November 2023 (part one)
This post is part one of three. I’ve broken this text up because it’s quite long. The images featured in this post are from Any Other Business, a exhibition of mine and Rohanne Udall’s work that we recently presented at an artist-led space in Nottingham called Gasleak Mountain. The particular work pictured – digitally printed posters wheat-pasted onto the wall – is called Public Intimacies. The photos were taken by Freddy Griffiths.
Dear readers,
My collaborator Rohanne and I usually have a few different artistic projects on the go at any one time. They vary not only in their materials or form (a collaborative book, an exhibition, a performance, etc.), but also in their institutional positioning. Some of these projects will be taking place in arts organisations run by salaried staff, with their idiosyncratic economies and rhythms, while others will move through grassroots spaces, or in people’s homes, or will be shared online or through the post.
One of the things we are currently working on is a performance called Swan Song, made with our friend Andy Edwards. This piece is very much designed for institutional production and presentation. Over the past few years, we have undertaken several residencies to develop the project, and have successfully applied for Arts Council England funding to pay ourselves for some of this work. This support has now dried up, so we are in a period of ‘hustling’ to accrue a fresh wave of institutional commitments (seed funding, rehearsal space, performance dates) for the project, which will provide the scaffolding for us to put together another ACE funding bid.1
This ’hustling’ is a complex thing. Rohanne and I have gotten in touch with many arts organisations across the UK. We have existing dialogues with some of them, but others are a ‘cold call’, or are places from which we have been trying to get replies, without success, for years. It’s a time-consuming process – which eats into the limited time we have together with which we could be spending on non-institutional projects – so we try to be strategic in how we reach out to these organisations. We understand that the people we are emailing – primarily the producers and programmers of arts organisations regularly in receipt of public funding – are already inundated with requests for their limited resources. We are trying to get them to read yet another email, and take a look at this Swan Song project (or our work more broadly), and then commit even more of their limited time for a call. And if we secure a conversation, there is a whole other complex process in which – in a very short space of time – we try to introduce our work to them, get a feel for the interests and resources of this particular organisation, and see if we can get them to commit some of their support.
I’m interested in this ‘hustling’, because it often comes to represent the position of freelance artists working in the UK’s publicly-funded arts sector, particularly in experimental dance and performance.2 The artist is viewed as a powerless agent who must continually beg for resources – and the salaried institutional staff member as the figure who determines whether or not the artist will be granted them. I want to reflect on a number of these ‘hustling’ encounters, because I want to tease out and complicate this understanding. I want to think with greater nuance and compassion about the nature of institutions, and how they structure the role and relationships of the people who work within them. However, I’m cautious of a number of things:
Firstly, any discussion of artist-institutional relations risks simply adding to the extensive discourse of how hard it is to be an artist in the UK. I’m not saying that it’s not hard to be an artist in this country, but that narrative can bring with it a number of assumptions that I find questionable: that the artist is a victim (did anyone ask me to enter into these institutional markets?) who should be receiving greater support (from whom, and with what expectations?). I want to avoid rushing into making any such recommendations, or moral judgements.
Due to the financial precarity of freelance artists in comparison to other workers in the field, much of the informal or formal discourse is often centered on their predicaments. Indeed, I’m realising that this PhD project is centered on different ways that freelance artists might understand their role within these publicly-funded arts institutions. However, I’m just as interested in the experiences and role of salaried members of staff, whose complex position is less often scrutinised. In this text I want to think about what it means to be in these roles, and the complex ethical manoeuvring that these people may or may not be undertaking when trying to navigate these situations – in order to better make sense of freelance workers’ ambivalent belonging.
It’s rare to find candid accounts of the challenges and nuances of holding these kinds of institutional positions in this field: in recent years, Alan Lane’s book The Club on the Edge of Town (2022) and The Uncultured’s Producing Liveness in Interesting Times (2022) are notable examples. In order to think from this gap, in this text I introduce and reflect on a number of anecdotes in order to ground my discussion. I am rarely in the role of institutional staff, so the anecdotes I draw from are mostly second-hand: either from being a freelance artist in an encounter with a salaried staff member, or from talking with friends who hold these positions. While I suspect that most of these anecdotes would be familiar to my peers across the industry, they are unverifiable and highly subjective. They offer only my perspective of a situation, and only include the details that I have deemed relevant. At best and at worst, they are gossip. But I do not think the these anecdotes need to ‘stand up’ as fact, testimony, or raw data, in order to still offer useful provocations with which to draw attention to and reflect on a number of tensions that underlie institutional office. Recognizing the intimate and, at times, exposing nature of the experiences, I have tried to fully anonymise anyone I discuss.
This text’s mostly focussed on the affective qualities of these complex institutional relations, rather than addressing their material or economic dimensions. This focus reflects my personal interest – and this PhD’s focus – on the psychic and interpersonal. But, as the feminist philosopher Silvia Federici notes, an over-emphasis on the emotional realm (particularly within discussions around ‘care’ or ‘support’) risks obscuring the finances that underpin these labour relations, and the many kinds of labour that are not primarily concerned with interpersonal exchange, yet are equally important in sustaining these institutions and fields.3 I hope that this text will be understood to be contributing to a wider discussion of these institutional complexities, and sit alongside texts by other thinkers, each with their different and complementary obsessions.
When Rohanne and I are approaching an organisation, we often have a particular goal in mind, e.g. trying to get some free rehearsal space, or a performance date, or some information. Sometimes we are very up front with this, and sometimes it feels better to be more demure. When I write these emails, I rarely make direct requests (“would you be up for co-commissioning this work?”). Instead, I veer towards more open-ended questions (“would you be up for a chat to help us think about this project, and where we could develop it within the UK performance scene?”).
This email manner is partly strategic. We do not want to get to a situation where a hard ‘no’ to a direct question might end the conversation. We want to keep things open, such that if they are unwilling or unable to offer the kinds of resources we are looking for, then we can pivot the conversation towards accessing other things which we might not have anticipated, e.g. getting advice on a particular aspect of the project, or a connection to someone else in the industry, or them engaging with a different strand of our practice.
Yet at the same time, this ‘demure’ attitude comes from our sense of politeness. I am reluctant to put this person (at this early stage of a conversation) in a position where they have to say “yes” or “no” to such a direct request. I am reminded of Audre Lorde in her memoir Zami reminiscing about a possible lover who asked if she was “able to stay the night?”:
It offered us both an out if necessary. If the answer to the question might, by any chance, have been no, then its very syntax allowed for a reason of impossibility, rather than of choice – ‘I can’t’, rather than ‘I won’t’. The demands of another commitment, an early job, a sick cat, etc. could be lived with more easily than an out-and-out rejection.4
For better or worse – and for their benefit or mine – I am moved to write invitations in ways that make it possible for others to gently decline. Before we reach the stage of explicitly requesting an organisation’s support, we want to offer routes for this person to indicate their dis/interest.
These conversations are complex. There is much information on both sides of the exchange that will likely be withheld: what resources the organisation actually has or might be willing to commit; what the ‘core interests’ of the artist actually are, as opposed to what they might be willing to claim in order to solicit institutional interest. It’s never quite clear what might make an artistic practice desirable to an organisation: accolades from press, association with other major institutions, the work seeming to address fashionable or ‘urgent’ topics, the possibility of the work appealing to ‘non-arts audiences’ (demographics underrepresented in the workforce or audience), or even an apparent rejection of the conventions of institutional presentation or marketability (e.g. a critical or ‘punk’ attitude, or a process that deviates from traditions and norms of art-making).
Another part of the complexity is how these conversations might exceed or deviate from what might be understood as ‘normal professionalism’. Many of these interactions can feature a pleasurable social and intellectual exchange, that in some instances overlaps with or develops into outright friendships. I would suggest that the default tone of many people working in arts organisations in the UK is a kind of ‘friendliness’, sought with the deliberate intention to diminish or soften some of the boundaries of ‘work’. A recent newsletter by the small arts organisation Independent Dance announced their forthcoming programme, and ended with the line: “As ever we welcome you to pop into ID’s corner of the office and say hello when you’re in the building – we are quite happy to be relinquished from admin for a moment!”5
The field of UK publicly-funded arts operates through a complex web of social bonds. Industry events (performances, exhibitions, showcases, residencies, conferences) have a significant social aspect that go beyond mere ‘work’. This social activity is not unique to this (semi-)professional field – any kind of encounter has a social dimension, even if that sociality is being firmly denied – but the arts often deviate from the traditional boundaries between public, professional and private life.
Due to the low rates of pay, the need to often work evenings and weekends or on tour, and the emphasis on taste and personal expression, there is a highly vocational nature to this industry. As one participant in a survey on freelance producers wrote, “producing is […] not just a job or a career but a lifestyle.”6 People are involved because they care, or they once cared. Things are rarely kept ‘in house’: due to the large number of freelance workers, the high turnover short-term ’projects’, and the fact that these projects move across or are supported by many different organisations, people are continually being drawn together across the field.7 The performance producer Sally Rose evokes the demand of all this: “the constant reaching out can be overwhelming in this game: Invitations, pitches, applications, pushing for fair pay, negotiating contracts, networking events, even the essential (and fun!) attendance at shows and events.”8
I suspect that social ties often play a significant factor in determining how any project is designed or a programme is being selected. I remember the first time I had been on a selection panel for an arts organsiation. We were deciding which applicants should receive the two commissions, and one of my fellow panellist reacted with shock when I noted that our discussion of the merits of a particular practitioner had strayed from what they had included in their application, to include details we knew from our work and social life. They said that this was standard practice, and that we as a selection panel ought to use all the knowledge we had about these applicants to inform our decisions. I didn’t necessarily disagree with this – and still don’t – but it felt important for me to make it clear to myself and my fellow panellists at the time that this was taking place. I suspect that in most such decisions – whether they are formal commissioning processes, or through more informal project design – similarly tend to favour or confer advantage to individuals with whom people have existing relationships and familiarity.
I feel a little uncertain about my phrasing. In my attempt to demonstrate their blurring, I keep implying a binary between ‘social’ and ‘professional’. But I’m not sure how truthful this is to many of the work situations I am describing. A substantial degree of ‘work’ within the arts is around establishing and maintaining social connections: forming dialogues and collaborative networks; pleasurable exchanges within the artistic process itself (e.g. rehearsals that involve developing shared language and trust, etc.); arts fairs where people are invited to discussions, drinks, parties and performances. These social and relational activities cannot be described as non-professional. They are undeniably part of the work of the artist or producer, and one of the significant resources upon which projects depend in order to flourish into the recognizable ‘products’ of the industry (e.g. performances, exhibitions, installations, publications, talks, workshops, etc.).9
There is no reason why a professional exchange cannot accommodate – and even benefit – from sociality. Within these ‘hustling’ conversations, I have very much appreciated many exchanges that have gone well beyond the remit of professional process or need. There has been playfulness in how we have spoken with one another, alongside a sense of respect and mutual interest. We have shared insights about each others’ positions and efforts and challenges. And much of this has taken place in instances in which staff have candidly reported that their organisation is incapable of offering us any support.
Equally, I’ve appreciated the many conversations which proceed directly and ‘by the book’; in which we quickly assess the needs of the project, establish what’s possible, and then let each of us to get on with our days. Our questions and answers are carefully shaped to border off the wild complexities of the rest of our working and social lives. Rather than advocate in favour of one way of working or another, I simply want to draw attention to the social complexity that is at play, to some degree, in all of these institutional exchanges. We are interacting with one another from our respective positions (freelance artist or salaried programmer), with all of our personal idiosyncrasies about how we deal with other people, and we are trying to navigate the personal, social and professional complexities of that contact. These navigations play out through relatively banal technicalities such as how we make sense of our work hours (“Despite your best efforts not to, you might find yourself slipping professional communications outside of established email channels and onto Whatsapp – including the dreaded, frazzled voice note.”10, but also through the nature of who we form relationships with, and why, and the ways we become invested in these relationships and roles.11
I want to note that trying to write about these dynamics has felt a little exposing. I am deliberately using the provocative term ‘hustling’ (as opposed to alternatives like ’networking’ or ‘relationship building’), to emphasise the strategic and mercantile nature of some of this exchange, which has an uncomfortable overlap with what we might normally think of as ‘friendship’. While I rarely make outright lies in these ‘hustling’ conversations, I am certainly ‘bending’ the truth, and presenting a version of myself and my work to what I believe will be advantageous in this encounter. I could easily imagine a reader of this text being prompted to reflect on my correspondence wth them, and start to doubt my expressions and gestures of friendship. The freelance curator and educator Cecilia Wee acknolwedges the risk of talking “about the problematic and taboo aspects of arts work that should be probably kept behind closed doors.”12 Thinking back to lack of literature that reflects on the experiences of people working in arts organisations I identified at the start of this text, I’m not surprised that many people avoid candid discussions of their work, given how this could possibly complicate or sour their relationships within the field.
However, in order to discuss these complex (para-)institutional relations, it feels necessary to name these ‘unflattering’ dynamics that are at play, and particularly those in which I am complicit. I want to resist some of the “self-policing” that Wee argues is necessary for freelance worker, “because of a fear of being ‘cancelled’ by the organisations we work with.”13 I write from a sense of academic curiosity, and a desire to make sense of an name my own experience, and in the hope that greater transparency about these dynamics can offer different individuals greater agency as they navigate these messy fields.
At times, I think I am very skilled at tolerating and navigating this kind of intense social complexity. I can make sense of my feelings, motivations and compromises, and can be attentive, articulate, agile and charming. But at other times, I find myself at a total loss.
After a recent dance event, I joined a group of artists, curators and organisers – with different degrees of institutional power and renown – at the pub. I found myself sandwiched between the artistic director of an international theatre and an artist. The latter proceeded to tell a long story which just-so-happened to reference a number of esteemed artists and organisations with whom they have worked. I found myself despairing. Was there nothing we could talk about that was more interesting than this thinly-veiled careerism? Did we have to be doing this? I felt embarrassed for the artistic director, who was patiently nodding along, and marvelled at their stamina in weathering this. As the evening went on, I found myself trying to sabotaging this artist’s efforts, by directing the topic of conversation to anything that else about our lives that might be meaningful or interesting in our lives, but that had absolutely had no relevance to our professional careers, or capacity to reflect our institutional successes. (We ended up talking about how each of us felt when we discovered our pet cats murdering birds or small animals, which I found extremely interesting.)
I don’t think my objection to my fellow artist’s behaviour reflects on my intolerance for ambition or hustling in general. Rather, it came from a feeling of frustrated desire. This time (after the event itself) and social context (a pub) gave us a chance to experiment with other ways of being together, but this conversation was confining us to our usual roles (the artist seeking to convince the institutional gatekeeper of their merit, even if this was disguised as different form of exchange, i.e. ‘amusing’ stories from life). I was hungry for a different kind of exchange; something more flirtatious, by which I do not mean something (necessarily) sexual, but rather a mode of exchange which the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips defines as “an attempt to re-open, to rework, the plot”14. Flirtation insists on “keeping things in play”15, in order for “the elaboration of, making time for, less familiar possibilities”16. According to Phillips, it is a dynamic sociality in which we don’t yet know what we are looking for, or what positions we might be adopting in relation to one another, or who each of us might yet be. Flirtation makes me feel stimulated, curious, and alert. In contrast, so much of this artist-institutional social “complexity” can feel so narrow and predictable – in short, not complex enough. In thinking about how I make sense of my behaviour in the pub, and in many other social situations, I am reminded of a passage from Caleb Smith’s obituary for the queer theorist Lauren Berlant:
Lauren was a genius about social worlds and people’s feelings, but they didn’t always use their power to make any particular social situation feel easy for the people in it. Instead, they might make the situation weird. Lauren was interested in things, and things got interesting when they came around. Complications were introduced. Ordinary human interactions went off-script, taking extra time.17
I understand this need for stimulation to simultaneously be generative – it reveals things, about who we are in relation to one another, and offers a chance to make a shift within that – but also a limitation. It relates to my finite tolerance of being in a position of dependency. As an artist friend recently wrote on social media, to describe their feelings when trying to garner institutional support to develop their work: “I’m also being reminded of why I stepped away from theatre in the first place because I’m sending emails asking theatres and festivals to give me some weeks of space and it makes you feel small and pathetic and I want to curl up and die doing that.”18 I can enter into some of these exchanges, but after a while I often grow frustrated and resentful. I find myself making various provocation in an attempt to highlight or shift the power dynamics at play. From my experience, these kinds of challenges are rarely welcome, nor help me access the resources I was looking for in the first place. They just put people on edge.
One of other the ways that I sustain my intolerance is to keep practicing outside of institutional contexts. Rohanne and I might be hustling for this Swan Song project, but we have been simultaneously presenting an unfunded performance that takes place in people’s homes, and presenting an exhibition in an artist-led gallery. For better or worse, these extra-institutional practices mitigate my feeling of dependency. Or, I develop particular projects – like this PhD – through which I can directly name and address these dynamics. They help me clarify the affective and economic complexities of this field, and my feelings about entering them; and also create space for me to more safely live out the antagonistic fantasies that recur within me (e.g. contemplating resigning from the arts19; clearing and energetically dancing on office desks20; dressing up as a ghost and telling everyone I am invisible so that I can do whatever I want21).
Another way that I bear this social-professional complexity is that I rarely let the relationships I form with institutional staff develop into ‘actual’ friendships. I often have and express genuine affection for these people – we share jokes, and express mutual admiration for each other at work events, and we ‘like’ each other’s posts about our personal lives on social media – but I won’t reach out to or meet up with them outside of these (semi-)professional contexts for a purely social exchange. Sometimes I might think of them as ‘work colleagues’, with all the affection and distance that that might connote. This social distance sits in stark contrast with my friends who are freelance artists. Despite working in the same field as me in a professional capacity, these relationships are profound and intimate, and form a substantial part of social life.
I can think of a number of remarkably nice and interesting people, who I have only felt able to develop a friendship with once they have are no longer in such a position of institutional power over me. With one, our friendship only arose after they had left their role as a curator in an organisation with which I had infrequently worked. A couple of years after their departure (not only from the organisation, but the professional field as a whole), we have made quite significant gestures of care towards each other. I strongly suspect one factor that enables me to do so is the knowledge that there are no longer any possible professional rewards to this exchange. I can trust my own motivations, and trust that this other person does not regard them with any suspicion. Another friendship arose once I very consciously stepped away from an organisation I had cared about a lot, but with which I had grown increasingly frustrated. This individual was and continues to be in a significant leadership role at that institution. It was only when I had let go of my investment in this organisation, that I was able to relinquish my feelings of frustration I had toward this person, and the decisions they were making. I was then able to engage with them as the generally nice and intelligent person they are, without all the other baggage getting in the way.
Obviously, this strategy is not particularly wise. I suspect my career as an artist might look quite different if I had sought and cultivated relationships with people with significant institutional roles of power – as I have seen in the case of some of my peers. I am not suggesting that these peers and their curator friends don’t genuinely like and care for one another; I’m not interesting in drawing any definitive lines between ‘real’ friendship and self-interest, that which is ‘open-ended’ or ‘strategic’, ‘generous’ or ‘self-serving’, etc. (I assume it is usually both things at once.) All I can say is that I would find those relationships to present an intense complexity that I do not think I can bear. As Phillips would put it, my need to maintain some distance from institutional members of staff is a way of keeping things certain – and reveals some of the limits of my capacity for flirtation. I think it is safe to assume that everyone who remains in the field is, consciously or otherwise, continually making whatever social boundaries are necessary to sustain their own participation, depending on their own particular limits, needs, and desires.
And perhaps it goes without saying, but we need these boundaries because the content of these social exchanges are not fully in our control. Last year I had been undertaking a small project at a local arts organisation. The project was under the remit of a particular curator within that organisation. Although we hadn’t been in direct communication with one another, at one point they exercised their authority to demand a particular shift in the design of the project (as a non-negotiable decision, without opportunity for discussion). I was frustrated about this, but acquiesced, and I believe the changes that they insisted upon caused significant issues later on in the project. More recently, I was attending an event at the same organistaion, and I was shocked to hear this same curator give a loud cry of how nice it was to see me, and come up a give me a hug. We had only ever met once or twice in person, and had not had any contact since our (indirect) exchange about my project. I felt totally unsure of how to respond to their embrace, which felt completely out of touch with our existing relationship. I can only speculate as to what might have motivated this person to act in this way: my sense was that it was valuable for them to be seen on friendly terms with local practitioners, in their own eyes, or for the benefit of the international guests that were present at the event. I felt a bit used, but I can acknowledge that I was totally complicit in that situation: the hazy mix of sociality and professionalism that had characterised the initial conversations between us had left me open for them to make use of me, at that particular moment, in this way.
My discomfort within institutional exchanges doesn’t come from a simple rejection of ‘power relations’ in their own right. I am relatively content to (temporarily) acquiesce to certain hierarchies, and I think power can be a pleasurable and interesting thing to play with. Rather, I suspect it is how these institutional contexts expose and make me vulnerable to the social ‘moves’ of others – like this overly-friendly curator, or the ambitious artist in the pub – who either do not share my social taste, or lack skills and sensitivities to deftly ‘play the game’.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that “relations are inseparable from the capacity to be affected.”22 All institutions circumscribe different kinds of sociality: they open us up to things, hold us at distance, and position us in certain kinds of relation. The field of experimental performing arts in the UK has its own particular customs, expectations, norms – that each of us makes sense of and responds to, and goes on to reproduce or reshape through how we participate in that field. Again, rather than make any firm moral judgements that can assign the “right” or “wrong” ways for us to behave, I am trying to highlight the (endlessly slippery and nuanced) social dimension that is always already at play. I want to better understand the ways that this institutional field renders us vulnerable to one another – and the decisions that each of us might make to navigating that exposure.
More soon,
Paul
State funding for the arts is highly competitive. Arts Council England are loath to wholly fund a project. They require the artist to demonstrate how extensive institutional backing – which both legitimises the quality of the project, and demosntrates how it might reach the public – and to calculate the financial value of this support. You must declare the financial value of this ‘in kind support’ (e.g. a week of studio space offered for free), in order to claim that ACE are only paying for ‘half’ of the project, even if they are pretty much the sole contributor of hard cash. I co-wrote a text with Simon Ellis in 2022 that explains how freelance artists accrue this institutional support.
This is not to say that artists in other disciplines – like music or visual arts – do not also need to hustle to access resources to develop or present their work. However, most of my institutional experience is in the fields of performance and dance, and I suspect that the particular dynamics and conventions of hustling (the site and the nature of the ask, the means of courtship, the expectations and rhetorics, etc.) might vary across these fields.
Federici, Silvia (2019) An afternoon with Silvia Federici. 5 August. Available here. From 58:30-1:01:00.
Lorde, Audre (2018 [1982]) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. United Kingdom: Penguin Books. p.294
The Uncultured (2022) Survey Says, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3
Bojana Kunst goes into the labour of the endlessly-networking artist in her book Artist at Work (2015). I’m also thinking about a statement that I think the art historian Claire Bishop made (I can’t remember where) that success within contemporary arts is measured not by the inherent aesthetic or political qualities of a project, but in how it leads to ‘other projects’.
Rose, Sally (2022) Isolation and Loneliness, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3
I recently co-wrote a text with Efrosini Protopapa, that is soon to be published in the academic journal Dance Research. In the text, we wrote about the work of Paolo Virno (The Grammar of the Multitude, 2004) to think about this sociality not merely as a by-product, but a valuable and intentional output of performance/dance/academic industries. By “we wrote”, I mean “Efrosini wrote”; I’ve not actually read any Virno, so you’ll have to take her word for it. Here’s an excerpt:
“As the philosopher Paolo Virno has argued, that which is really productive from an economic point of view is not the sum of individual labourers’ outputs, but the context of collaboration and interaction; and what counts in collaboration is not so much the separate contributions as the network that unites the collaborators.”
Wagaine, Salome (2022) The Only Way Out is Through the…No., in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.3
I addressed this sense of personal investment in arts institutions in a the last blogpost focussing on the notion of home.
Wee, Cecilia. Casting Spells, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.5.
Ibid. p.3
Phillips, Adam (1995) On Flirtation. London: faber and faber. p.xxv
ibid. p.xii
ibid. p.xix
Deleuze, Gilles (2005 [1968]) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Joughin, Martin. New York: Zone Books. p.218