I would like the following text to serve as a continuation of the discussion on the economy of the contemporary art world and the place of art and creative labor in the world of capital.

Let’s begin with a simple tale.

Once upon a time there was an artist who was so naïve that he thought that artists, as workers, should receive compensation for participation in shows and screenings of their works. Despite the disappointing experiences he’d had when he’d tried to press these issues in many projects, he thought it made sense to try his best and see what came of it, especially when his art works were invited to spaces marked by the obvious presence of capital (or where one could presume its presence). When he made his modest requests, he usually received the answer that there was no money. Neither for artist fees, nor for travel, nor for production. Curators usually just asked him and his colleagues to send copies of their films or print files of their works – they would do the rest. Most artists thus had little chance to see the many beautiful, important shows that were made with their work and thus to grow professionally.

The artist was a member of a collective. This collective did not have a gallery, and most of the videos they produced were self-financed (or underfinanced) with the vague hope that one day they might be able to raise money for a new production. To make matters worse, they worked under public license.

One day the artist received a polite letter from a nice curator whom he had never met. The curator was pleased to invite the artist to screen a video work at a show. She explained how the video was crucial to the whole concept of the show. She even asked the artist to produce a new graphic piece that would work in conjunction with the video.

The artist was thrilled to receive this invitation. He read the concept for the show and discovered that it was filled with important ideas and stirring expressions that he liked a lot. The emancipatory aspect of modernity as an unfinished project… The question of the contemporary emancipatory potential of revolutionary ideas, of socialism and communism… The role of art in the transformation of society. And so on.

He thought to himself that it was terrific there were curators and venues that worried about the issues dear to his heart. He read the name of the place where he had been invited to exhibit: Pavilion UniCredit in Bucharest. This particular space was renowned for supporting the most radical (even revolutionary) practices and some of the most leftist and socially concerned international artists.

He recalled that this cutting-edge space with its radical agenda was run by a guy he had once met; this man had also invited him to a big biennale he was organizing. He also recalled that this fellow had complained his space was very poorly financed because his country was the poorest in Europe. They had begun to argue about just this fact. The artist felt that since this fellow’s space was named in honor of a big bank, it might make sense to push this bank for more solid support. Otherwise, when local institutions were not treated as equal partners, and their hard work was poorly compensated, you ended up with something that smacked of the neocolonial exploitation of resources and people, of local miseries and inequalities. There was nothing wrong with the bank’s sponsorship itself, he thought, but there was something perverse about featuring the bank’s name without securing enough funding to run a decent program and treat artists and contributors right.

The artist recalled all this when he got the invitation. He Googled the name of the bank’s Romanian branch and within minutes he learned that UniCredit, one of the most powerful banks in Europe, was also well known for its social responsibility and support of culture:

The banks who united their forces to create UniCredit Group have a long tradition in promoting culture and local artistic manifestations, in the countries where they are present. This involvement is proved by UniCredit Group’s vast art collection and by the tens of initiatives within the UniCredit & Art Project.

Being very close to the communities where we are present, we try to maintain a strong relationship with them, by encouraging all the initiatives that contribute to their cultural enrichment. Thus, we encourage cultural diversity, by supporting music, literature, film and plastic art projects.

http://www.unicredit-tiriac.ro/sustainability/partnerships-sponsorships/art-culture

As part of a banking group with a tradition in supporting the arts, UniCredit Tiriac Bank has a strong interest in cultural artistic projects. We already have a tradition in supporting social and environment protection projects. We believe in the power of example, and this is why we involve our employees in the various projects that we support.

Beyond its main objective of making profit, we think that a private company has a responsibility to give something back to the community. Without this, we cannot speak of sustainability.

http://www.unicredit-tiriac.ro/sustainability/policies-strategy

[The UniCredit Integrity Charter] encourage[s] the growth of shared feelings and experiences among all our colleagues.

http://www.unicredit-tiriac.ro/about-us/mission-values/integrity-charter

Our artist was not a purist. As long as UniCredit had such good policies, that meant it should respect artists and cultural initiatives, particularly when its name was on the marquee of the art space it sponsored. How could it show its respect for artists? By supporting their work with serious funding and providing decent working conditions for guest curators and everyone involved in their projects.

He imagined what it would be like if he ran a project space in Petersburg called Sberbank Chto Delat or Gazprom Chto Delat and then sat around complaining that there wasn’t adequate funding for its programs. Wouldn’t other artists expect to be paid for their work if they exhibited at a space with such a solid-sounding name?

After mulling over all these things, he agreed to participate in the show at Pavilion UniCredit.

In his letter, he modestly asked the curator whether a fee would be paid for his work and for screening his collective’s video.

The curator sent him a rather detailed reply. There was no money for artist fees: all the money had gone into building a new wall and dimming the windows and so on and so forth. There was no money left for anything else, but still it is a great space, etc. In short, it was the same old story.

This was no great surprise to the artist. But as someone who had been developing a class consciousness and who saw artists and other creative and intellectual workers as a new kind of exploited proletariat, he couldn’t help thinking that it was irresponsible to go on making his peace with this business as usual.

So he again modestly asked the curator whether it wouldn’t make sense for all the participants involved in this project (the organizers included) to raise in a general way the issue of financial support from rich corporate sponsors. Maybe it would be a good idea to challenge them to extend their nice-sounding concept of social responsibility to artistic workers – that is, to themselves and their colleagues? He merely wanted to spark a discussion in the good old spirit of institutional critique. He didn’t want to cause a scandal – just to get folks to start thinking.

And because the piece the curator wanted him to exhibit was a video about Brecht and the dialectic, the artist thought it would be great to bring this message into their present working situation and try to prove that things didn’t have to remain the way they were. He also thought that the graphic statement he had been asked to produce for the show should likewise reflect these questions.

The guest curator liked his idea a lot. What could be wrong with it? Radical spaces like Pavilion UniCredit usually savored these kinds of tough issues. It would be possible to organize a discussion of the precarious conditions of artistic labor. They could then publish a radical newspaper with support from UniCredit in which dozens of brilliant precarious contributors would ponder this business of not getting paid for their work. Of course they would do so for free (or, at very least, for the nice food stamps called per diems in the art world). There was no money to finance this important debate, which in reality would cost almost nothing, perhaps a millionth of the budget for a run-of-the-mill corporate dinner.

The artist’s dialogue with the curator was going well until the folks at Pavilion UniCredit got wind of what he was proposing. They informed him (indirectly, via the curator) that their board couldn’t permit anyone to exhibit an attack on their institution (even in the form of an artwork) within the institution itself. And that was that: the artist’s piece, allegedly so crucial to the concept of the show, was disinvited with amazing alacrity and without any further discussion.

Why? The artist could only guess at the real reasons because the managers of Pavilion UniCredit refused further contact with him and thus foreclosed the possibility of a real discussion. Was it because the artist was a greedy egomaniac with a passion for scandal? Or was it because artists could not be allowed to raise questions of any sort about production? Or was it because the artist had mildly challenged the grey economy of sponsorship?

*****

What is the moral of this story?

We might say that this story is too local and too bound up with personal peculiarities and emotions to have any general significance. This is true to some extent. The artist, however, believes that such cases should be made public. If today’s undeclared status quo is that artists are expected to keep their mouths shut and let institutions decide how things should be done and what things should be discussed, then this is wrong. Radicalism in art, culture, and thought should not be the exclusive property of institutions backed with power and money.

In short, institutions should not be free to abuse artists with their arrogance and incompetence. They should face the consequences of their behavior, even when they are located in Europe’s poorest country and backed by the richest corporate sponsors.

– Dmitry Vilensky, Saint Petersburg, 17.02.2010

P.S. The exhibition Comrades of Time opens at Pavilion UniCredit in Bucharest on February 18. Angry Sandwichpeople, or In Praise of Dialectics, a work by the Chto Delat collective, was disinvited from the show by the board of Pavilion UniCredit because, in discussion with the curator, Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat collective) suggested raising the issue of the project’s funding and artist fees. The work can be viewed online at: http://vimeo.com/6879250

Published on: http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/pavilion-unicredit-an-artists-tale/

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? (Clarice Lispector)

For some time now we have been considering the questions about the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. Jacques Ranciere, for example, talks about emancipation of art from its representative regime.

But what does this actually mean? When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives, or “meaningful spectacle” as Ranciere put it) that contribute towards raising the political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics condition art and not about art’s emancipation from the representational regime.

What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, operations of desire or even insights, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their “extractive conditions”. But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the “not yet” into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art?

In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation dominating our way of thinking. It has been suggested (Simon O’Sullivan) that under different circumstances the art history practice as it is known now might disappear, that is, the kind of practice which positions an artwork as a representation, as a hermeneutic activity.

Imagination is traditionally understood as one’s ability to form mental images, concepts and sensations, which subsequently become defined by images they create of themselves. Images created by imagination are then overwhelmed by a “schema”, a classificatory system that hierarchically organizes knowledge about the world. This is the representation Deleuze called “organic representation” and it is opposite to the “rhizome”. For Deleuze and Guattari thinking non-representational involved thinking difference in itself. And this difference necessarily involves movement and desire; desire in a sense of being a mode of production and constructing of something (for example: a will to live, to create, to love, to invent another society, another value system).

David Bohm, a physicist and theorist, has written about creative and constructive imagination: the former involves perception before a mental vision, a certain insight, and only in the unfolding of this insight in the form of an image is the mind ready to pass the content of the insight into the domain of constructive imagination. Constructive imagination involves reasoning and taking images from memory and from other contexts, as well as already available structures and concepts that come from memory; for scientists it is a hypothesis, for artists the finalization of the perceptive process into an artwork and for writers a translation of thoughts into language. But as Bohm suggests, the creative and constructive are never completely separated, therefore the relationship between imagination and reason must also be taken into account.

Niklas Luhmann attributed to art the function of integrating perception into the communication network of a society. According to him, art only exists within the art system; it is a self-referential system, which interacts with other systems. Once this system recognizes art, the difference between inside and outside cannot disappear again. Luhmann also suggests that if perception and conceptual thought are constructed by the brain, then art should reject the functional concepts of representation, that is, forms that demonstrate the possibility of order and the impossibility of arbitrariness. He notes that only in the form of intuition (or in other words, artistic sensibility) does art acquire the possibility of constructing imaginary worlds within the life-world.

This is where he comes close to DG’s concept of desire and Bohm’s idea of insight. Moreover, what these authors suggest is that these concepts alone are not enough and that some kind of relationship between imagination and reason must be involved (Bohm), intuition and life-world or perception and communicating social system (Luhmann) and desire and stratum (Deleuze) in order to fully realize their revolutionary potential before they get captured by the molar machine or by the state philosophy which is another name for representational thinking. In other words, there needs to be some kind of “situated imagining” in order to point somewhere, there need to be some kind of strata available in order not to fall into the black pit.

It has been said that to invoke imagination as supporting radical politics has become a cliché. But isn’t this kind of statement grounded in another domain of representational thinking as well? And isn’t it our concern, after all, to change the way we make meanings and not just to change the meanings themselves? Or is writing about it already producing another representation?

One way to change the way we make meanings would be to simply do nothing, to avoid the so called “creative imperative” that has been so thoroughly imposed on us by capitalism. I am sure that many of you know the short text by the artist Mladen Stilinović called “In praise of laziness”. In it he talks about the importance of an artist being lazy. What is especially significant in this short text is his noting that laziness is not only the absence of thought, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence … but that it is really what art is all about, and not some preoccupation with objects and other such matters. In his Fifteen theses on contemporary art Badiou writes that it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent. Žižek has proposed that one alternative way to oppose the dominant system could be to withdraw from all forms of political representation, to renounce social and political responsibility, resist the compulsion to act, and instead do nothing. Of course, the question is, how can such non-activity, such doing nothing be revolutionary - resistant in any way? It can be easily considered an escape, a utopia without any meaning. But doing nothing is also becoming different, creating conditions for encounters that are not based on some kind of concept of identity, but on something previously unthought. When perception is liberated of mental images it does not only oppose object relations (schemes of power etc) but radically cancels them.

To give an example: surrealists were concerned with the emancipation of thought, and recognized imagination as a powerful weapon using techniques such as automatic writing, drawing, trance narrations … to move away from the conventional significations. But on the other hand, this kind of private fantasy or reverie could not affect or disrupt the social fabric, as they believed it would; it remained on the level of imaginary projections. Similarly, David Bohm invented a “flow language” – Rheomode, based on motion, because, as he said, reality leads to fragmentation of thought and to unending reductionism, therefore thought needs a constant flow to override this confusion.

And yet: could there be other possibilities? Perhaps we should think spatio-temporal planes differently, access that which is normally outside ourselves, to make ourselves a body without organs, as Artaud wrote in 1947: 

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.

If art is something that we consider an activity as such, it could be that art’s rupture is the event, or, in the words of Lyotard: “To encounter the event is like bordering on nothingness.” What he suggests is that in order to take on the attitude of an event, one needs to clean out his/her mind, reject modes of preestablished encodings and subsequently the fixity of representation. But the problem is that such affects (or intensities) have no vocabulary and are therefore wedded to theories: as Massumi points out, intensities then lose this kind of eventness in favor of a structure.

Examples of these intensities are “moments”, eruptions of spontaneous creativity, flashes of liberation, utopian consciousness that escape the daily programming. Moments are transitory, critical, creative, unpredictable … and they produce fractures in our subjectivity, introduce a sense of freedom from categorical thought, discipline, common structures, restraints and the like, since they have not yet become alienated time. Moments are sensations of powerful emotions such as delight, disgust, surprise, horror, outrage, and intense euphoria, and as such have a revolutionary potential.

But again: is the revolutionary potential hidden in the prolongation and intensification of such moments, or in their reactivation in the process of defixating meanings?

The analogy can be drawn here with Ranciere’s suggestions that “the dream of an art is to transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations”. Native Americans, for example, believe that what appears as a material object or image in space is simply the manifestation of a unique combination of energy waves. Occasionally temporary markings appear in the flux, which are then used as reference points. And these points are what constitute reality.

It would be naïve to suppose that only by breaking or ridding the strata (representation), would one be able to set free. After all, if you lose images you lose space. As DG said: staying organized, signified, subjected is not the worst thing that can happen. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight; through connections of desires, con­junctions of flows, a continuum of intensities. 

Or, put differently: blowing up the molar machine will get one destroyed – and not the machine itself. Instead of symmetrical opposition to repressive representation, instead of opposing the current reality in an alleged parallel reality “the aim is now the principle that leads the destiny of creation”. Therefore the political potential of art is in unleashing mind’s most creative capacities, moving away from representation into experience, becoming the “power of emergence” into the open field of unknown relations, which traverse all domains of being into unlimited number of connections in every sense and in all directions, of infinite spreading into schools, prisons, factories, art museums and further on towards where “communication is occurring at the edge of impossible crossings, or perhaps in the gap of potential contact.”