ArtLeaks Gazette
ArtLeaks Gazette #5: “Patriarchy Over & Out. Discourse Made Manifest” brings together contributions that analyze concrete practices and campaigns, and which engage theoretically and intersectionally with relevant issues related to queer, trans, feminist, first nations, racial, and economic justice. The diverse contributions in this issue – including poetry, petitions, lyrics, visual art, activism, manifestoes, and critical essays – confront nationalist discourses, colonial violences, orthodox regimes, misogynist cultural and political programs, crises of identity politics, and the remaining legacies of white supremacy, considering not only overall conditions in the artworld but also local specificities. While the contributions are diverse in their political and cultural scope, their common target remains toxic patriarchy in all its nefarious manifestations. The writers, musicians, artists, activists, filmmakers, and poets featured in this issue envision and demand a different reality and future. To summon Planningtorock’s words from All Love’s Legal (2014): “I don’t want to wait, patriarchal life, you’re out of date.”
The gazette is freely available to read here:
The gazette includes contributions by: Planningtorock, Judith Goldman, Susanne Sachsee, Ashon Crawley, Kim Bode, Magdalena Zurawski, Nitasha Dhillon, Ana Grujić, Bridget Daria O’ Neill, Mickey Harmon, Joshua Lam Jasmina Tumbas, Divya Victor, Scene & Heard, Nosotras Proponemos, Erika Balsom & Elena Gorfinkel, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, We are sick of it, Imani Henry, Betty Yu, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Paris Henderson, Boineelo Cassandra Mouse, Amanda Fayant, Van Tran Nguyen, Ena Jurov & Selma Banich, Fred Moten & Corina L. Apostol, LaKisha Simmons, Matt Applegate & Andrew Culp, Shannon Woodcock, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Danai Anagnostou, Katja Kobolt & Anna Ehrenstein, Alyssa Schwendener, Tanya Loughead, Mima Simić
Editorial and layout: Corina L. Apostol, Rena&Vladan, with guest editor Jasmina Tumbas
Title page illustration: Paris Henderson
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Corina L. Apostol, Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić // Introduction
Anastasia Vepreva & Roman Osminkin // Dialog
Mike Watson // Let’s talk about Class and Art
Joshua Schwebel and Catarina Pires // Subsidy
Art Handlers Alliance of New York // Bill of Rights
Rena Rädle & Vladan Jeremić // Contradictions and Transformative Trajectory of Art & Labor
Tihomir Topuzovski // Visualizing Resistence: Subversive Artistic Practices in the Republic of Macedonia
Haim Sokol // Dictionary of Resistance for Beginners
Corina L. Apostol // Art Workers, Art Strikes and Collective Actions
Gil Mualem Doron // Artist Strike, or How Close Are We to Bouazizi?
Claudiu Cobilanschi // Posters
Gregory Sholette, Kuba Szreder and Noah Fischer Interview by Marco Baravalle // Dark Matter Games
You can download a print version of the gazette here:
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Cover page by the editors, Photo credit: Margaret Singer
Corina L. Apostol, Brett A. Bloom, Vladan Jeremić // Introduction
Corina L. Apostol // ArtWorkers Between Precarity and Resistance: A Genealogy
Ingela Johansson // An Introduction to the Great Miners’ Strike in Kiruna, Malmberget and Svappavaara – An Artistic Inquiry into The Great Miners’ Strike and Solidarity Actions
Bojana Piškur // Education in the Museum – A Space of Political Emancipation?
Dmitry Vilensky // Activist Club or On the Concept of Cultural Houses, Social Centers & Museums. What is the Use of Art?
Joanna Figiel & Mikołaj Iwański // The TRAFO Boycott: Standing Up to the Privatization and Corporatization of Art and Cultural Institutions in Poland
Alejandro Strus & Sonja Hornung // Putzstrategien
Xandra Popescu with Veda Popovici, Delia Popa and Ioana Cojocaru // Solidarity: Making it Happen
HABEN UND BRAUCHEN (to Have and to Need) // STATEMENT
G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction) // On Direct Action: An Address to Cultural Workers
Ivor Stodolsky // When Politics Becomes Form. The Venice Biennale, 2015
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You can download a print version of the gazette here: http://issuu.com/vladanrena/docs/artleaks_gazette_3
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Open Call : ArtLeaks Gazette No.3
Artists Against Precarity and Violence – Resistance Strategies, Unionizing, and Coalition Building in a Time of Global Conflict and Contradiction
The ArtLeaks Gazette aims to shed critical light on both the challenges and obstacles inherent in the contemporary art world, in order to work towards constructive and meaningful transformations. Beyond“breaking the silence” and exposing bad practices, we are exploring the ways in which art workers around the world are pushing towards changing their factories of art, embedded in larger socio-economic-political flows. We realize this is a difficult task, as the global condition since ArtLeaks was established in 2011 is quite different. The (art)world has changed and it seems that violence and hostility rule around the globe. The years to come seem like they will be even more full of conflict and contradiction. Due to the increase of global wars, the threat of climate breakdown, and other devastating realities, new media and technology are being used in a negative way, encouraging deeper precarity, austerity, and inequality. This is happening in the sector of arts and culture increasing the debt of artists and cultural workers. We believe that art workers need to formulate an answer to these challenges, to build global coalitions, and to unionize in order to counter precarity and violence in a countervailing way.
The third issue of the ArtLeaks Gazette will bring together theoreticians and practitioners dealing with these urgent questions about models of organizations, unionizing, and strategies of resistance. This helps to illuminate new ways of production and coalition building in international and local environments that are increasingly hostile.
Specifically, social institutions of the welfare state are in poor shape thanks to the neoliberal offensive now underway for several decades. This process affects art workers. For example, in so-called “creative” European cities, significant numbers of registered artists function as a “reserve army” for cheap or even voluntary work. Conditions of artistic labor are summarily dismissed as unimportant, frequently among the upper echelons of the art management class, and sometimes even among artists that have either achieved economic hegemony or aspire to it. In some cases, when members of the art community do decide to speak out, they face the danger of being excluded from an exhibition or a project, or blacklisted from working in certain institutions.
One of the problems lies in the fact that artists usually do not understand themselves as workers, but see themselves working against each other and feel that art production differs from the capitalist working relations of the greater economy. The challenge is to continue to question the autonomy of artistic production, to confront those who benefit with this mode of cultural profiteering, and to demythologize the production process of art itself.
Several present-day activist art worker groups are beginning to look back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and even further to the mid 19th century, particularly in the 1930s, as moments of inspiration during social movements and political struggles, for the fight for art workers’ rights, reclaiming cultural institutions, art and/as labor in a global context. Indeed, we would emphasize today’s art workers need more of that do-it-together spirit, a greater common interest and a more developed strategy and plan for transformation.
Therefore, the key issue the third installment of the ArtLeaks Gazette wants to tackle is the question:“Is it possible to make an international coalition of artists on the basis of art workers’ solidarity and to struggle for better material conditions?” And if so, then what could be the mechanisms to build and spread the network and to make stronger demands? Are there modes of production that can support coalition building?
We welcome contributions in a variety of narrative forms, from articles, commentaries, and glossary entries, to posters, drawings and films. The deadline for entries is the 5th of April, 2015. Contributions should be delivered in English, or as an exemption in other languages after negotiations with the editorial council. The editorial council of ArtLeaks takes responsibility for communicating with all authors during the editorial process.
Please contact us with any questions, comments, and submit materials to: artsleaks@gmail.com.
The on-line gazette will be published in English under the Creative Commons attribution noncommercial-share alike and its materials will be offered for translation in any languages to any interested parts.
Limited printed copies will be available. We are calling on those of you who regularly print as a part of your work to help us get the ALG by committing to small print runs of 50-100 copies. We will make several PDF formats of the ALG to meet various digital needs, as well as an epub edition. We encourage contributors to be an active part of spreading the ALG by hosting it on their site and forwarding it on to their networks.
The editorial council for the third issue is: Corina L. Apostol, Brett Bloom and Vladan Jeremić.
Previous issues of the ArtLeaks Gazette can be read here and here.
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Corina L. Apostol, Vladan Jeremic, Raluca Voinea //Introduction
Noah Fischer with comments by Artur Žmijewski // The Occupied Museum
Joanna Figiel // On the Citizen Forum for Contemporary Arts
Larissa Babij in conversation with Corina L. Apostol // The Assembly for Culture in Ukraine: Shaking the Foundations of Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture
Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić // Artists between aestheticization of the struggle and unionization
Andrey Shental // Spear v.s. scissors: Art held captive by budget cuts
Corina L. Apostol with drawings by Iulia Toma // Circus Melodrama
Comics by Federico Geller
Daniel Blochwitz // Artist Union Fund for a Living Wage
Heath Schultz // Autonomous Research within and/or Beneath the Ruins; Or, We are Finally Getting our Feet Wet
Andrea Pagnes // SPACED, ART OUT OF PLACE
Sean Lowry and Nancy de Freitas // Project Anywhere: art, peer review and alternative approaches to validation at the outermost limits of location-specificity
ArtLeaks Open Call for establishing local/regional ArtLeaks platforms
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You can download a print version of the gazette here: http://issuu.com/vladanrena/docs/artleaks_gazette_2_press
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Visual Contributions (Selection)
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OPEN CALL: ARTLEAKS GAZETTE NO.2
(An)Other Art World(s)? Imagination Beyond Fiction
Our first issue of the ArtLeaks Gazette was aimed at bringing critical awareness of the challenges and obstacles of the contemporary art system. While we considered this a necessary initial step in enacting meaningful transformations of this system, we now feel the need to move beyond exposure and breaking the silence into ways of engagement, or what does it mean to be agents of change in the art world today?
The question of engagement is not singular to the art world, as activists and peers continue to grapple with it in the wake of the post-Occupy challenges. Just as activits have re-claimed and organized squares, parks and streets for a life-changing experience, so cultural workers have occupied cultural spaces, have disrupted the business cycles of galleries and auction houses, and have organized alternative schools and conscious-raising workshops. Nonetheless, we all share the frustration that all this is ephemeral, temporary, that as we participate in something magical together, it inevitably comes to an end. While we have been successful at transforming small spaces for short periods of time, there is still much work to do in the way of a long-lasting and depth-reaching transformation of culture and society.
The main question that the second issue of the ArtLeaks Gazette addresses is: What are the conditions and possibilities of alternative art worlds? And because we ask about that which is yet to come, how can we engage and use our imagination, avoiding, at the same time, the traps of utopian thinking? In many ways, these questions are precisely related to the challenge of special and temporal limitations, of the continuity of building more engaged institutions, sustainable socio-political practices, something which we can come back to and extend. It seeks to bring together a host of proposals for practices, platforms, organizations and ask how we can push further beyond their being too local and temporary. One step towards this is recognizing the international character of the resistance, calling for a different way of making a critical art, of running institutions and of doing politics as people translate their aspirations and practices into a new cycle of struggles.
Therefore, we want to ask what process-based, long term paths can be followed to bypass the traditional curated exhibition / festival or gallery representation to allow for more challenging explorations? How do we navigate artistic practice within the rigid established structures in order to allow for positive change and growth? Today’s art world is far from being friendly to cultural workers. Using our own methods, many have identified successful tactics for navigating the existing system – although this system is becoming more and more unable to provide real support for creative production. How can art workers attain fair compensation without continuing to feed this broken system? How can they exercise their voices and power to develop other sustainable platforms and support the creative field? What experimental approaches to art education have been developed and are currently practiced? What new ways of unionizing precarious labor exist and could they be adapted to cultural workers?
We seek contributions that investigate models for communing within the context of art and education; examples of free schools and cooperatives based on skills sharing; analyses of economic relations inside the art academy that lead to precarity and ways to strike against the system of debt and expendable labor; strategies for undoing the highly competitive, individualist, market-driven values that the art system often produces and ways of making room for collective processes; approaches for supporting art practices that remain disconnected from the art market and maintain an explicit critical position; ways of establishing new paradigms for redevelopment that do not displace artists, workers, local residents or industries but build a sustainable community of working people.
Our second issue of the gazette will begin to map these active agents and connect peers that have begun constructing in these directions and already established platforms – in other words we want to step back and look closely at what people are already doing/ have achieved and ways in which to fortify demands and critical structures. Our needs, passions, values and ideologies maybe diverse, however we consider it important to flesh out areas or overlap and dissonance, to map existing resistant communities, other economies and ways of organizing. This issue aims to bring into focus these various systems rather than create a composite, fixed structure, which we hope can lead to a different art world with the potential for collective evolution.
We welcome contributions in a variety of narrative forms, from articles, commentaries, and glossary entries, to posters, drawings and films. The deadline for entries is the 7th of April 2014. Contributions should be delivered in English or as an exemption in any language after negotiations with the editorial council. The editorial council of Artleaks takes responsibility of communicating with all authors during the editorial process.
Please contact us with any questions, comments and submit materials to: artsleaks@gmail.com.
We will publish all contributions delivered to us in a separate section. However, we take full responsibility in composing an issue of the gazette in the way we feel it should be done.
The on-line gazette will be published in English under the Creative Commons attribution noncommercial-share alike and its materials will be offered for translation in any languages to any interested parts.
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Corina Apostol, Vladan Jeremić, Vlad Morariu, David Riff & Dmitry Vilensky
Breaking the Silence: Towards Justice, Solidarity and Mobilization
Milena Placentile
Controlling the Limits of Possibility: On the Privatization of Education and Culture
Jonas Staal
Art, Democratism and Fundamental Democracy: An Exploration of the New World Summit
Evgenia Abramova
On Art Workers’ Labor Conditions (Moscow)
Dictionary
Evgenia Abramova: Art Workers and Labor Conditions
Milena Placentile: What is Neoliberalism?
Veda Popovici
So You Think You’re Political ?! Seven Notes on the Harmlessness of Art
Mykola Ridnyi
Amber Hickey
Beyond Reflecction: Art Pedagogy and the Ethics of Art Sponsorship
Fokus Grupa
Artists’ Contracts and Artists’ Rights
Marsha Bradfield & Kuba Szreder (members of Critical Practice)
Lauren van Haaften-Schick
with graphic interventions by Zampa di Leone
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You can also download the full issue of the ArtLeaks Gazette here.
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As stated in our Open Call for the gazette, in addition to the final version of the publication, in this section we publish the remainder of submissions which were delivered to us by the deadline, with the exception of those that the authors did not wish to have published here.
Ana Sol Alderete, On One’s Videoperformance in Petersburg & Campo de Marte
Anja Cuhalev, Can Art Act as a Form of Democracy?
Stephan Groß, FREE TRADE text & graphic
Christian Heck, noparts & noimage
Marc Herbst, It’s Midnight
Astrid Jahns, The Seven Deadly Sins
Patricia Reed, Labour Poster
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ArtLeaks Gazette Open Call
On the urgency of launching the ArtLeaks Gazette
Artleaks was founded in 2011 as an international platform for cultural workers where instances of abuse, corruption and exploitation are exposed and submitted for public inquiry. After over a year of activity, we, members of the collective ArtLeaks felt an urgent need to establish a regular on-line publication as a tool for empowerment in the face of the systemic abuse of cultural workers’ basic labor rights, repression or even blatant censorship and growing corporatization of culture that we encounter today.
Namely: radical (political) projects are co-opted under the umbrella of corporate promotion and gentrification; artistic research is performed on research hand-outs, creating only an illusion of depth while in fact adding to the reserve army of creative capital; the secondary market thrives as auction houses speculate on blue chip artists for enormous amounts of laundered money, following finance capitalism from boom to bust, meanwhile, most artists can’t even make a living and depend on miserly fees, restrictive residencies, and research handouts to survive; galleries and dealers more and more heavily copyright cultural values; approximately 5% of authors, producers and dealers control 80% of all cultural resources (and indeed, in reality, the situation may be even worse than these numbers suggest) ; certain cultural managers and institutions do not shy away from using repressive maneuvers against those who bring into question their mission, politics or dubious engagements with corporate or state benefactors; and last but not least, restrictive national(ist) laws and governments suppress cultural workers through very drastic politics, not to mention the national state functions as a factor of neoliberal expression in the field of culture.
Do you recognize yourself in the scenarios above? Do you accept them as immutable conditions of your labor? We strongly believe that this dire state of affairs can be changed. We do not have to carry on complying to politics that cultivate harsh principles of pseudo-natural selection (or social-Darwinism) – instead we should fight against them and imagine different scenarios based on collective values, fairness and dignity. We strongly believe that issues of exploitation, repression or cooptation cannot be divorced from their specific politico-economic contexts and historical conditions, and need to be raised in connection with a new concept of culture as an invaluable reservoir of the common, as well as new forms of class consciousness in the artistic field in particular, and the cultural field more generally.
Recently, this spectrum of urgencies and the necessity to address them has also become the focus of fundamental discussions and reflection on the part of communities involved in cultural production and certain leftist social and political activists. Among these, we share the concerns of pioneering groups such as the Radical Education Collective (Ljubljana), Precarious Workers’ Brigade (PWB) (London), W.A.G.E. (NYC), Arts &Labor (NYC), the May Congress of Creative Workers (Moscow) and others (see the Related Causes section on our website). The condition of cultural workers has also recently been theorized within the framework of bio-politics – in which cognitive labor is implicitly described as a new hegemonic type of production in the context of the global industrialization of creative work.
The question then emerges, what is creative work today? To structure this undifferentiated categorizations, we will begin by addressing in our journal all those “occupied” with art who are striving towards emancipatory knowledge in the process of their activity. As the contemporary art world more and more envelops different areas of knowledge as well as the production of events, we considered it a priority to focus on this particular field. However, we remain open to discussing urgencies related to other forms of creative activity beyond the art world.
Through our journal, we want to stresses the urgent need to seriously transform these workers’ relationship with institutions, networks and economies involved in the production, reproduction and consumption of art and culture. We will pursue these goals through developing a new approach to the tradition of institutional critique and fostering new forms of artistic production, that may challenge dominant discourses of criticality and social engagement which tame creative forces. We also feel the urgency to link cultural workers’ struggles with similar ones from other fields of human activity – at the same time, we strongly believe that any such sustainable alliances could hardly be built unless we begin with the struggles in our own factories.
Announced Theme for the first issue: Breaking the Silence – Towards Justice, Solidarity and Mobilization
The main theme of the first issue of our journal is establishing a politics of truth by breaking the silence on the art world. What do we actually mean by this? We suggest that breaking the silence on the art world is similar to breaking the silence of family violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Similarly as when coming out with stories of endemic exploitation form inside the household, talking about violence and exploitation in the art world commonly brings shame, ambivalence and fear. But while each case of abuse may be different, we believe these are not singular instances but part of a larger system of repression, abuse and arrogance that have been normalized through the practices of certain cultural managers and institutions. Our task is to find voices, narratives, hybrid forms that raise consciousness about the profound effects of these forms of maltreatments: to break through the normalizing rhetoric that relegate cultural workers’ labor to an activity performed out of instinct, for the survival of culture at large, like sex or child rearing which, too are zones of intense exploitation today.
Implicit in this gesture is a radical form of protest – one that does not simply join the concert of affirmative institutional critique which confirms the system by criticizing it. Rather, breaking the silence implies bringing into question the ways in which the current art system constructs positions for its speakers, and looking for strategies in which to counteract naturalized exploitation and repression today.
At the same time, we recognize that the moment of exposure does not fully address self-organization or, what comes after breaking the silence? We suggest that it is therefore important to link this to solidarity, mobilization and an appeal for justice, as political tools. As it is the understanding of the dynamic interaction between the mobilization of resources, political opportunities in contexts and emancipatory cultural frames that we can use to analyze and construct strategies for cultural workers movements. With summoning the urgency of “potentia agendi” (or the power to act) collectively we also call for the necessity to forge coalitions within the art world and beyond it – alliances that have the concrete ability of exerting a certain political pressure towards achieving the promise of a more just and emancipatory cultural field.
Structure of publication
The journal would be divided into 6 major sections.
A. Critique of cultural dominance apparatuses
Here we will address methodological issues in analyzing the condition of cultural production and the system that allows for the facile exploitation of the cultural labor-force. Ideally, though not necessarily, these theoretical elaborations would be related to concrete case studies of conflicts, exploitation, dissent across various regions of the world, drawing comparisons and providing local context for understanding them.
B. Forms of organization and history of struggles
Cultural workers have been demanding just working conditions, struggling over agency and subjectivity in myriad ways and through various ideas about what this entails. In this section we will analyze historical case-studies of self-organization of cultural workers. Our goal is not to produce a synthetic model out of all of these struggles, rather to examine how problems have been articulated at various levels of (political) organization, with attention to the genealogy of the issues and the interaction between hegemonic discourses (of the institution, corporation, the state) and those employed by cultural workers in their respective communities.
C. The struggle of narrations
In this section we will invite our contributors to develop and practice artistic forms of narration which cannot be fully articulated through direct “leaking”. It should be focused on finding new languages for narration of systemic dysfunctions . We expect these elaborations can take different forms of artistic contributions, including comics, poems, films, plays, short stories, librettos etc.
D. Glossary of terms
What do we mean by the concept of “cultural workers”? What does “gentrification” or “systemic abuse” mean in certain contexts? Whose “art world”? This section addresses the necessity of developing a terminology to make theoretical articulations more clear and accessible to our readers. Members of ArtLeaks as well as our contributors to our gazette will be invited to define key terms used in the material presented in the publication. These definitions should be no more that 3-4 sentences long and they should be formulated as a result of a dialogue between all the contributors.
E. Education and its discontents
The conflicts and struggles in the field of creative education are at the core of determining what kind of subjectivities will shape the culture(s) of future generations. It is very important to carefully analyze what is currently at the stake in these specific fields of educational processes and how they are linked with what is happening outside academies and universities. In this section we will discuss possible emancipatory approaches to education that are possible today, which resist pressing commercial demands for flexible and “creative” subjectivities. Can we imagine an alternative system of values based of a different meaning of progress?
F. Best practices and useful resources
In this section we would like to invite people to play out their fantasies of new, just forms of organization of creative life. Developing the tradition of different visionaries of the past we hope that this section will trigger many speculations which might help us collect modest proposals for the future and thus counter the shabby reality of the present. This section is also dedicated to the practices which demonstrate alternative ethical guidelines, and stimulate the creation of a common cultural sphere. This would allow cultural workers to unleash their full potential in creating values based on principles of emancipatory politics, critical reflections and affirmative inspiration of a different world where these values should form the basis of a dignified life.
On Practicalities
Our open call addresses all those who feel the urgency to discuss the aforementioned-issues. We look forward to collecting contributions until the 31st of December 2012. Contributions should be delivered in English or as an exemption in any language after negotiations with the editorial council. The editorial council of Artleaks takes responsibility of communicating with all authors during the editorial process.
Please contact us with any questions, comments and submit materials to: artsleaks@gmail.com. When submitting material, please also note the section under which you would like to see it published.
The on-line gazette will be published in English under the Creative Commons attribution noncommercial-share alike and its materials will be offered for translation in any languages to any interested parts.
We will publish all contributions delivered to us in a separate section. However, our editorial council takes full responsibility in composing an issue of the journal in the way we feel it should be done.
Editorial council for the first issue will consist of: Corina L. Apostol, Vladan Jeremić,Vlad Morariu, David Riff and Dmitry Vilensky.
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