lust for life
on being an amateur
Truth be told, I’m a hedonist.
Pleasure, and by extension comfort, motivates so much of what I do. Whether that’s curating the perfect driving playlist, a comfort rewatch of RHOSLC, or the initial viewing of a long-awaited roll of photos sent out for development, what I’m really chasing in all of these quotidian acts is that feeling of serendipitous delight that comes with doing something you love.
The French word amateur was once also used to describe one who loves. Derived from the Latin amator (lover), amateur described someone who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport free of any monetary goal or material motives–as an admirer, as a devotee, as a lover. In 1777, amateur entered the English lexicon for the first time, used in its literal sense by Philip Howard, but by 1790 the English use of amateur had already taken on a condescending, if not derogatory, connotation. While today we associate the word with incompetency and the lack of a professional skill set, it once was used in affection for personal passion(s).
To some, this may seem like an inconsequential shift in meaning. You might think it’s unsurprising that since amateur pursuits tend to result in more ‘low quality’ results the word has taken on a more depreciative meaning, granted amateur pursuits usually occur outside institutional modes of knowledge production (i.e. think tanks, trade schools, higher education, accreditation). But it’s irresponsible to assume that institutional practice has more quality, more legitimacy, than any amateur pursuit once you consider how wholly Western institutional knowledge production is invested in both white supremacy and capitalism. It’s no coincidence that amateur pursuits have become bastardized in the context of film, sports, music, even porn. Why on earth would the global and overlapping projects of colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy allow communities, especially marginalized communities, to generate creative and cultural work without paying the price of institutional validation? What could you possibly do or create without the gatekeeping that comes with degrees, certificates, and awards and still be considered valid?
As the definition of amateurism has crept closer to suggesting incompetence, capitalist society has largely disparaged the efforts of those considered too poor, undignified, and unrefined; designating amateurity along racial and class lines. A case can also certainly be made that amateur production doesn’t exactly fuel a profit driven society. In Work Won’t Love you Back, Sarah Jaffe chronicles how “‘doing what you love’ is a recipe for exploitation,” especially when the work in question “is making other people rich while we [workers] struggle to pay rent.”
Now, if we were all to pursue what we loved free of capital constraints, instead of the work that pushes profit margins, the economy would be smaller, less inflated, and less competitive. But we’d also be happier and more creative people, working, playing, and doing under the auspices of our own pleasure and fulfillment as opposed to the expectations of capitalistic labor. However, under capitalism, to wholly devote yourself to do what you love requires time, and time requires money. If we are to make a living through our passions, those passions will become a professional pursuit–no longer amateur–and often a method(s) of survival. If without the privilege of disposable income and wealth, the work that impassioned professionals produce is inherently tinged by market goals; what you love to do must now be guided by profitability. In the words of Jaffe, “it is not a victory to have work demand our love.”
This small shift in meaning has so many different repercussions for how people conceive of and do what they love to do. For how passion becomes intrinsically tied to labor power. Under capitalism, our passions are threatened into becoming our business. That a capitalist society could enact such consequential semantic shifts in the way we describe our own affection for the things we love to do is tragic, if not devastating to amateurists who dare to dream bigger than their resumes and bank accounts.
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I, for one, have always been an amateur artist. A self-proclaimed multimedia creative and filmmaker (without much technical training or education in either visual art or film), I often feel like those labels are closer to lies than truth. I have never felt like my creative pursuits are entirely valid, let alone anywhere near the realm of being professional. Often, I feel like the real work for me is in working against my own chronic imposter syndrome (more on that later).
Despite this, I love making films and video art. I am obsessed with how film has given me a vehicle to externalize the way I understand the world through an audiovisual format, capturing both intimate and performed scenes between me and my loved ones, creating memories. I love that my exploration of film and video has been able to exist outside of cinematic expectations, deadlines and paychecks. When I create, I’m interested in telling stories that resonate with my community, rather than a market, and it’s allowed me to tell stories that are more honest, maybe even authentic. That I am a hobbyist or amateur filmmaker does not begin to acknowledge the level of care and intentionality that goes into the work I do. Nor does it preclude my ability to create something that is worthwhile, successful even. What being an amateur does is classify my work as invalid.
The last video project I completed was my undergraduate senior thesis. Originally a personal passion project, I chose to make it doubly function as an academic project once Covid-19 prevented my original plan from panning out the way I hoped it would. The project took the form of a series of home movies capturing my senior year, inquiring into the function of amateur films as a valid form of documentation and archival. I argued that the inclusion of private memories, in the form of the home movies that I created, into the academic archive and in public discourse would liberate the archive by creating a more wholistic and varied narrativization of the past. The home movies I recorded mostly depicted my queer friends of color going about their daily lives, mostly at play and in community with each other, within the ivory tower.
I’ll be the first to admit that my home movies aren’t perfect; completed remotely on an inadequate processor, the editing process was grueling, and mostly limited to footage I’d shot before the onset of Covid-19. They are simplistic and straight forward in nature, relaying a series of clips in chronological order with little audio effect. Despite this, they are honest, genuine relics of a time eclipsed by global catastrophe. And that's the point; that these home movies could be lo-fi, amateurish, and without a prescriptive narrative arc, and still have meaning and value for my intended audience. These amateur films are fulfilling not because they could sell, but because the otherwise immaterial memories they depicted are now able to be enjoyed and replayed by loved ones.
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Looking back, validity was an inadequate term for what I actually was trying to explore in my thesis. What I really wanted to acknowledge was that art (and anything, really) doesn’t need to be valid to be real, to be respected, discussed, and enjoyed. Validity and the idea of being validated by an external influence is simply another unfortunate product of neocolonialism and white supremacy, in it’s positing of alternative and deviant modes of existing as an invalid origin that needs to be corrected, or validated. So often is validity tied to success in contemporary culture and discourse, that we often trick ourselves into believing that being valid is the only pathway to fulfillment. The cult of validity may lead you to believe that you need to be connected to certain people or institutions in order to legitimize what you do, that you need to gain the approval of your peers in every aspect of your life to be good. Hell, it’s even shaped the way we speak; in NYC, valid slangily can be defined as being attractive or cool. And this is not to say amateurs cannot or don’t ever make it in their respective fields. This is more to say, “why should validation be a sole arbiter of fulfillment for the things we love to do?”
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A few weeks ago, while rewatching Soul (2020), I realized that the film’s protagonist Joe Gardener also struggled with this dilemma of feeling like he wasn’t good enough at doing what he loved. An amateur pianist and substitute teacher who dreamed of one day becoming a professional jazz musician, Joe traversed corporeal and disembodied realms in pursuit of fulfillment, of what he thought to be success. It was only after becoming a valid, or real jazz musician that Joe had to face the fact that validation alone did not fulfill his lust for life. Instead, it was his own love of playing the piano that fulfilled him from the very start. The Disney film–which was curiously existential for a children’s movie–served as a perfect allegory for this essay; how capitalist society sends us on never-ending searches for what so clearly is abundant from the very beginning. Joe had always been a rather talented musician–what he wasn’t, was a believer in his truth, in his own passion.
Even though I make “amateur” art, I know that I am a very real and effective storyteller. Despite anxieties surrounding the greater trajectory of my career and insecurities stemming from a lack of material resources, my lust for life, for art-making, for telling stories that make my heart sing (and cry), has led me to everything I’ve ever been proud of. It’s what I live to do. That I wake up most days and want to take silly little photos and make videos and write essays entirely for my own pleasure is a testament to everything capitalism hasn’t been able to take from me. Like Joe, I have big dreams of making it someday… but I have even bigger dreams of a day where “making it” is a thing of the past. Being an amateur is radical, imperfect, and emergent in ways that continue to nourish my soul.
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