AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

by Joseph Guisti

I am an artist. I don’t feel the need to legitimate that statement, but because my audience (and perhaps an ex-girlfriend or two) might argue with me, allow me to frame what I do in an artist’s vocabulary: I create performance-based works which rely heavily on pastiche, sampling, re-contextualization and pop culture. I blend and temporally arrange popular media pieces which take inspiration from a wide variety of contemporary genres and folk practices. I create these works with the help of my audience, who have also assisted me in compiling the mountains of source material I draw from in each installation. I occasionally perform for myself or small groups of friends, but the majority of my performances are funded. Sometimes I even perform half-naked.
I’ll cut the suspense and tell you what medium I work in. I’m a DJ. I work in LA, birthplace of the motion picture industry, the adult entertainment industry, and the West Coast art world. It’s an incredibly diverse population comprised of persons from all races, classes, genders and sexual orientations who will all, at one time or another, dance to music played by a DJ. This is not a job I signed up for, or even sought out. Instead, it’s something I fell into one night while I was attempting to make art. It has become one of my most liberating mediums for self expression, but at times it is also my most stifling and frustrating. I have a feeling that anyone reading this who has called themselves an artist has, at one point or another, felt the same way about their own medium. The great thing about Artists’ Meeting Place is that it not only gives us access to resources and friends from all over the world, it also gives us a space to talk about our lives as artists. So instead of writing a hip, slick and cool piece about what it’s like to DJ in Los Angeles, I decided to write about craft-as-art (and art-as-craft).

I have a wealth of experientially-gleaned and (as of yet) disorganized personal opinions on this subject, and if you are feeling frustrated about your trajectory as someone with the dual needs to afford food and express yourself artistically, I urge you to build some of these opinions for yourself. In the process, you might reframe the way you see yourself as an artist.

The majority of my work nights begin stressfully. I show up an hour before the event starts (usually running late) and run a combination of impression-management and damage control with my clients or their staff. I exclusively play private parties, as the club scene isn’t for me. I could be working anything from a hipster house party to a wedding. As the night builds, I feel out my crowd, do my best to get people involved, strategically line up songs that I know will induce the euphoria of familiarity, and attempt to introduce some people to some new and hip stuff they might not be familiar with. It’s all a game I play with time, pacing and control. It’s about knowing when to step in and when to pull back. I often joke that I’m a combination of control-freak and designated-party-bitch. Usually I do a killer job and everyone ends up sweaty and crazed-looking. Sometimes I take people to a more introspective and vibe-heavy place and we end up communing that way. Sometimes I plan on introspective and vibe-y and the crowd pulls me into a night of back-to-back gangster rap jams and booty bass. It’s all fun. It’s all work. And it’s all a way to communicate the human experience in an abstract way that can be shared with those who know what to look for, so . . . it’s all art, too.

I didn’t start out playing anything that could be used to get a crowd jumping around. I started out opening for punk bands at warehouse spaces, mixing a combination of original synthesizer music and field recordings into ambient soundscapes. I was more comfortable with the title “sound designer” or “sound installation artist” than “musician,” and I was far from embracing the term “entertainer.” There was something about the term “entertaining” that just didn’t legitimize the experience I was trying to share with my sound pieces.

Then one night the lineup was full, so instead of opening for punk bands upstairs to a crowd of metal-heads and scenesters, the promoter put me downstairs in the bar and told me to play whatever I wanted to play. The crowd was mixed. There were lots of girls who had come with their boyfriends but preferred to drink and laugh with their friends at the bar rather than committing to a stuffy moshpit upstairs. I wasn’t about to make them listen to a bunch of melancholy soundscapes while they drank their vodkatinis, so I started ransacking my iTunes for dance music that I could shove through my performance software. Between early 90s hip hop anthems and a few iconic post-punk jams, I managed to scrape up enough songs to keep everyone dancing until 2 am. The crowd responded in a way that I had never experienced: girls were flirting with me. People were cheering me on with chants of “go DJ!” It was more attention than I had ever received as an “artist,” so I felt like I had cheated. At the same time, I was in control and had just created something that people loved. Sort of. I kind of cheated. But did I?

I’d rather not delve into a gauche attempt to define art, so allow me––based on my personal feelings about what art means to me––to posit that surrendering to a spirit of service (and a rather constrained artistic “vision”) has paradoxically created a certain kind of freedom with which to find a new voice I was blocked off from while I was struggling to inject synthesizers with emotional discourse.

I will concede to a few things. One of them is that I do not always feel “artistic” in what I do. Sometimes it’s just a job, and I play “Sweet Caroline” and “Brick House” for under-appreciative wedding clients with bad attitudes and even worse taste. I often long for a space where, at least once a week with no strings attached, I could perform for people in whichever style moves me at the moment. I will also concede to the fact that this sort of reframing––thinking of myself as an artist––takes a bit of rhetorical work, and does not come immediately.

While I am far from placing myself in the “everything can be seen as art” camp, I do appreciate the subtle joys in making creative decisions in an otherwise constraining craft. As artists, we might be doing any number of jobs on a day-to-day basis which fall below our dreams of achieving universal intellectual notoriety, but if you are like me and are lucky enough to be in a craft which parallels your passion, try reframing your experience as an exercise in socially-directed creation. I’m learning that my most successful creative moves are the result of my commitment to a spirit of selfless service to my audience. I once wanted to make sound art. I now realize that I just wanted to share meaning with as many people as possible by sequencing sounds in time. My laptop is making very different sounds now than it was when I was playing warehouse spaces four years ago. But I’m stitching stuff together, doing things that people before me haven’t done, and pulling it off with a skill that could hardly be described as artless.