Lets Talk About The Debt Do For… Responses
Lets Talk About The Debt Do For…
Responses from: https://www.academia.edu/s/33a4eb423e
(as of Februrary 3rd, 2015)
Hi Gregory, I followed the debt discussion online as best I could. Thanks for uploading this so that I can engage in it more thoroughly. I think the issue of art and debt is politically very important which is why I am inclined to pick out small errors rather than merely cheer you on. I hope you don’t mind. There are two key ‘errors’ from my point of view in your paper. First, the introductory section appears to assume that art is a business activity that fails for most of its participants to realise profits/income. I think we can only understand the ‘dark matter’ of art by recognising that art is not a business activity. In fact, the enormous global art market is an anomaly insofar as it converts this non-business activity into super-profits. Second, your argument about real subsumption makes the common error (which I outline in my forthcoming book) of separating an abstract concept of real subsumption from the specific Marxist concept of “the real subsumption of labour under capital”. In the mature Marx the word subsumption is never used in its original philosophical abstract sense but only in relation to labour and capital. It is misleading to talk of ‘the real subsumption of artists under capital’, when this does not refer to (a) the formal subsumption of their labour under capital – i.e. the conversion of independent handicraft into wage labour, and then (b) the transformation of labour by the capitalist mode of production through the division of labour, mechanisation, automation, deskilling, rationalisation, standardisation and the application of science to production. What is called real subsumption in the more general way that it is used by contemporary post-Marxist philosophers and activists is not real subsumption at all in Marx’s sense but suggest a different social process – one anomalous to the capitalist mode of production – in which activities take on the characteristic features of capitalist production without having first being converted to the capitalist mode of production. I think the conflation occurs when sociological methods are used instead of Marxist economic analysis. Thanks again for uploading this. Dave
———————————————————————————————————-
Thanks Dave – I am about to leave town to install some new work in Philadelphia and not sure if I will be swallowed by this allegedly historic snow blizzard heading our way. So if you don’t hear from me again… Just two quickie points (and looking forward to your book). I am not sure what the “essence” of art is that you allude to, but the essential nature of the “art world” under capitalism is business, that seems indisputable. That is not to say that all sorts of imaginative, creative practices exist which do not get shoe-horned into that box (as I have written in Dark Matter) for economic or political reasons, or simply because these practices are self-defined as informal and non-professional. But this paper and the conference it was written for deals specifically with relations within the art world and its integrated market, system of education, and so forth. Informal artists don’t accumulated debt in order to belong to something they think is important. They might become indebted of course, but the motivation is different and so is who their debt benefits. In the case of an art student with some 80 thousand dollars of school loans it is not just the banks who gain, but importantly it is the actually existing global art world. (Of course fees in the UK are significantly lower and this crucial point may have been missed in your response, nonetheless this was the focus of the conference and my contribution.) Regarding real and formal subsumption, I am afraid I have serious reservations about your interpretation of this process, even if it fits more closely with Marx’s original concept. More than a century of capitalist innovation both organizationally and technologically has certainly had an impact on how such concepts can be applied, no? I am also not so sure I would dismiss the notion that artist’s labor was never “formally” subsumed by capital, or that artists have not been in a sense a kind of wage worker. Then again, the deregulated economic conditions in the US are much more brutal and unmediated than in your country, though I am aware that is changing fast. Anyway, I will wait to read your work to comment further except to add this one thought about homology. As you know, in both Africa and South American large flightless birds evolved with almost identical morphologies: the Emu and the Ostrich. Nevertheless, their is no genetic link between these species. While certainly the processes that shaped the form of each animal are important to differentiate, from the point of view of the bird, its prey, its environment and so forth the difference is insignificant. Best regards and more sometime soon. greg
———————————————————————————————————
Hi Greg, thanks for inviting me to comment; I found reading your paper raised some very useful questions in relation to my own work. These remarks respond in particular to Dave’s point about the meaning of real subsumption within Marxism, and its usefulness as a conceptualization of the position of artists’ labour vis-à-vis wider socio-economic changes since the 1970s. They are a bit lengthy, so apologies if I recap some ground that is familiar. I was very interested to read Kirstin Stakemeier’s suggestion that the mid-1970s saw the real subsumption of artistic labour. ( I haven’t read her essay yet, so may inadvertently reproduce some her points). It is an observation that has some plausibility, not least because the expansion of the art institution can be traced to the same time. In 1975 there were already people arguing that the emergence of alternative spaces and collectives was a kind of real subsumption of artistic labour, although the precise term was not used. For example, Ian Burn in ‘The Art Market: Affluence and Degradation”: .’..my role as an “artist” has become one befitting a trained and efficient economic unit, my “work” has become a mere reflex of my specialized role, and I am encouraged to see the market as really none of my business…whereas once (not so long ago) the market was a somewhat more personal matter for the artist, it has become impersonal and independent of the artist, and, in an emphatically economic world, the impersonal market has grown to such an extent that it can dominate and dictate to the artist’ These observations are clearly modeled on a Marxist account of the alienation caused by the real subsumption of the labour process under capitalism. Whether they use the concept ‘real subsumption’ accurately is another matter though. Nonetheless, Burn develops this argument to suggest that the socialization of artistic activity in SoHo is a response to what (what I am arguing is) his reading of the real subsumption of artistic labour. ‘In the progressive history of capitalism, the concentration of labour always creates the conditions for the socialization of labour. Now, most of us are familiar with the novel phenomenon of ‘quasi-factory’ conditions of art production accompanied by the ‘factory-related’ community, SoHo. It is plain that the currently ‘necessary’ concentration of production goes hand in hand with the concentration of population, and also prompts a relocation of market outlets…the development of a ‘factory-like’ community, which sustains and encourages an exploitative market, also creates uniquely different social conditions and in turn may lead to social and political awareness of the power of community’ Again, Burn is shadowing Marx’s arguments. Real subsumption of the labour process is a precondition for the creation of an industrial proletariat, via the restructuring of social life by the demands of capitalism. A proletariat, needless to say, is the precondition of proletarian revolution. Burn sees real subsumption as a stepping stone towards revolutionary consciousness for artists. For this reason, like the rest of A&LNY, he was suspicious of moves towards artists’ unionization which he regarded as reformist. Burn sees real subsumption as engendering a potentially radical situation, perhaps through the collapse of the market for contemporary art entirely: ‘…one cannot help but express a masochistic curiosity about how much art will continue to be made if there is literally no market demand for it. Because, while we have been able to sell modern art to Europe and other Westernized countries, it is still moot whether it will be collected by OPEC countries…’ Well, we can safely say that OPEC countries have proved enthusiastic collectors of contemporary art. Burn’s central point, however, is worth considering. If socialization of art is a side-effect of the real subsumption of artistic labour, how should revolutionary consciousness be gleaned from this new situation? Is it now just a matter of agitating for a share of the spoils? At this point, however, it is helpful to change tack and ask whether Burn was right to identify the real subsumption of artistic labour in the mid-1970s. Other members of A&L (those based in the UK) attacked him mercilessly for placing the artist in the place of the revolutionary proletariat in his analysis. For those who maintained that artists are basically petite-bourgeoise, the suspicion was that the identification with a revolutionary proletariat was a self-aggradizing alibi. This criticism in turn sparked an intense debate about the class-identity of the artist – which influenced Karl Beveridge and Carole Conde’s work on ‘It’s Still Privileged Art’ as well as the A&L ‘Lumpenheadache’ debates. The class identity of the artist is old ground perhaps but it continues to crop up in recent debates influenced by Marxism (for example, in Marc’s work, or in Ben Davis’s arguments). Personally, I don’t think that an argument about artists’ class identity should be used to attack the work of politicized artists – as Davis does – it’s a divisive move, and the left has ripped itself apart for long enough. Nonetheless, the tensions exist and recur. Was there a real subsumption of artistic labour in the 1970s? I think that Dave is right to argue that (if I have properly understood, Dave) using Marx’s definition of real subsumption, this cannot be the case. Artistic labour retains at a relative distance from general social technique: artists do not produce their work in factories that are directly organized by the needs of capital etc. The relationship between the alternative space and the factory is one of analogy. Alternative spaces were state funded for the most part. They were not directly connected to the productive labour process under capitalism – they were funded from the surplus created by this process. However, it does depend how real subsumption is understood as a concept. Negri and other recent theorists (Theorie Communiste etc.) have adapted the idea to different purposes. Even if artistic labour is never directly subject to real subsumption, it might be affected indirectly. For example, it might be argued that the expansion of the art institution in the 1960s (in its largest sense including expanded art education / art market etc.) was a side-effect of the real subsumption of labour. If this is the case, then changes in the 1970s art world might be read as secondary effects of this process, whether or not artistic labour qua the labour of artists on art, is subject to formal or real subsumption. (Of course, artists generally have to labour in lots of other ways besides the production of art, and ‘artistic labour’ is an ambiguous concept. Arguably, the production of art does not depend solely on the labour of artists). So, I think that the use of real subsumption as a concept to describe changes within art is open to question – but the debate needs to be opened out to take into account the different types of Marxist thinking that are in play. It is not cut and dried either way. I think that this post on ‘Endnotes’ is useful in that it questions whether real subsumption really ought to be used as a periodizing concept: http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-the-history-of-subsumption Indebtedness is a crucial issue in contemporary art’s politics, because it highlights enduring contradictions and politicizes people. But it is important to problematize the connection between the tensions experienced by artists and those of non-artists, if this is not to be simply a ‘reformist’ attempt to secure a bigger slice of the neo-liberal pie. Sometimes the concept artistic labour conceals this relationship, by implying that artists stand in the position of a revolutionary proletariat, which they don’t. I think that artists (and intellectuals) remain, more or less, petite-bourgeoise, which is not to say that they can’t contribute to real political change, they can. I think that you conception of ‘dark matter’ suggests the kinds of connections that need to be made, but it is important to restate the issues raise, for example, in ‘Art, Politics, Dark Matter: Nine Prologues’ where you write about ‘Swampwall’. It does seem to be true that artists’ labour is ideally suited to neo-liberal culture – at least in the affluent parts of the world: high instrinsic motivation and scant material reward. (In other parts of the world there is no requirement to be motivated, because coercion is more explicit). But this is symptomatic of the process of the failure of capitalism, not its rampant success. Not a neo-liberal coup de grace of co-option, but a side effect of neo-liberalism’s successive failed attempts to resolve contradictions: one mad ponzi scheme after another, including the one we call the contemporary art market. So, the failure of artists required by the art market exists in an intriguing relationship both to the expansion of the art institution, and the gradual coming apart of capitalism. (I am trying to think through some of Streeck’s analyses here). My point perhaps only mirrors or reproduces yours (it certainly draws heavily upon your work) but I want to underscore that the expansion of the art institution is an effect of the failure of capitalism, not its success. This I think, is a precondition of re-evaluation of the meaning of failure within politicized art. Once again thanks for the opportunity to read your paper – very helpful.
———————————————————————————————————-
Dear Kim, Dave, Dorothee, Marc et al… Appropriately, I think this debate hinges in large part precisely on the issue of debt. Comparing the period that Burn was writing about to our own what is very striking is the enormous difference both in terms of the personal cost of producing contemporary art today, as well as the spike in the number of producers and therefore works of art produced. If the 1960s and 1970s SoHo communities and alternative spaces were a kind of extended small factory then the situation now reflects the post-Fordist networked production chain. Alienation that was linked to proletarian consciousness in the past, is now experienced differently, more inline with the entire “knowledge worker” class whose Occupations of privatized public spaces a few years back were certainly not only demands for employment, but also an expression of their disaffection towards capital 2.0. The degree to which artists are entwined with this form of alienated production may be haggled over, but not its reality. I might add that its worth examining again this question of whether or not capital organizes cultural workers into outsourced, digitally connected social factories because artistic production does play some significant role in its ideological imaginary, if not its actual process of production. Am I suggesting that we put artists on the same level as actual factory workers in Asia say, who mold the plastic frames for laptops and so forth, no, not at all. Still, our concept of working class v. petit-bourgeoise has to be modified from its standard use a century ago, one of the fundamental mistakes Ben Davis has fallen into with the results not only being divisive for artists seeking a way of radically confronting their circumstances (and therefore as you say Kim alienating along the A&L lines of old- though I recall that curator Chris Gilbert also took up these same brawling tactics in a letter to Artforum before disappearing into Venezuela), it seems to relieve critical theorists of any responsibility towards modeling this situation in a progressive manner, thus leaving everyone who seeks real change waiting for the big bang of revolution elsewhere. Always elsewhere. – greg
———————————————————————————————————-
The Real Subsumption of Art Labour Hi Greg, Some sort of response here: Just to pick up on your Art and Debt paper and exchange with Dave Beech, I think there is a very interesting problem happening in your respective takes on the relevance of formal subsumption to that of real subsumption, especially as art in the shape of commodities and art in the more advanced, let’s say, shape of community services and activism is linked to the Marxist notion of totality, which implies not so much determination, but overdetermination (or even a Lacanian castration), which then implies, in a political sense, exactly the kind of political analysis that you are referring to with your work on the art strike and the organization of artists as a proletariat, to use the classical term. Today, we might prefer the term precarious cognitariat but even this designation has a prehistory, as in Siegfried Kracauer’s “salaried masses,” and C. Wright Mills’ “white-collar.” The important thing here, in my view, is the step from political economy to political ideology as opposed to the trend towards so-called New Materialism. This is one means to approach not only the commodification of engaged practices and its generation of surplus, but the necessity of this surplus, beyond the pleasure principle, for even the most minimal level of survival – and here we should hear the ghostly voice of Raoul Vaneigem wispering in our ears. To put this into perspective, Gene Ray writes in “Toward a Critical Art Theory”: “In political terms, there are at this point just two irreconcilable options: either to be enlisted in culture’s affirmative function – ‘to justify a society with no justification’ (Debord) – or to press forward with the revolutionary process. The institution will organize the prolongation of art ‘as a dead thing for spectacular contemplation’ (Debord). The radical alternative is the supersession of art. The first aligns itself with the defense of class power; the second, with the radical critique of society. Surpassing art means removing it from institutional management and transforming it into a practice for expanding life here and now, for overcoming passivity and separation, in short for ‘revolutionizing everyday life’.” With regard to the neo-bohemianization of the artist, my essay “Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution” proposed a new phase to Peter Bürger’s historical model of the development of art as a bourgeois category, with today art functioning, in a dominant register, as a petty bourgeois category, understood in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s breakdown of the class habitus according to bourgeois detachment, petty bourgeois allodoxia, and working class ethos. As was confirmed by recent sociological research and statistics, Bourdieu’s model is inaccurate insofar as the bourgeois model of culture is no longer dominant, but still relevant insofar as his analysis of the petty bourgeois model of allodoxia describes the lifestyle concerns and post-political predispositions of the majority of even the politicized dark matter which, of necessity, plays the game of art (liar’s poker in Brian Holmes’ terms, or even the conversion of politics into a new form of art’s ‘avant-garde’ self-revolutionizing in the terms of Rainer Rochlitz). One level of difficulty here is that the managerial class, those lucky enough to occupy positions of curatorial, editorial and educational power amongst the broad progressive class of socially engaged artists (the 2014 Creative Time Summit in Stockholm presented many such knowledge workers) conform almost absolutely to the global petty bourgeois model of protest and identity politics, as opposed to what is considered the tired revolutionary models of politicization. They are, as Tiqqun says a propos of the ‘Young Girl,’ fiendishly biopolitical. One might consider as an example of this the theoretical stance of Jen Delos Reyes in her short piece for the Blade of Grass website “What Are We Trying to Get Ahead of? Leaving the Idea of the Avant-Garde Behind” [(September 24, 2014), available at http://www.abladeofgrass.org/growing-dialogue/growing-dialogue-the-latest-thing-3/]. Delos Reyes wants to nevermind so-called transgressive innovation, a statement that was echoed somewhere on the BoG site by Stephen Pritchard, who says: “I’m down with dropping ideologies.” It is ironic of course that they want to go beyond the avant garde but at the same reject the notion of avant-garde overcoming. One presumes that Pritchard wants to get on with making more socially pragmatic art and dissolve art into useful life projects, working with communities and neighbourhoods, and so on. Del Reyes concludes with the Buckminster Fuller statement “artists are now extraordinarily important to human society” and asks: “so, what is there to get ahead of?” This idea of artists being useful to society is in fact the notion of artists as an avant-garde that was invented by the Saint-Simonians in the early 1800s, later changed at the end of the century to imply a vanguard within the art field, leading other artists. Of course Delos Reyes avoids here the question of the real subsumption of labour and sidesteps the political reading of avant-garde contestation. She ignores even the well-worn analysis of the neo-avant-garde (Bürger’s pessimistic conclusions), which accounts for a whole generation of artists and theorists, from the October Group and Whitney Independent Program artists to the work of institutional critical artists. As I wrote in “Avant Garde and Creative Industry,” and as the notion of dark matter also expresses, neoliberal governments and corporations are interested in culture’s contribution to GDP and with this they are interested also in allowing artists to fill in the social gap after the degradation of hard-won social safety nets – to become virtuous individuals and community builders after the social institutions of the welfare state have been dismantled and the initiatives for ameliorism transferred to private foundations and wealthy individuals. This is the context in which it is possible to talk about socially engaged art as a kind of official academic art, subsumed in the machinations of the global creative economy, which seeks to move away from radical ideology towards soft forms of biopolitical coercion, with competition amongst workers, flexibilized work, low wages, mutli-skilled requirements, and now, in some cases, diversity credentials. The point that Delos Reyes makes is both wrong and correct. Yes, we are in a post-contemporary stage of art, as Yates McKee defines it, but no, this biopolitical stage of protest, multiculturalism and relational activism is not beyond capitalism. The question, as Imre Szeman and Eric Cazdin ask, is now that postmodernism as a cultural formation is over, what comes after capitalist globalization, a stage in which every identity is formally subsumed, desubstantialized and operationalized by exchange? This is indeed a stage of analysis that goes beyond the bohemian anti-bourgeois avant gardes, and perhaps also the historical revolutionary model of the avant garde, which sought to sublate art into life – a hypothesis that is probably too dialectical for most of today’s academically trained postmodernists to deal with adequately. A good rejoinder to such neoliberal left pragmatism is John Roberts’s model of a post-Thermidorian suspension of autonomy and his notion of art as a non-identitarian adisciplinary post-art form of mass technique and social struggle. (See John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, Verso, 2015.) Roberts’ theory provides a radical rather than reformist model for political art praxis. The problem with the petty bourgeois activist camp, from the point of view of political art praxis, is that it tends to reduce art to an instrumental function and provides a somewhat naïve gloss on art’s complex histories. For the sake of effectivity, it escapes art into politics. However, Roberts also identifies the opposite problem, which one finds in the “critical” art of universities and galleries, which is that of escaping politics into art. Roberts allows for post-art to have a more complex range of concerns and features but without reducing the political implications of its continuous self-alienation/revolutionizing. The Žižekian supplement that I would make to Roberts’ model, and this also in order to move away from the politicized aesthetics of someone like Jacques Rancière – which mostly buttresses the political compromises of art world technocrats – has to do with the interplay between art and non-art. The ontology of art is always interacting with the history of its heteronomous materials, social relations and contexts. Art’s ontology, however, is itself divided by the lack of the subject in ideology. The Žižekian “less than nothing” that is related to the desire of being an artist, the desire of art, is perhaps also the debt (or risk) that confronts everyone in a biocapitalist economy. Here art transmogrifies into an epistemological-ontological mediation, the transposition of an epistemological obstacle into the Thing itself. It seems to me that Rolling Jubilee is onto something when it seeks to make debt disappear, presenting us with one solution to the failure of any absolute fit between ontology and history, showing us that the economy is not-All. Perhaps this is also why most of today’s activists want to make the idea of the avant garde disappear, perhaps so that we might have more leisure time to simply enjoy art. Who knows. Marc James Léger
———————————————————————————————————-
Let’s talk about the debt due artists for: [suggestions for putting in your own words] -art in libraries, hospitals, govt offices, consulates, schools, parks… -babysitting, daycare, after school, elementary ed, eldercare and special needs inspiration & instruction provided by artists -pleasure, stimulation and non conformity -trendsetting, future-imagining, forecasting and fantasy
Hi Greg & everyone, Insightful discussion here. While thinking about the structuring of debt, indebtedness, art, making and education… this is not my area of concentration . I deeply appreciate both your paper and the expanded commentary. Thank you for the invitation and opportunity. In addition to the ‘Let’s talk about…’ items I mentioned here above, I wanted to add: vision and visionaries. The current culture of millennial social entrepreneurship has hijacked a lot of the language and attention-bandwidth for ‘creativity’ — quite independently of art and arts. This ‘creative’ is unquestioningly aligned with a similarly unquestioned idea of productivity (both commercial and conceptual). This emergent class of ‘creatives’ tend towards an obsession with ‘metrics’ (quantification as legitimation) and leadership (another numerically-endowed endgame). Art is a visionary engagement that exceeds and extends beyond quantification. The most significant new ways of knowing, seeing, asking, wondering, ruminating and creating often do not garner a following (leadership) and cannot be measured in terms of sheer bulk (mass interest). This is true across disciplines to varying extents and would have to do with the nature of knowledge, knowledge production, its communicability,recognizability and the technologies of sociality and communication in general. Art is tendentially an open field of exploration with arguably ‘less criteria’ or with criteria that befits the artist and their discursive community, allowing vision and/or a sense-/sensory- hunch to dictate one’s exploration more or less independently of conferred evaluation. Of course art school, exhibition opportunities, grants and the like do much to narrow this open-ended ‘potentiality’ on the basis that some sort of recognition is necessary in order to participate in communicative fields of evaluation and value itself. But art practice itself is a place of vision-based exploration and often produces visionary excellence precisely because criteria is largely self-scripted, piecemeal, even hallucinatory (relative to other fields of engagement). I value this visionary potential as I see that leadership is effectively a numerical end-game, wherein a leader is the sum total of a communication with a numerical base. I’m interested in drawing out the idea of visionary as somewhat lone pioneer whose vision is by definition not available, ie., not re-cognizable, to a large number of people precisely because its contribution and insight ‘exceed’ or expand beyond what is contemporarily available. This is a slippery slope because it can be too easy to defensively posture that not making it is everyone else’s failure to see the value claims of the artist, and in other disciplines, rigor, argument and precedent serve to distinguish between contribution and ‘madness’ which have to do with relevance, ascertainability and discernable productivity or advancement of the discipline or inquiry as a whole. To this end, I proffer: Let’s talk about vision and visionary as integral and exceptional contributions the arts and artists make as we incur debt and psychologically navigate inhospitable social structures that nonetheless presume and often subsume our contributions.
———————————————————————————————————-
Hi Gregory, thank you for the invitation to follow and/or to contribute to this relevant discussion. I’d add to the ‘lets talk’ list something that I’d call ‘double debt’. My question would be how all these arguments fit in comparison to the unequally developed countries’ art markets; in other words, how the issue of ‘debt’ in the art context relates to the economies of the underdeveloped countries already profoundly indebted to MMF and dependent on the foreign economies but that could be yet another paper. Still the surplus and profit made of the art works from the underdeveloped economies could be a relevant topic in the general frame of the discussion since I guess that the uneven competition at its start adds to the debt of many local artists whose art works circulate globally in art fairs and biennials. Suzana
———————————————————————————————————-
As an artist, I am close to debt. always thinking about debt. Always looking for a solution to debt. This debt can come in forms other than just money. It’s heartbreaking. It is not about being famous. No. That has it’s own troubles. I’m talking about quality of life, acknowledgement and access. It is also about time. Artists often sell their valuable time to aid extremely successful people / institutions but the money they pay merely gets them by or works to silence them. It reminds one of the kind of bitterness laid before us in A Room of One’s Own. Think of that. Social circumstance and the unwritten and written rules of access. Access leading to voices heard and debts paid (one cannot live on recognition alone – for I’ve known “successful” artists who’ve mortgaged their homes to continue their practice). How, as a group of artists do we agree to change / manage this when we are trained merely to be seen? How do we help institutions that want to help us be seen but have no funds to pay? Do we start a union with dues? Do we tax the successful? What about “ambition?” How do we measure that? What about hierarchy? It is a bottom up change and it involves a real attitude shift within the arts community. The Gramscii Monument really re-kindled my hope in something big like this (….made by a successful artist whose project was funded by Dia….) All aside, does it begin with the way society thinks about the worth of artists and the function of art, and that there are a myriad ways of existing as an artist?
———————————————————————————————————-
indeed Gregory, IT will die of its own over indulgence, and will carry all the forms that come attached to it along. the question is, will art as we know it survive? will artists manage to adapt to the process of change? and how? I think what is so intriguing to capitalism from the art world is exactly how resilient and adaptive artists are, more than the risk-taking, transgressive, scrappy non-conformity exoticisms that they see in us. it is basically because we know it is not really in the material, measurable appearance of the thing they buy and sell, but beyond it. It is more of a life skill, and possibly the knowledge that this life skill is not quite commodifiable that eludes the whole system, including the concept of debt. or perhaps, expanding the knowledge of debt to such scale that what indeed happens is that we are all in debt with life, as this non-commodifiable thing that happens to all of us. not sue how this might help, but it is my response to you paper on a snowy monday morning. best of luck!
———————————————————————————————————-
Hi Gregory, thanks for your interesting article- I would like to add one thing, which I am sure you are aware of anyway, but I would like mention Ulf Wuggenigs research on race, class and gender in relation to “success” or “failure”, especially because feminist issues in relation to art or curating are a bit overlooked these days … so the range of depth and the power system behind it follows certain paths, today the same as yesterday, best, Dorothee
———————————————————————————————————-
Just a footnote of sorts, there was also an Australian Artworkers Union, founded in 1980 that had registration and operated within the legal framework for trade unions. After legislation to reduce the number of unions it was forced into amagamation with Actors Equity and the Journalists Association to form the Media Alliance whch still exists but is inactive in he visual arts. The Victorian state Branch of the Painters and Decorators Union, a building industry union, also had legal coverage of muralists etc and was active in promoting murals and arts in new buildings though the 80s and early 90s.
———————————————————————————————————-
Thanks for this invitation. I enjoyed reading your paper, and the comments by others. Thanks to all. You touch upon some deep concerns among artists. Though more often than not we keep them out of our minds, because it can be abysmally depressing. We are so taken advantage of that we don’t even register on the radar of our huge industry except as an absence. As artists, we need to utilize our networks to set up tangible steps that are easy for most artists to commit to. For example, why not, right here on this blog agree not to donate art to fundraising events that do not acknowledge a commitment to us as art makers. Our new group could support us to say that “I am happy to donate, but I need to redeem a percentage that accounts for my time and materials. If I have the ability to regain materials and time to do more art then it’s worth it for me. How about I get 10% plus $25 for the matt and frame that I put together?” What if we all did this simple and small thing from now on, rather than accept the norm, which is a big loss. A trend may begin. It would be the beginning of a union, of course. Another thing we can do is to look into attaching to a big union like United Steel Workers based in Pittsburg. They are a supremely progressive union with support from the middle and right wings of the labor movement, and may be interested. For example, we can offer to pay annual dues, perhaps $50, to append legislation within their lobby and through the AFL-CIO lobby. Our first nominal language may be something that allows us to donate art to museums the way collectors do. In this way we can get some kind of real tax write-off. It does not hurt to ask. Our connection to each other through the internet strengthens us if we waver. When someone asks me to donate I can say that “I am part of an artists organization that is setting standards and here is my deal.” Could this small but significant agreement among a few hundred or a few thousand artists shift the economy of debt? I just sent this to a friend who requested an original piece from me for an auction: Dear Cornelia, I am now part of an artists an artists organization that is setting standards. Our first small step is to protect artists from hurting themselves at the very least. We are concerned about how our de facto agreements to fundraising events puts us into debt. I am happy to donate, but I need to redeem a percentage that accounts for some of my time and especially for my materials. If I have the ability to regain materials and time to do more art then it’s worth it for me. How about I get 10% of the auction sale plus $20 for the matt and frame that I put together? Please, do not take offense, but we have to begin somewhere and the time is now. I am sure that you understand. Love to you and Glen, Doris
Doris Bittar:
I mentioned the United Steelworkers because they balance ideology with pragmatism, and they are competently powerful, too. They are a progressive union, respected by the full spectrum of unions, and they are part of the AFL-CIO muscle that actually pass legislation in the US Congress. For example, United Electric is similarly progressive, but do not have the same stature. I think we need to be careful not to be caught into ideological webs when we consider these kinds of issues. Also, there would not be 2 million added to the ranks of the IWW. That is pure fantasy. In my experience being an artist does not automatically make you a union supporter or even progressive. We are a pretty isolated bunch. Why not big labor to piggyback onto with our a few sentences of legislation? There is also the task of changing the AFL-CIO from within. We could join that movement that is already working on these issues. An update on my request to get some kind of compensation for the auction I was invited to donate to was met with, “We don’t want you in it anymore…” So actually, I feel like sh_t about it. Regardless, I am thinking of passing this idea around my artists friends in Southern California region to see if there are takers. Then we can all stick our necks out at the same time when we are asked to donate next time.
———————————————————————————————————-
A few thoughts in response to Doris, I agree with you that forms of collectivization are a good step to remedying the individualization of debt in a risk society. I would caution on the one hand in isolating cultural workers from other workers, and in this sense your AFL-CIO idea is a step in the right direction. I would caution though against the AFL-CIO as a pro-establishment organization. This article by a Trotskyite party that I appreciate has some perhaps problematic aspects but has some concerns that are probably ballpark accurate: (http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/13/warr-j13.html) (though I do hope that Elizabeth Warren will run, but only with illusions.). What about the IWW? They are a smaller group but with the addition of 2 million underpaid american artist members could possibly have an impact on the current ways that cultural and educational institutions operate. They are also not anti-communist and come with anarchist credentials. The total student debt in the US is over $1 trillion, greater than the combined credit card debt. Every year the government collects $50 billion in interest from student loans, equal to the profits of the 4 largest US banks. If the US could bail out foreign banks, why can they not bailout student debt? 1 trillion is much less than 20. There are possibly similar statistics for artists’ average debt and the problems of a creative economy, which the Euro May Day movement has already analyzed to some degree.
Greg, Longwinded whaza here: I would mention that in my talk at Blade of Grass in April 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veZtiKmp0X8) I in fact brought up the question of formal and real subsumption of labour and gave as an example of the latter a job description at that Art Gallery of Ontario which required a lifetime’s worth of qualifications but that was minimum wage, part time and temporary. I didn’t go further into identity politics, but the same applies in terms of equal opportunity exploitation – so I do think it’s good to be talking about class and labour issues even if in this regard we cultural workers do sometimes run out of steam a little early (compared to a David Harvey or someone like that). Western Marxists used to do cultural theory when they could not officially engage in political economy. Now that we’re free to do so, we avoid it. Good thing that there are people like you and Oliver Ressler to help us with this agenda. I truly appreciate it. We know from Marxist theory that labour and capital work in tandem: they feed each other (in Foucault’s terms) and today exclude, not Jews, not women, not people with disabilities, but vanguards. That’s my theory in “1+1+a.” I don’t think we’re at the same level of impasse that Peter Burger analyzed in the 70s, a position taken up by people like Benjamin Buchloh, for example. But then even people like Bifo are pessimistic in their own way. Regardless, our movement has regained some lost ground since the postmodern 80s and 90s. There are different ways to respond to the notion that the petty bourgeois habitus is now dominant (and we should always avoid being overly positivist when talking about class). Brian Holmes suggests that in North America at least there is a kind of civil war amidst factions of this class (the degree to which artists are entwined in alienated production), with progressive factions struggling against the more technocratic yuppy factions – something along these lines. Zizek’s interventions in Hegemony, Contingency, Universality are worth knowing, as are Badiou’s theoretical innovations. This isn’t old stuff but a real challenge to us today and very useful actually. As for the imaginary, I’ve written a few things about avant-garde fantasy and offered a pervert’s guide to activism, so in this case even psychoanalytic theory is hardly bereft of praxiological matter. The bohemian avant-garde attitude of the 19th C, I would say, à la Boltanski and Chiapello, is actually typical of today’s entrepreneurial capitalism and biocapolitical technocrats. Consider Andrew Ross’s No Collar as another example. They’re the post-political Fukuyama progressives who try to get us off of radical left legacies and resources – I call them the neoliberal undead – which sometimes makes things confusing in the art world to say the least. So we need more analysis of the way biocapitalism operates, as in, for example, Greg Sharzer’s No Local, which makes important arguments about the effective limits of small-scale local green alternatives. Even if such initiatives are good for community building, they won’t save us. I recall that a few months ago you yourself sent out some questions to colleagues wondering about, concerned with, the institutional recuperation of social practice. The notion that the old left is passéists is a standard means to demobilize certain left factions or get beyond the terminology of left and right. I think we should leave these kinds of arguments to capitalist liberals. I tried at one time to put together a book called Comrades: Anecdotes of Cross-Ideological Collaboration on the Left. Everyone I contacted except Marc Herbst was not interested in the book. It’s not surprising that with the success of horizontalism as well as the limitations of horizontalism people are going to think also about revolutionary theory. Even Negri is now calling for more organization and verticality. It’s not for nothing that the leadership of Syriza is communist. What I would hope for within the movement is more left ecumenism. The debate between ‘alternative’ and ‘radical’ is indeed as old as the 60s, at least. It seems that such debates return and so all the more reason to find solutions. Claire Bishop’s writing on Russian theatre collectives in the teens and twenties in very interesting in this regard. For some the ideas of Negri, Deleuze and Ettinger or Latour are most apt while for people like myself “impractical literati” like Marx and Zizek are the Thing. It’s of zero use (maybe it’s more ‘less than nothing’ than zero) to the movement to play intellectuals against activists. Here I agree with Graeber (“The Twilight of Vanguardism”) that intellectuals are essential to movements but that only the people, the grassroots, can make a revolution. In times of radical change ideas are important. Think of what the labour theory of value has done for justice and political change, up to the critique of imperialism, socialism in one country, the unrecognized work of women, etc.
copyright artist as debtor and the authors 2015