The Myth of the Calling

In 1969, Michel Foucault stood before the Société Française de Philosophie and asked a question that still unsettles anyone who has ever introduced themselves by profession: what is an author? His answer was not the one his audience expected. The author, he argued, is not a person who precedes the work, pouring some pre-existing genius onto the page. The author is an author-function; a position manufactured after the fact, assembled by the very texts, institutions, and critical languages that claim only to be describing it.¹ I think about this probably more than is healthy, because I have spent two decades failing to answer a much smaller question: what am I? Artist. Art historian. Teacher. The order changes depending on who’s asking and how recently I’ve sold a painting. Each label arrives pre-loaded with its own mythology, and none of them, I’ve come to realise, were waiting inside me at birth like a vocation to be discovered. They were built. We like to talk about “calling” as though it were a signal transmitted from somewhere private and true; a frequency only the calling knows how to receive. Vocation, from vocare, to call.

Nobody actually experiences their working life this way, not really. I didn’t wake up as a child in possession of the category “artist.” I acquired it, incrementally, the way you acquire a passport stamp: through an art school that told me my brushwork counted as evidence, through a gallery that hung my work and therefore ratified the claim, through the small ceremonial act of writing “artist” on immigration forms without anyone laughing. The vocation didn’t produce the artist. The apparatus produced the artist, and the vocation was the story I told myself to make the sequence feel inevitable rather than administrative. This is not, I promise, an exercise in professional nihilism. I spent this year writing about a museum in Ho Chi Minh City that renames a Vietnamese artist, moves his portrait into a gilded frame, and declares him a “master”. Not because the paint changed, but because the institutional grammar around him did.²

The painting didn’t get better. Its author-function got upgraded. Watching that happen at the scale of a national museum made something click about my own much smaller biography: none of us are exempt from the mechanism. We are all, quietly, being upgraded or downgraded by the language spoken around us, whether that language belongs to a curator, a critic, an exam board, or an art teacher deciding whose work goes on the corridor wall. Teaching has only sharpened this. Every August I watch teenagers arrive convinced they are either “creative” or they aren’t, as if it were a blood type. Part of my job is to dismantle that myth without dismantling their confidence, which is a harder trick than it sounds. I try to show them what Foucault was really pointing at: that the “artist” they’re anxious about becoming is not a fixed essence waiting to be unlocked by innate talent, but a position built through practice, feedback, critique, repetition, and (crucially) other people’s willingness to call it art. Which means it is buildable. Which, if you think about it, is considerably more hopeful than the alternative.

None of this makes the vocation less real, only differently located. If the artist is a construct rather than an origin, then the labour of vocation isn’t self-discovery (excavating some buried true self) but self-construction in public, under conditions you didn’t fully choose and can’t fully control. I’ve moved through China, South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam telling people I was a painter and an art historian long before either title felt earned. I’ve come to think the feeling of having earned it never fully arrives because it isn’t a threshold you cross, it’s a discourse you keep participating in. Foucault’s insight isn’t a demotion. It’s a redistribution of responsibility, away from some mystical inner summons and towards the much less romantic, much more workable question of who is doing the calling, and whether we’re willing to keep answering.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1979 [1969]), pp. 196–210. ↩

2. Author’s own research on the Quang San Art Museum’s display of Lê Phổ’s Maternity (c.1938), Ho Chi Minh City, 2025. Essay: To what extent does the QSAM’s institutional display of Lê Phổ’s Maternity (1938) challenge centre-periphery structures of value established during its colonial production and reception? ↩