It’s a simple yet ineffable truth that lies at the heart of Alec Soth’s new exhibition Advice for Young Artists: you have to be in it to win it, no matter what your age is – here, the artist tells AnOther about the show
The ballad of the mid-career artist has gone largely unsung, its challenges and rewards often growing more prosaic with age. Under the weight of career, the balance between ingenuity and continuity often collapses into cliché – but not for photographer Alec Soth. At 55, Soth strides into middle age with a decidedly Gen-X jaunt with Advice for Young Artists, opening March 7 at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and travelling to Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco in April. Drawn from his eponymous monograph from Mack Books, the exhibition brings together works made while visiting 25 undergraduate art programmes across the United States between 2022 and 2024.
The title is a comforting nod to our desire for guidance and wisdom from those we admire and respect; Soth, being anything but pedantic and grandiose, hops off the pedestal to stand shoulder to shoulder with readers. He adopts the age-old wisdom “show, don’t tell” that writers know so well, offering a poetic take on the imperfect art of creativity. For Soth, it begins with immersion in spaces where desire is met with the thrill of limitless possibility.
It’s a rush that he remembers from his first exhibition in 1995, perfectly preserved in a recently rediscovered video made with a shaky handheld camera. The video zooms in and out on the band at a queasy speed, inducing a flashback to that night 30 years ago. “I think we all experience this movement of time as we get older, where a split second gives you one of those dizzying, surreal moments looking back at your life very quickly and thinking, what did this feel like then?” Soth says. “This was all new. My first exhibition, the whole world’s opening up – and what does it feel like now? I have an exhibition opening in a couple days, and another one next month; and where does it feel vital to me?”
Perhaps the answer lies in the question itself: the curiosity and desire that drives Soth to seek out authentic spaces in which to make art as his guiding star. Drawn to the kinetic energy of BFA programmes, Soth leveraged his profile to gain access to these creative realms without having to engage with formal hierarchies ascribed to the “visiting artist”. After receiving the campus tour, he would disappear into the crowd, moving freely among the students as though he were one of them. “Sometimes I would talk to the students and ask if I could photograph them, but often they wouldn’t have any clue who I was or what I was doing there,” Soth says. “I would kind of explain, but they weren’t necessarily photography students and didn’t know my reputation, which was great.”
Advice for Young Artists is an elegantly subversive take on the shopworn trope of self-help publishing. Amid the interior studies, still lifes and portraits, Soth carefully pens a few simple thoughts on neon Post-It notes like “Patience etc”, “Everything I know”, and “What do you want, really?” Spoken aloud, they might sound trite to those seeking hard and fast answers to life’s most striking questions, but when contemplated as one might a koan, an elemental truth is wordlessly revealed. “Advice is one of those things that has to catch you at the right moment,” Soth says. “It’s related to art education, it’s so hard to pinpoint what it is. It’s not usually a specific thing that does it; it’s being in proximity to energy that opens up a channel and being exposed to that.”
It’s a simple yet ineffable truth that lies at the heart of Advice for Young Artists: you have to be in it to win it, no matter what your age is. Easy answers lie in elements like technique, but talent alone is not enough. For Soth, it is the intangible spark of creation, a secret alchemy, that must be tended throughout life. But how to convey this without sounding trite? Words alone are not enough. “Tap into that openness – that’s a ridiculous thing to say to someone,” Soth says. “It’s like telling someone to relax. It’s not very helpful.”
However, leading by example is a good place to start. With Advice for Young Artists, Soth stands at the crossroads between the literal and figurative, living by the Gen X coda: Do It Yourself. Subvert hierarchies. Dismantle tropes. Reinvent paradigms. And above all, resist the slavish call of careerism. Why not find an empty room, push a desk against the door, disrobe completely, put on a mask, and take a nude self-portrait just to see if Andy Warhol was right when he said, “Art is anything you can get away with.”
Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists is on show at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York until April 18, and at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco from from April 17-May 23.
