Self Organise: Artists Take Control
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This presentation crutinises how art practitioners are navigating the artworld, which in our contemporary, late capitalist society is arguably, increasingly regulated by free market conditions, managed in the artworld by the same bureaucrats, curators, dealers and gallery owners, roles that have encroached on the career of artists themselves.
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Self Organise: Artists Take Control
- 2. Aims: • To analyse the conditions in which contemporary art is produced • To (re) evaluate your function as an artist within a broad context • Address making a living in the current climate of instability and enforced austerity • Consider issues of free labour, particularly internships, in the cultural sector
- 3. Naomi Siderfin in her essay Occupation Hazard, states that to contemplate the sheer number of practicing artists in Britain is sobering
- 4. The increasingly perilous financial circumstances of artists
- 7. “For the large numbers of students enrolled on art courses, conviction in their vocation is contradicted by the lack of official acknowledgement for the occupation on the world outside education.” (Naomi Siderfin Occupational Hazard. P.30)
- 8. • Despite its rarefied status, there is very little money to be made from contemporary art, when compared to average income levels, at least not for artists • Individual artists and ARIs function with some proportion of income coming from patronage, be it state, commercial or private The exceptional economy of the arts
- 9. I know what you did last summer: Internships, invigilation and exploitation The ongoing casualisation of the labour force and the commonly held misconception that artists should work for nothing.
- 10. The romanticised view of privileged artists in search of a precarious existence and artists complicity in the reproduction of their precarious conditions
- 11. The desire for flexibility and independence can trump security. But these prospects of flexibility and freedom may already have morphed into insecurity and exploitation for most young artists.
- 12. The Rise of the Volunteer Autonomy without resources, independence without the economic and social means to counter existing inequalities
- 13. Addressing this situation is complicated because our desire to produce culture and to be free and creative is entangled in the manipulations of unpaid work.
- 14. • Parallel to instrumentalisation is self-organisation • Instrumentalisation is cultural production being mediated by public and commercial institutions, from government to galleries
- 16. ARIs, grassroots galleries, run by artists on a voluntary basis Reinforces the idealist convention of artists being dependent on subsidy that furthermore endangers their sustainability
- 17. Highlighted the underlying economic disparities and antagonisms that exist within the art world
- 18. Collective Cultural Action Collective action solves some of the problems of navigating the market-driven cultural economy by allowing the individual to escape the skewed power relationships with the institution.
- 19. Re-activate: art as creative collaboration
Notes de l'éditeur
- Last week we looked at how ARIs have articulated the desire of artists for more direct control over their professional lives. We saw how a generation of artists disillusioned and dissatisfied by the prevailing established mechanisms of the artworld emerged and created a legacy and blueprint for future generations who were interested in how they could produce and exhibit with less mediation by bureaucrats, curators, dealers or gallery owners.
- So today’s lecture scrutinises how art practitioners are navigating the artworld, which in our contemporary, late capitalist society is arguably, increasingly regulated by free market conditions, managed in the artworld by the same bureaucrats, curators, dealers and gallery owners, roles that have encroached on the career of artists themselves. Aims of todays lecture: To analyse the conditions in which contemporary art is produced To (re) evaluate your function as an artist within a broad context Address making a living in the current climate of instability and enforced austerity Consider issues of free labour, particularly internships, in the cultural sector
- Occupational Hazard Naomi Siderfin in her essay ‘Occupation Hazard’ (in the book of the same name), states that to contemplate the sheer number of practicing artists in Britain is sobering
- Reflecting on the cumulative effect of recruiting increasing numbers of art students in the UK during 1960s, Siderfin points out that this has meant that all those stating their occupation as artist represent the successes and casualties of art school higher education since that time. Siderfin goes on to say that, given the increasingly perilous financial circumstances of artists their sheer numbers are baffling. Apart form anything else, to officially admit to that occupation generally ensures a zero credit rating with banks.
- So what is it that motivates so many art graduates to live in near penury (poverty), juggling a number of low or no pay positions, making work for little financial recompense? Wanting to make art is of course an important motive.. In addition Siderfin offers another explanation, that of a moral pressure. For thousands of individuals officially sanctioned (through education) as artists, the pressure to continue working after art school is fairly intense. There is an unwritten code, perhaps absorbed at art school, which insinuates itself into the artist’s psyche; it says that the art school graduate should continue to practice whatever the odds, or risk exposure as a failure or, worse, as ‘never really having been an Artist in the first place’. This somewhat romantic pressure results in low expectations on many levels in terms of making a living from your art practice. The low levels of income on which artists (and indeed many other industries other that the creative industries) are still prepared to survive and the extent to which, by doing so, they wittingly or unwittingly subsidise national culture is surely what we would call Institutionalised Precarity. This precariousness refers specifically to a set of conditions, such as insecurity, instability and vulnerability, that affects not just the worklife of an individual, but of course, by extension their life, the inevitable knock on effects of financial insecurity.
- There are a number of long standing campaigns that work towards ensuring that the worth of artists is recognised and that a Artists are by no means alone in facing this situation, low wages, freelance, part-time work and the inherent instabilities and associated exploitation is of course endemic in our increasingly financially polarised society.
- Fundamentally, the condition of precarity plays out via short-term contracts, no-contract work, bad pay, deprivation of rights and status, competition and pressure, high rent, lack of accessible public services, etc. As I said, precarity is not linked to a specific type of employment status, but manifests itself through an insecurity whereby one is at the mercy of others, always having to beg, network and compete in order to be able to pursue one’s labour and life. Precarity is the paradoxical state of being both overworked and insecure at once, regardless of being employed or not. For instance, consider the work involved in applications for funding, residencies, even voluntary positions in the art world, with no guarantee of success or advancement. Such disparities are again highlighted by Naomi Siderfin: “For the large numbers of students enrolled on art courses, conviction in their vocation is contradicted by the lack of official acknowledgement for the occupation on the world outside education.” (Naomi Siderfin
- A key issue that underpins the value of artists, cultural, financial or otherwise is emphasised when we consider how much of the art world now runs on intern or voluntary labour Across the board, commercial galleries, arts publications, museums, non-profits, and other arts employers now use interns and volunteers for longer periods, for instance a year or two is not uncommon and there is zero guarantee of any paid work, these arts employers or exploiters, use volunteers in greater numbers, in fact often interns may outnumber regular staff. Interns are utilised to perform a wider range of tasks: assisting artists, design, marketing, fundraising, and other core needs. In what Hans Abbing has described as “the exceptional economy of the arts” the majority of this labour goes unpaid. The reliance on a willingness to work for free in the arts, for example, means those who can afford to work unpaid are at a distinct advantage in this sector. This leads not only to the exclusion of those who cannot afford to work for free, but also perpetuates a culture of poor working conditions where unpaid overtime is the norm, the minimum wage regulations are often ignored and competition among peers becomes even more fierce. To put this concisely: Despite its rarefied status, there is very little money to be made from contemporary art, when compared to average income levels, at least not for artists. Individual artists and ARIs function with some proportion of income coming from patronage, be it state, commercial or private.
- Internships, invigilation and exploitation Much of the art world today operates as if artists were not workers and as if labour standards do not apply. Internships are a significant case in point and deserve to analysed further—they are replacing entry-level jobs and appear to be pushing aside older, more informal ways of cutting one’s teeth in the arts, such as apprenticeship, time spent overseas, membership in a particular movement, vanguard or scene. Interns also take their place within, and in some sense are preparing themselves for, a broader almost unquestioned hierarchy of precarious work in the arts, where both commercial success and secure, well-paid work is a vanishingly scarcity. What concerns me, and indeed influential scholars such as Angela McRobbie, is the ongoing casualisation of the labour force and the commonly held misconception that artists should work for nothing. In an broader context, rather than providing opportunities for emerging artists, unpaid internships are precisely one of the mechanisms for the erosion of decent working conditions (and therefore a decent life) for everyone. Interns and volunteers are fast becoming a structural necessity, they are in fact masking the collapse of the cultural sector, hiding the exodus, the dismantling of public resources from these activities and thus preventing the general public from perceiving the unsustainability of the situation. In this landscape, interns offer both a solution and a threat. They fill in the ever-widening gaps between ambitions and cash, but they also legitimise the exploitative nature of no or low paid cultural work – reminding those who are employed in the sector that there is always someone ready to do your job for free (if they can afford to).
- So whilst the number of artists has multiplied, at the same time, the nature of work in the art world has grown more precarious despite a sustained boom in the international art market, a proliferation of new arts institutions and workplaces, and the vaunted rise of an artist-driven “creative class” that Richard Florida touted in his texts The Rise of the Creative Class and its sequel, The Flight of the Creative Class. The artist has become the immanent glorification of precarious work, seen both as model and material for “cool hunters”, branding bureaucrats, and real estate speculators. Concern that the arts is becoming what artist Andrea Fraser calls a “luxury goods business”, linked to four decades of widening inequality, is at an all-time high. Yet the romanticised view of privileged artists in search of a precarious existence and artists own complicity in the reproduction of their precarious conditions persists. the creative worker has become a symbolic economic figure, driving growth, setting lifestyle trends and reshaping urban environments. The ‘self-actualising‘ and infinitely flexible (and exploitable) ‘creative‘ becomes the ideal towards which all work should strive, setting a corrosive example and encouraging a series of expectations around non-waged labour that infiltrate the entirety of productive and social relations.
- PLAY LINK … most artists choose to work part-time, so that they have time to have a studio practice”. Part-time internships, volunteering, freelance gigs, temporary projects, and other precarious forms of art world work are thus often welcome—the desire for flexibility and independence can trump security. But these prospects of flexibility and freedom may already have morphed into insecurity and exploitation for most young artists.
- The rise of the volunteer It‘s ‘autonomy‘ without resources, independence without the economic and social means to counter existing inequalities While the cost of basic living, education, food and housing shoots up, voluntary work poses as a civic and moral good; a way in which we can all chip in to some phantom collective national recovery effort, where we are all in it together.
- As I’ve stated, unpaid internships and volunteering naturalise exploitation, institutionalise hierarchies and produce isolated individuals. Addressing this situation is complicated because our desire to produce culture and to be free and creative is entangled in the manipulations of unpaid work. So the question then is how do artists address and challenge the various forms of instrumentalisation, that determine their choices and possibilities? Art has long been instrumentalised, however recent developments are linked with changes in the global economy. Furthermore the structure of the wider labour market is also being framed around the need for self-motivated and self-regulated workers. In the last decade or so there have been discussions about the artist as a role model, not only for the entrepreneur but also for the contemporary worker. Artists as a flexible, self-motivated and innovative individuals is being touted as the ideal for a large portion of the workforce in our deregulated labour market. What does this mean for artists themselves? How can artists survive under the present circumstances?
- Reassuringly enough, when the control of cultural production moves so much in this one direction, counterweights always arise. In this case, parallel to instrumentalisation is self-organisation. According to independent curator and writer Maria Lind, artists’ self-organised initiatives will play an increasingly important role in the future, particularly initiatives which take a counter-position in relation to mainstream culture and especially instrumentalisation. To be clear, what I mean by instrumentalisation is cultural production being mediated by public and commercial institutions, from government to galleries.
- Precarious Workers Brigade "It is clear that the job requires previous experience and some expertise in the area. While, as a charity, it is not a legal necessity that you pay what are described as 'volunteers', many in the sector have acknowledged the exploitative implications of taking advantage of this legal loophole and not paying young workers who clearly fulfill necessary, vital and in many cases, formerly paid positions within organisations."
- ARIs, grassroots galleries, run by artists on a voluntary basis. …reinforces the idealist convention of artists being dependent on subsidy that furthermore endangers their sustainability. What this serves to highlight is the limitation of strategies both available and deployed in order to fund artistic endeavours. Surely it is now time for the effort and commitment on behalf of the grassroots to be recognised and funded accordingly.
- 2010 No Soul For Sale (NSFS) held to commemorate the tenth anniversary of London’s Tate Modern. NSFS congregated seventy international ARIs in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group (together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and Tate Online). However, Tate Modern’s hospitality only served to highlight the underlying economic disparities and antagonisms that exist within the art world. There was tangible resentment towards Tate Modern because the event was projected as being conceived of and supported by them. In actuality the participants had to pay their own way, thus leaving them out of pocket whilst Tate Modern no doubt benefited through increased audiences and retail revenues. This can be considered to further propagate the myth that it is a positive thing for emerging artists to struggle.
- This is where I want to refocus the discussion towards collective activities throughout the art world. This is a new wave, following the one which helped shape conceptual art in the 60s and which was arguably crucial in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. For some this offers an alternative to the individualism that dominates the art world, for others a way of questioning both artistic identity and authorship through self-organisation. For others yet, it is a pragmatic choice, a possibility of shared resources, equipment and experience. Collective action solves some of the problems of navigating market-driven cultural economy by allowing the individual to escape the skewed power relationships with the institution. Collectives reside in that liminal zone - they are neither an individual, nor an institution. Collective action is traditionally defined as any action aiming to improve the group’s conditions (such as status or power) and depends on people’s ability to refrain from individually profitable actions for the sake of the common good. Collectives are not welcomed in the public sphere, in the education system, nor in the cultural market, so why be in favour of collective cultural action?
- This is where we need to consider the sociopolitical relevance of collaboration, particularly as a strategy to engage with the critical transformations of neo-liberalism. Neoliberalism is promoted as the mechanism for global trade and investment supposedly for all nations to prosper and develop fairly and equitably..
- So what we are talking about now is “agency” in the visual arts, namely does art have anything to do with a world beyond its own professional rituals and priorities, and if so, could and should it strive to shape the world somehow. To raise the question of agency is to address matters of activism and realpolitik, the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. Collectives are tied to contemporary politics of globalization and are motivated in their efforts to create and maintain an egalitarian non-hierarchical collective practice.