Creative Responses Blog

In The Beggar’s Strike, I came to the confounding realization that we are all in fact a form of a beggar. This is not to undermine the struggles that an impoverished beggar must face, nor does this take away the intense privileges we all have incurred. But I believe that privilege in itself throws us into a position similar to that of a beggar because we are in privilege due to something — we are privileged over someone else — and this constant comparison of privilege vs non-privilege is what incentives us to earn, to gain, to profit. We are part of an economic system, and I believe that these incentives, though liberating for those who can achieve, are also restrictive in terms of humanity and human freedom. We are incentivized by profits, but how many of these profits are truly given to those who cannot follow incentives, to those with less ability to say participate in the market? For this reason I created a form of ambiguity and connections — there are several outlying houses connected by strips of charcoal to one main center — perhaps a city, but it shows that we are all part of a large system, and regardless of how privileged we are, we must all act as part of this. In a sense, because a beggar does not have the privilege to take part in an economic market as much as another, he has more freedom because he is not incentivized by the lures of achievement in the same way. He is incentivized by survival. And I think that we all are, at some point, similar to this.

~ by dmuhleisen on December 5, 2015.