November 2023 (part two)
This post is part two of three. (You can find part one here.) The images across these posts 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 works pictured below – the embroidered portraits on paper, suspended from the ceiling – are called The Stewards. The first portrait is of the Associate Artistic Director of Sadler's Wells Theatre, and the second is one of the Co-Directors of Stand Assembly. The photos were taken by Freddy Griffiths.
Dear readers,
As part of the ‘hustling’ process I described in the previous post, Rohanne and I recently reached out to a large publicly-funded theatre near where I live in Nottingham. We have done a small bit of work there a few years ago, and have applied to a number of their opportunities for local artists (including proposing the Swan Song piece for one of their substantial annual commissions, without success). While it’s never felt like the obvious choice for our practice – it’s clear that our kind of work is not regularly presented there – we occasionally return to try our luck. It’s a small city in which there are not too many people making or presenting performance, so their open calls are less competitive than some of the other inter-/national ones we apply for – and it feels important to me to insist that our practice is part of the local landscape of performance-making.
I arranged a meeting with one of the producers who works at the theatre. These ‘one-to-one’ meetings are offered as part of their ‘artist development’ network, on which I’m registered, and which this particular producer manages. I was conscious that they were relatively new to this role, and I was curious as to whether they might be more open to the kinds of work we do than their predecessor.
While the conversation wasn’t particularly fruitful for the Swan Song project, it was a striking reminder of many of the questions I have been pursuing in this PhD. The producer stressed that they were less than a year into this institutional role, and expressed their discomfort in their position – in particular, their apprehensions about ‘entering the institution’ after having an extensive career as a freelancer. They spoke about their previous person who had held their role, and then invoked the unknown figure who would one day follow them (through reflecting on the notes they were taking during our meeting, to which this future person would have access). They said that it was nice to be able to grant artists the resources to make their work, but deeply uncomfortable to be on the person to have to say “no” – particularly, to represent and express the wider organisation’s disinterest or incapacity.
I suspect this self-avowed discomfort (in conveying an institution’s ‘no’) was a significant factor in their hesitant manner for much of the meeting. They had been part of the panel for the open call I had applied to earlier that year, but seemed very reticent to give any candid feedback on the work. I was keen to hear what this producer or their colleagues had made of the materials we had submitted (a proposal text, excerpt of the script, and video documentation of rehearsals), in order to find out what kinds of assumptions were being made about this work (and our practice) from people working in these kinds of organisations – so that we could recalibrate our pitch to avoid similar responses in future encounters. But it was difficult to get this producer to speak openly or directly; as the meeting progressed, their reticence seemed not to come simply from having said ‘no’, but in having to account for their perception of the work, and the reasoning of the panel’s decision-making. As the meeting went on, they began to acknowledge not only the limited information they had about not only the works or the practitioners, but also of the region’s field of performance and art-making.
This producer is responsible for the organisation’s programme to engage with and support the region’s theatre artists. But there is no way for them to be sensitive to the needs and processes of all these practitioners; let alone have a familiarity with the diverse contexts and frameworks in which they might be working (new writing, experimental practice, community-focused practice, political organising, pedagogical, academic research, etc.) I am assuming, like most people in publicly-funded arts in the UK, that this producer is working for low pay and is trying to do their job despite scarce resources. Individuals are often tasked with a quantity and breadth of work that in other fields (and in certain countries with better funding) would be split across a number of different roles. What can we expect of an individual when their workload exceeds what is possible to achieve in their work hours? How much time and effort should someone in such a position make to meet with the practitioners living in their city, or see the work that they are making and presenting across the region?1
To what degree am I, or any other practitioner, meant to enter into this exchange with the expectation of ‘support’? As I suggested earlier, it not clear as to whether or not my practice was eligible for support in this context at all. Yes, I might be a local artist making performance who is registered on their ‘artist development programme’, but if my work can be defined as ‘live art’ or ‘dance’ (as it was during the meeting, and often happens in similar kinds of meetings), then this might disavow the organisation of any responsibility to engage with my work at all. I’m not suggesting that this is a malicious (or even conscious) exclusion; the people working within these organisations have limited resources, and a particular taste and set of values, and will need to find ways of making peace with how they support some practitioners and turn away others.2
I expect this not-quite-fitting is quite a common dynamic within publicly-funded arts in the UK. Many of these organisations will have some programme or offer to engage with and support local practitioners – or even, like the theatre, have a member of staff with that as their specific remit. But most organisations will have quite particular tastes – either due to the constraints of limited funding, or through the desires of their artistic directors wishing to prioritise a very particular community or form of a practice – and the work of many artists might not neatly fit within these disciplinary or socio-political agendas. These organisations tastes may or may not made be explicitly stated. As such, it’s often not clear for an artist whether it they are eligible for a particular organisation’s offer of support.
But even in situations where an artist’s work clearly suits an organisation’s current interests, it’s not clear what expectations they should hold when approaching a publicly-funded organisation for support. How are this producer and I making sense of our roles and relation as we enter into this institutional encounter? The theatre I had reached out receives substantial public funding as one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisation, with a significant chunk of this funding coming with the remit to support local artists and creative cultures. Should I, as an artist making performance in this city, expect to receive some kind of support from this organisation – with perhaps the theatre acting as a convenient conduit for ACE to deliver these funds to grassroots practitioners and networks? Or are these funds under the expert stewardship of the theatre’s staff, who distribute them through particular forms (smaller pots of funding, advise sessions, workshops, etc.) which ring-fence resources for select groups of artists who have been prioritised as being most deserving or in need of support?
Should the administrative workers, who are assign themselves salaries from these funds while others’ labour remains freelance or unpaid, be regarded a parasitic class whose rampant greed can and should be held in check? Is this support to be regarded as an expression of good will (or charity) by this organisation; to which these artists should be grateful if they happen to receive, yet refrain from expecting or dependent upon? Are the theatre and I simply two independent figures within this city’s cultural landscape, engaging on neutral ground, who may or may not wish to work with one another, with no sense of expectation or obligation? To what degree is this figure, in their role, beholden to a wider artistic community, and accountable for the decisions this organisation is making about how it is directing its limited resources?
In their recent article ‘Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox’, dance scholars Rosa Cisneros, Simon Ellis and Rowan McLelland argue that the hardship experienced by many freelance dance artists in the UK during the Covid-19 lockdowns was caused by the structural inequality of the sector that pre-existed the virus.3 They write that these workers as being insufficiently supported by “the professional contemporary dance sector and its institutions as an entity or system”4, and that the only individuals who can afford to persist in this sector are those than can make up for that deficit of support through private means – reliance on family, friends, partners.
These are unsurprising claims, and ones that I agree with. But what I find interesting about this article is how it deals with the question of whether freelance dance artists understand these organisations to be supporting them in the first place. While invoking the notion of “state-sponsored funding to which we are all entitled”5, the authors acknowledge the fact that their opinion is not shared by the UK government, whose funding for the arts is “based solely on market-led thinking”: on the capacity of “the UK of creative sectors […] to produce and sell intellectual property”6. As such, the organisations themselves must continually invoke certain rhetorics (“the tropes of neoliberal thinking”7) in order to secure public funding, despite these rhetorics sitting in profound contrast to the values of those working there, or the communities or practitioners they seek to support:
Perhaps contemporary dance in the UK is better described as a collection of not-for-profit institutions that adopt industry-inspired postures […] as a survival strategy. Such posturing occurs even though market-based neoliberal thinking tends to be orthogonal to the implicit cultural values of contemporary dance artists.8
I find it very rare for arts organisations in the UK to make any explicit statements about how they understand the relationship between institutional staff and freelance artists. I suspect this ambiguity – and the different unspoken attitudes across different organisations – causes much upset. However, the desire that many organisational staff might have to support freelance artists, might only be realised through their continued ability to receive and redistribute funding, which (according to Cisneros et al.) depends entirely on their continued pretence this relationship is something else entirely.
This producer had complicated and unresolved feelings about their recent move to the ‘other side’ of the artist-institution binary. What does it mean to ‘represent’ an institution? How much of what they say should be understood as an expression of the organisation – and for how much of its activity are they responsible? To what degree should their personal tastes, values and blind spots shape their work and the organisation during their tenure – and to what degree could they even be expected to be conscious of, or mitigate, these idiosyncrasies?
Before I pursue the questions, I first want to trouble this binary between ‘freelance artist’ and ‘institutional staff’. Firstly, we can note that many people in such a salaried role might themselves be (or once were) practicing artists. We might expect emerging practitioners to pay their rent by working part-time in a theatre’s bar, or as a technician or an invigilator in a gallery. When does this ‘non-artistic’ work begin to subsume their entire professional identity, for themselves, or in the eyes of others? Most artists pay some of their rent through work beyond their practice. Is someone working four days a week as a finance officer, or as a full-time academic, still an artist?
Secondly, I’m hesitant about how this binary homogenises people in very different positions. Many roles in arts organisations of varying ‘seniority’ (for example, finance officers, technicians, receptionists, social media managers, executive directors, etc.) don’t fit particularly well into my discussion so far. One of the issues of regarding this ‘hustling’ activity as being representative of the artist-institutional relations is how the roles of people most often in dialogue with artists (producers, programmers or artistic directors) can eclipse all others. Some of my questions I have posed about what it means to hold institutional office might apply to all of these different roles; whereas others (around personal taste, for example) might only be relevant to people who are making decisions about programming. I’m curious about all kinds of workers – freelance and salaried, directly or indirectly engaged with artistic production – and how we differently make sense of their roles within these institutional entities.
How are individuals are equated with or distanced from the organisations in which they work? Much of this PhD has been prompted by Mick Wilson’s definition of an institution as a ‘trans-generational contract’, which implies that this entity has some existence and duration distinct from any of the individuals who might be temporarily engaging with it. The founders might have left, and new individuals have entered this structure which pre-existed them, and they anticipate might continue on beyond their tenure. Our mental image of an institution can slip between a physical building, and the group of people who work there, and then a more intangible entity that is somehow distinct from both.
This distinction between individuals and an organisation has a clear legal expression. The technology of a company as a legal entity distinct from and outliving its members has its origins in the UK in the medieval corporations such as churches, charities, universities and guilds – which were “legal ‘persons’ that could own assets, incur debts and enter contracts independent of their individual members”9. The more commercial form of a company – in the form of a ‘joint-stock corporation’ – came about in the 16th century with royal charters being granted for the Muscovy Company in 1555, the Levant Company in 1592 and the East India Company in 1600 (with shares of such companies’ stocks being publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange from 1571).10 The ‘limited liability’ of such companies established a legal separation between individual and the organisations in which they work, ensuring that a director of a organisation is only personally liable to a set amount for the potential debts that the company might incur. However, this ‘limited liability’ is not absolute; there are various instances in which individuals can be held personally liable for their organisational actions, and charged with criminal and civil offences. For example, section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 makes individual workers personally liable (i.e. criminally prosecutable) for ensuring a safe working environment.11
Alongside this distinction between an organisation and the individuals who work there, we can also distinguish between those individuals and their formal roles of office; yet again, this distinction is neither clear nor total. To make sense of this, the philosopher Hannah Arendt draws on the Roman notion of persona, a citizen who held rights, which etymologically derived from the mask worn by an actor. The mask covers the actor’s face, and designates them as a particular character, however there is still an opening at the mouth through which they speak through: “per-sonare, to sound through”12. Individuals operate through and are recognized by their public roles, but also exceed them: “We […] are recognized according to the roles which our professions assign us, as physicians or lawyers […]. It is through this role, sounding through it, as it were, that something else manifests itself, something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably identifiable, so that we are not confused by a sudden change of roles, for instance […] when a hostess, whom socially we know as a physician, serves drinks instead of taking care of her patients.”13
Arendt writes that “we must accept and even acquire [these roles] if we wish to take part in the world’s play at all”. Despite this, she argues that these roles are ultimately “exchangeable; […] they are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner self”14, and insists on the right not only to be “free not only to exchange the roles and masks that the great play of the world may offer, but free even to move through that play in my naked ‘thisness’.”15 According to Arendt, our fundamental selves are distinct from these professional roles, even if our performance of them is imbued with enduring qualities that “the human soul constantly bears within itself.”16 Most interestingly, she highlights ones sense of ethics (“the voice of conscience”) as one such quality.
We are part of our institutions, yet distinct from them, and the roles we adopt are separate from yet animated by our “naked ’thisness’”. Alongside the notion of legal responsibility, I’m interested in the less determinable question of who can be seen to ‘represent’ an organisation. Within the arts, my general sense is that the more junior staff (bar and events staff, administrative assistants, etc.) tend to be perceived as being less representative of the organisation. As I suggested before, it is often understood and accepted that the people undertaking these jobs primarily to pay the bills, while their passions and investment might lie elsewhere (their artistic practice, their studies, or the grassroots initiatives they are collaborating on or participating in.)
The more senior the staff get, the more these individuals become equated with the organisation. They might ‘speak’ for the organisation at a public event, or put their name to a statement published by the organisation. Their physical presence at an event becomes connoted with the presence and attention of the organisation: by saying “Sadler’s Wells came to see my show”, implies the presence of a senior programmer or director. These individuals are much less able than junior staff to express distance from the organisation’s various programmes, or openly criticise different aspects of its work. I would suggest that this distinction (of who is seen to represent the institution) primarily corresponds to the (perceived) decision-making power of the individual within that organisation, rather than their being ascribed to this individual’s personal investment in the organisation, or the duration of their work there.17
What is an institutional leader meant to look like, and how are they meant to be behave? Cecilia Wee writes that the conventions of “professionalism” within the arts “are predicated on white, male, ableist and middle class models”18. I assume there are complex conventions across most fields about how one is expected to comport yourself, that may or may not be explicitly stated. I also assume that most people who hold senior institutional roles feel a silent pressure about how their behaviour is witnessed and scrutinised across their working lives, and across the unstable borders to their non-professional lives. In 2022, the Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin faced demands by journalists and members of parliament to account for a video taken of her dancing and singing at a party.19 Within the UK, our political leaders aim to comport themselves with a sense of seriousness, competence, and every-day approachability; an endlessly complex balance, at which each major politician’s attempt garners endlessly scrutiny and ridicule. Many television shows extensively mine the discrepancy between organisational expectation and personal failing: The Thick of It (2005), Parks and Recreation (2009), W1A (2014). My favourite model of arts leadership comes from the gloriously camp Louie Spence in Pineapple Studios (2010).20
Over the past year, I’ve been following the work of Demetre Daskalakis, an American doctor appointed the Deputy Coordinator of the White House National Mpox Response. Mpox (formerly ‘Monkeypox’) is an infectious disease, transmitted through physical contact. Its outbreak in the West in 2022 was primarily through transmission between gay and bisexual men.21 As such, it was decided that experts in sexual healthcare would best lead preventative measures. Daskalakis was previously the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV/AIDS division, and his success in the field had been partly attributed to the ways he continued to stay in strong relation with the queer community, and embed his work is queer spaces such as bath houses and sex clubs.22
Daskalakis is clearly very deliberate in how he retains connection to and the trust of the queer community – of whom he is part, and serves – which navigating his significant institutional roles. While he might appear in press briefings in suit and tie or lab coat, he also breaks deeply sedimented norms of ‘professionalism’ that demand a distance from sex, by entering into formal contexts or undertakes press photography dressed in a leather jacket or harness, or other accoutrement from gay male sexual culture. I read Daskalakis’s performances of institutional office as resisting a very specific trend in healthcare that views gay male sexual culture as a ‘regrettable risk’23, to instead insist on it as a legitimate and respectable form for life; that sexually-active gay men can make use their experience and knowledge from that part of their lives as part of designing and enacting healthcare policy.24
I don’t want to equate the cultural expectations of leadership within government healthcare in the US and publicly-funded arts in the UK, but I do think that Daskalakis’ performances of institutional office offers a useful example in sensitising oneself to the demands and constraints of institutional office, however those conventions vary across different regions and fields. Whether or not these codes of professionalism are silent or explicit, their transgression can come at a cost. Shortly after his White House appointment, Daskalakis was subject to a number of articles from right-wing media outlets questing the suitability of his appointment based on his appearance and public image.25
In the face of these demands, and the risks of failing to meet them (both within and beyond the traditional delineations of work life), I’m interested in how people articulate the separations and overlaps between their professional role and themselves as an individual. While there are many more subtle ways by which we can indicate our institutional positioning to others (or hold it at a remove), I am endlessly charmed by the prefaces that many people use to frame their social media accounts. The phrase “all views my own” is used to indicate to readers that the content being posted should not be taken to be representative of the organisation in which this work, and that their activity and presence on this forum should be understood as part of their non-work life.
This strategy has its limits. I was amazed to once see a leading figure in UK experimental dance – a freelance artist, significantly engaged in disability justice, who frequently acts of a guest curator and organisational consultant – complain about organisational staff post their daily ‘Wordle’ scores on their personal social media accounts. They expressed outrage that these people clearly had enough time to play games, yet seemingly not enough time to address the enduring ableism that saturated the arts. I was quite shocked: both in how this person had read these individuals’ social media activity as being “on the clock” – and the apparent demand they were making for these individuals to devote every waking second of their lives to their work.
An individual being associated with an institution is not only a matter of formal appointment, or of how they are perceived by others. It is also a question of how one perceives oneself.
A friend of mine was recently working as a freelance ‘guest’ curator at an arts organisation, in which she was organising an event. She told me about her deep sense of frustration throughout the process. She had felt locked out of their decision-making, and was unable to get what she wanted or needed. She described herself as being completely at the mercy of the institution. And so, despite her involvement with the organisation in this situation – and her seemingly successful career in holding similar roles in other places – she was keen to insist to me that she was never ‘truly’ part of this institution.
I could strongly relate to my friend’s feeling of institutional powerlessness, but I felt unsure about the distinction she had implied between those who can effect change (who are ‘truly’ part of the organisation), and then everyone else. I suspect that many people who work there – including people in permanent and salaried roles – might often feel a similar powerlessness. They might feel little to no agency in their decision-making, and are primarily carrying out long-term projects that were designed and set in motion by their predecessors. Given the constraints of funding cycles, or limited resources, or policy established by the board, they might also claim to be ‘at the mercy’ of this organisation.
It can be seductive to form a binary between ‘us’ (however we might define that) and ‘them’ (those who are ‘truly’ part of the institution). But the artist and theorist Andrea Fraser insists that it is important to resist this:
Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us,” we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship—above all, self-censorship—which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it.26
By ‘institution’, Fraser does not mean any singular organisation, but rather ‘the art world’: a complex ecosystem of organisations, markets, journals, educational institutions, curators, critics, artists, studios, etc. But I think her argument is still useful in helping us resist the trap of conflating any organisation with the ‘people with power’ (whether or not they actually have the power we imagine). Following Fraser, an institution is composed of people, and not just the people who might hold the positions of governance or administration. The institution is all the workers and artists and thinkers and publics who participate in and reproduce and reshape the organisation – even if they believe themselves to be ‘outsiders’ or that they have no power.
I see many organisations in the UK making efforts to shift their self-representation to offer a more transparent, plural or personal picture of the individuals who work within the organisation. For example, over the past couple of years – during Rosie Groan’s tenure as artistic director – Artsadmin have started to sign off their e-newsletters with the first names of the artistic and executive directors.27 Many publicly-funded arts organisations of different scales and economies have pages on their websites bearing photographic portraits of the many people who work there. Like Artsadmin, many of them present these array of names and faces in ways that resist expected hierarchies – the directors of the organisation and chairs of their boards are mixed in among front of house, technical or bar staff.28 This sits in pretty sharp contrast to what we might think of as traditional forms of institutional portraiture: oil paintings or busts of select individuals (often critiqued as ‘old dead white men’) who co-founded the organisation, or held some leadership role.
These staff portraits that feature on organisation’s websites fascinate me. Over the past year, I have been making a series of embroidered portraits of institutional leaders called The Stewards, which are drawn from these images. These portraits are non-consensual – I did not ask for permission from these individuals, nor do I have any interest in telling them I have made them – and they are named according to the organisational role of the individual, rather than their personal name (e.g., rather than being called ‘Paul Paschal’, it would be titled ‘PhD student, University of Roehampton and Sadler’s Wells Theatre’). What I find interesting about these images is that by participating in this organisation, this individual has consented to this particular aspect of themselves being made available to the public. The embroideries are a way to linger with these photographs (hand embroidery is an extremely slow medium), and consider the peculiar and distant contact that this public photograph makes between this institutional representative and me, as a member of the public.
The wide-spread interest in shifting institutional portraiture also exists beyond the arts. For the past couple of years, the fence that borders Kings College Hospital in South London has been adorned with posters bearing photos and the names of staff holding a variety of roles (nurses, therapists, ambulance drivers, finance officers, operations staff). These posters also have a personalised “thank you” note, that highlights some particular quality of how this person’s goes about their work, and how that contributes to their team or the hospital more broadly. I suspect this campaign (and others like it) is undertaken with multiple intentions. They aim to evoke a greater sense of investment and pride in the staff about the organisation, and foster better internal relations between staff and management. They attempt to make the internal structure of the organisation more transparent to both the service users and the wider public. This latter factor might also be motivated by defence: they might attempt to mitigate bad feeling (people disgruntled about their frustrations with the bureaucracy of the NHS, for example) by giving the organisation a human face, to which might people might be less willing to express their ire. I find this attempt to humanise the organisation interesting, and a little uncanny: the earnest voice that expresses this gratitude to each staff member is never attributed or signed. Is it the management? Someone in the marketing department? Or the voice of the institution itself, distinct from any individual who might be featured on one of these posters?
However, Fraser’s statement is not just a matter of representation, but of responsibility. Her words articulate a powerful sense of possibility (“ok, if we are the institution, we can reshape how we are doing this”) and complicity (“ah, if we are the institution, we are co-responsible for things to have come to this situation”). If we part of the institution – and the institution is composed of all of us – then to what degree are we responsible for it? How complicit are we in its violences, and to what degree are we obliged to change its processes and values?
Many of us are working with values that diverge from or even directly contradict the organisations in which we are working. We could think of an academic and teacher, who continues to insist on time for open-ended critical discussion in the classroom, rather than adhere to the pre-set learning outcomes established for that teaching session29; or of a formerly freelance producer or artist, who takes on a role in a major arts organisation, with the desire to strategically serve and direct resources to a particular community of practitioners; or of a PhD student, like me, who invests significant time engaging in forms of dialogue and exchange that are neither recognized nor valued within their university’s protocols. I am in receipt of significant public funds to do this research, and for better or worse I feel a responsibility to ensure that the materials I develop are both available to and oriented towards a non-academic public.
However, following Fraser, we should not understand these efforts as contradicting ‘the institution’ itself, but merely the particular vision of whoever designed those policies and protocols within and against which we are working. Rather than being ‘against’ the institution, we can understand ourselves to be insisting on the enduring value of the institution, and working towards its possible alternative design. A frequent rhetoric of protest groups is to decouple the current directors of an organisation from the organisation more broadly, and by doing so to clarify that their directives are contingent. The dissenting workers can then present their own agenda as a legitimate voice and vision for the organisation, or propose a vision of organisational directorship based on alternative values.
However, an expression of institutional disavowal does not itself constitute an act of responsibility. Writing about the cultures within higher education art colleges, Mick Wilson describes a recurring tendency of ‘bourgeois revolt’30 he sees within many of his colleagues: of people falling into “a pattern of self-regarding conservatism disguised through theatrical self-presentations of radicalism” through an association with “a radical potency and critical culture – first proved in something like ‘1968’ or ‘the seventies’”31. Wilson is critical of such a disposition, in which individuals not only express disdain for the current operation of the institution, but condemn the institutional as a whole is unsalvageable. They are resistant to any efforts to mitigate and transform the situation – all while continuing to draw the benefits of their continued role there (a salary, etc.), in a position of “comfortable though miserable institutionalisation”.
Wilson suggests that while one continues to draw the benefits from holding a position within an organisation, one holds a responsibility to uphold or transform it. (I won’t fully get into it here, but it’s worth noting that this is not an uncontested opinion. The political philosophers Stefano Harney and Fred Moten quite consistently advocate for institutional disavowal.32) But to what degree? The kinds of organisations I am speaking about – major arts organisations, universities – can be enourmous, and outlive anyone who currently works there. Any individual seeking to work towards institutional change will have limited capacities (time, skills, energy, resilience) – and no doubt commitments to other parts of their lives (personal relationships and dependents, non-professional association with activist and community groups, etc.). The writer and activist Dana Kopel gave an account of her efforts to unionise the New Museum in New York (an arts organisation founded with democratic ideals, but which has since developed exploitative conditions for workers), which details the extraordinary personal cost of doing this work.33 One can join and take on an active role in one’s a union; or begin to educate oneself on the structural violences – sexism, racism, ableism – that likely saturate these organisations; or invest ever-greater care in how one is engaging with ones colleagues, students, managers, or the public. These are all endeavours into which one could sink a never-ending amount of energy. How do we decide what efforts are ‘enough’ to satisfy the responsibilities we take on as part of our institutions positions?
More soon,
Paul
Clayton Lee, the new artistic director of the performance festival Fierce Festival in Birmingham has commenced his tenure with offer 30-minute meetings to any individual in the city who requests it. See here.
It’s beyond the scope of this already overburdened text, but I’m curious about the histories of performance making in the UK that hve given rise to this crisis of dependency. Could it be attributed to the shift from repertory companies to a freelancer model, in which artists no longer has the structures of regular support within a single organisation, and now must work across a number of projects alongside leading their own? Was there even a moment in which these newly mobile body of freelance “dance artists” or “theatremakers” should have been able to sustain themselves through this decentralised subsidy?
Ellis, S., McLelland, R., & Cisneros, R. K. (2023). Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox. Kritika Kultura, 2023(40), 154-175.
Ibid. p.157
Ibid. p.169
Ibid. p.162
Ibid. p.166
Ibid. p.165
Mansell, S. F. & Sison, A. J. G. (2020) Medieval corporations, membership and the common good : rethinking the critique of shareholder primacy, Journal of Institutional Economics, 16(5), pp. 579-595
See: Koram, Kojo (2022) Uncommon Wealth: Britain and The Aftermath of Empire. London: John Murray. pp.54-58.
“Where an offence under any of the relevant statutory provisions committed by a body corporate is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to have been attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate or a person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he as well as the body corporate shall be guilty of that offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.” See here.
Arendt, H. (2003 [1975]) Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Kohn, J. New York: Schocken Books. p. 12
Ibid. p.13
Ibid. p.13
Ibid. p.14
Ibid. p.13
I’m not sure this distinction is always the case in other fields, or within the arts. I suspect many organisations are represented in people’s minds by the public-facing role which might be entry-level, with smaller salaries than those the executives who shape the organisation’s policies. For example, I am thinking about the clichés figures in American films of the figure of the disinterested DVLA worker behind the counter, or the mean tax officer behind the desk.
Wee, Cecilia. Casting Spells, in The Uncultured (eds.) Producing Liveness in Interesting Times. Available here. p.4
“When gay sex is discussed today, it’s almost always in negative terms. ‘Hook-up culture’ is pathologised as a consequence of childhood trauma and low self-esteem” Greig, James (2022) The Future of Gay Sex, Dazed. 20 August. Available here.
I would argue that this has a political legacy at least as far as Douglas Crimp writing in 1987 that “they insist that our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that will save us.” Crimp, Douglas (2002) How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic, in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp.237-271.
Fraser, Andrea (2005) From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Artforum, September. Available here.
See: Artsadmin, Primary, Bluecote, Siobhan Davies Studios.
In a discussion from pedagogue Klaas Hoek, during his tenure teaching at the Slade School of Art. ”It’s important to acknowledge that I never had to transform these activities into a formalised curriculum, and I didn’t have to justify my working hours or time at the academy. We insisted that these activities remain extracurricular from the start. We all kept a degree of independence and could do whatever we wanted to do.” ‘Conversations on Art Education: Klaas Hoek’. Formerly available on www.fudgethefacts.com, but still retrievable via the Way Back Machine here.
Wilson, Mick (2015) Artistic Research between Inquiry and Revolt: Artistic Research, the University, and the Trajectory of a Deleuzian Motif. Presented at: The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research, Orpheus Institute, Ghent Belgium. Available here.
Wilson, Mick (2007) Art School and the Old Grey Cardigan Test. Variant 29, Summer. Available here. p.22
See their text ‘the university: last words’ (2020, available here, produced for ‘FUC’, a discussion group organised by striking students at the University of California):
“What does it mean […] to work for an institution whose disappearance you desire […]? […] It requires practicing non-cooperation rather than petitioning for shared governance. […] We’re not stakeholders in the university. Let’s not share in its governance. We are neither producers nor consumers of intellectual property. Let’s not enact its management. And why should we want to hear from the motherfuckers who run it as they tell us why they have no choice but to run it like they do? Most people know they are in an antagonistic relation with their boss. It’s a fuck of a lot easier to think about how to grow in antagonism to the boss than to think about how to make the bosses’ genocidally dysfunctional shit job—the management he imposes upon us as weight and role—better. Why should we make their job better, or easier? Let’s be glad to grow in the ongoing project of destroying their shit. Let’s refuse to make do in the maintenance of their shit. Our work, not their jobs.” p.3.
Or from 2:25 to 5:10 on their podcast with Millenials are Killing Capitalism (2020) "Wildcat The Totality” - Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time of Pandemic And Rebellion (part 1) [Podcast]. Available here.