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 co-optation 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 Causessection 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 maltreatment: 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 six 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 form 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.
[…]
