, and doesn’t need anyone’s permission. You can even announce it upfront. If you feel embarrassed, or simply aren’t good at writing while listening, ask someone else to take notes for you. Instruct them what to look out for, so that they can focus on what you’re curious about. If you can’t record and don’t have anyone who can take notes for you, then write down your memories right after the feedback session is over.

Understand that recording and note-taking can also act as potent filter to proactively shield you from weird, imbalanced behaviors: awareness of being recorded can create a sort of “invisible authority”, a supporting power that might otherwise not be present.
Explain yourself: Use your prior preparations to now give a quick intro and overview on what you do, and how you understand your work. Explain your references, preferences and frustrations; and ask any specific questions that you might have. How you present your work has the power to influence the feedbacker’s focus. Use this to get feedback on what you most want.
Listen: After having done your preparations and introductions, it’s time to let your work speak for itself, to see where it takes the feedbacker. This is an exciting moment that might have seen you worried, giddy, and maybe even sleepless the previous night. Now listen as your work becomes a platform for someone’s thoughts. Learn to listen neutrally, without taking offense or pride. Don’t antedate the feedbacker’s opinion by interrupting them. Refrain from being dominant or shy; let there be space for the work to speak. This can be especially hard when the feedbacker takes a lot of time without saying anything, or if the work demands a lot of time (as in a performance or video work). Trust in the work you created, and listen.
Expect misunderstandings: Since everyone is and interprets differently, your work often won’t immediately be seen according to your intentions. That’s normal, and the reason why you want external feedback: to increase your knowledge on how to create work that’s concise enough to evoke what you want it to, without requiring your contextualization. It’s OK if, in your apprenticeship phase, your work is deemed to be plagiative, lacking art historical knowledge, etc. Don’t worry about these things – they are the reason why you wanted feedback.
Expect harshness: Even though art is a forum for highly individual content, the art world’s protagonists aren’t free of being judgemental. Even mellow, kind people can misunderstand your intentions, or might have an extremely bad day. In the worst case, you might receive feedback from someone intending to hurt you; for all these reasons, consider shielding yourself mentally from abuse: don’t believe everything that’s said. Don’t transfer authority over your work in general, and specifically not to someone who discusses it insensitively.

If worse comes to worse, consider asking questions like these: “How can you know so surely that the work isn’t good? Who defines what’s ‘good’? How can I know that I should listen to you? What would happen if I don’t? Couldn’t worthwhile work emerge from pursuing my voice further? If I would pursue your path only, wouldn’t this create a copy of your work?“

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We are all endlessly challenged by life, with a major obstacle being our frequent lack (or low degree) of agency. This also applies to artists, which is why increasing agency can often feel like a primary objective: to set up a life where your proactivity influences your fates as much and as competently as possible.

Agency is the capacity to act, and thus the result of all of a person’s experiences, thought patterns and psychological strategies – it doesn’t come easily or for free: it’s hard to do anything when depressed. There’s little agency available to a victim. It’s often the result of years of introspection, discussions, (self-)coaching or therapy. While every child has certain decision-making freedoms, a grown-up has deeper, harder, more challenging and potentially more consequential decisions to ponder.

As an artist, you want to make use of the creativity ascribed to children – the many ideas, hopes and dreams that can result in an artwork; your most precious challenge is to use your agency to pursue your art practice. At the same time, you need a firm grasp on the world, on reality: as potentially self-employed person, you need to navigate your life through both artistic practice and personal challenges, with ever-increasing business-savviness, self-knowledge and self-care. There’s little child-like about any of this. You need to develop a balance between the potentials of your inner child, and the necessities of being grown up. Every challenge lets you refine this balance anew. Yet quite obviously, some of the situations we’ll face will simply be too much for us. They can bring us to a stand-still.

How then to approach challenges? Consider the following template:

Analyse the situation: What’s going on?
- What’s the essence of the challenge?
- What are the intentions and goals of each of the challenges’ participants?
Create agency: You need to find out what room you have to maneuver the situation. Without this, there’s little space for agency. By starting to ponder your options, your agency begins to manifest. This removes you from self-victimization, and instead lets you become proactive. Ideally, you manage to create agency
- without causing harm to yourself (by compromising your core vision, collaborations, work, etc.), and
- without causing harm to others.
Implement the steps as envisioned: Life will always interfere with the dry theory of plans. The better you visualize your strategies upfront, the easier they might play out, and the better you will likely be prepared for alterations. The stronger your experience with the specific subject matter, the better your chances in manifesting your vision: how to stretch a canvas; how to sell a sculpture; how to end a gallery collaboration; which lawyer to involve. The better your knowledge about psychological aspects of yourself and the involved people, groups and cultures, the less friction there will usually be between theory and practice.
Do a postmortem: Reaching the finish line sees you more experienced: you moved through (or sidestepped) challenges, and experienced successes and/or failures. Yet how did you succeed or fail specifically? What’s the anatomy of the situation and your path through the challenge(s), analyzed retrospectively? The deeper your understanding of your experiences, the better you can be prepared for similar future experiences. The wider you dig into your experience, the better you can be prepared for further, slightly different future experiences: few situations result in only one lesson to learn. Most likely, there are all sorts of things to remember, for the next time a challenge arises. Consider:
- How spot-on was your original analysis? Were there specific aspects that unexpectedly were (in-)correct? Where did you succeed, and where did you fail miserably in understanding and anticipating the situation?
- How good was your strategy (to create agency)? If you understand your plan as a sum of actions with specific attributions: what were their consequences, and how could you have improved the result? Could you have reached the goal more smoothly, with less alienation or humiliation, or simply quicker or more efficiently?
- How did your implementation actually play out? Which aspects did you not consider correctly, in regards to people, situations, materials, processes etc? Which specific collaborators or negotiation partners, likes or dislikes emerged from this episode?

Our lives are built on experiences – yet experiences themselves aren’t always to be trusted; if you don’t invest time to reflect upon them, they can stay shallow. It usually pays off to interrogate your actions (and their outcome) both radically analytically and emotionally. You need to embrace yourself, hug yourself, and then still find out why things went wrong or right. With luck, this helps you understand the world.

The deeper you know yourself, the more likely you will find goals and strategies that will make your life bearable, and potentially exciting and fun. Noone can do this for you, since everyone’s truths differ. You can surround yourself with people who help you on this way – but the will to analyze yourself has to emerge from yourself. It’s the first and final step to being a person with agency, and thus the prerequisite to succeed as an artist.

Tag: how to create agency

How can I create agency in a feedback session?

How can I increase agency to proactively handle life?