Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art 9780755604333, 9781784534103

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Marcel Duchamp, Tzank Check, ink on paper, 1919 Copyright © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP Licensed by Viscopy, 2014 Claes Oldenburg in The Store, installation view of exhibition at Ray Gun Mfg. Co., 107 E. 2nd St., New York, USA, 1 December 1961–2 January 1962 Photo credit: Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague, (detail), artists’ book, 1957 Copyright © Asger Jorn/COPYDAN Licensed by Viscopy, 2014 Asger Jorn, Poussin, oil on canvas, 1962 Copyright © Asger Jorn/COPYDAN Licensed by Viscopy, 2014 Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, colour poster, 1989 Copyright © Guerrilla Girls Courtesy of www.guerrillagirls.com 2011 MOCA Gala – An Artist’s Life Manifesto, Directed by Marina Abramovi´e – Inside, colour photograph, 2011 Photo credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Entertainment Collection/Getty Images Patrick Robert, Civil War in Liberia, photograph used in United Colour of Benetton Campaign, 1992 Photo credit: Patrick Robert/Sygma

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance: Freshkills Landfill, 1977–80 (Talking with worker of the New York City Department of Sanitation), colour photograph Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York Harrell Fletcher, Blot Out The Sun, video still, 2002 Copyright © Harrell Fletcher Courtesy of Harrell Fletcher Mayamiko Artists Preparing Textiles in Malawi, colour photograph, 2014 Photo Credit: Paola Masperi, 2014 Andrea Zittel, smockshop London, installation view, Spr¨uth Magers, London, 19 September–3 October 2009 Courtesy of Spr¨uth Magers, London Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, Pacific Trade: Occupation & Exchange, installation view of exhibition, 2011 Photo Credit: Lisa Hilli, 2011 (Left) Osei-Duro and Dzidefo Collaboration, 2010 Photo credit: Molly Keogh, Producer/Leila Hekmat, Photographer Copyright © Osei-Duro (Right) Exterior view of Dzidefo workshop in Kpando, Ghana, 2012 Photo credit: Grace McQuilten

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Acknowledgements The authors would firstly like to acknowledge the generosity, time and contribution of the artists, art organizations, social enterprises and industry professionals who have contributed to the body of knowledge represented in this book. We would also like to mention the invaluable support of a number of grants that have resourced our research, which includes a University of Melbourne research collaboration grant (2011), a Myer Fund grant (2012) and a Churchill Fellowship that supported international site visits to art organizations, collectives and enterprises (2011). Sections of Chapter 2 have previously appeared in a scholarly journal article by Anthony White published in Reading Room (2009), and in Grace McQuilten’s book Art in Consumer Culture (2011). Grace would particularly like to thank the artists and staff at The Social Studio for their humour, generosity, patience, artistic rebellion and belief that the world can change for the better.

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Introduction Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art examines the interaction of art with social questions by directly addressing art’s place in the economic systems of consumer society. The concept of social enterprise is the model for understanding that interaction. Artistic practice offers unique strategies for change and innovation by embracing risk, exploring ideas without determining an outcome, thereby enabling us to think differently and to mediate between individual and collective experience. At the same time, art has been increasingly subject to market forces, which have the potential to evacuate its critical capacity. This book looks at the rebellious dimension of art, its capacity to incite critical reflection on society, not from an oppositional perspective but as a “social enterprise” operating on the inside of economic systems. This means engaging with the realm of art’s production, a territory that is rife with ethical, social and political complexity; a set of economic and human processes that often become opaque in the reception and distribution of art. This lack of transparency relates to a fundamental anxiety in contemporary art; that an understanding of, and engagement with, the realities of art’s production might threaten its critical and aesthetic autonomy. As this book argues, addressing art as enterprise is a means to consider the economic and social entanglements of artistic practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. This does not signal a gesture of defeat; rather it repositions art as a simultaneously productive and critical force within contemporary economic systems. This approach builds upon an extensive body of political, philosophical 1

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and sociological discourse that illuminates the contemporary economic landscape as one in which the historical notion of the subordinated worker in industrial production has been replaced by the self-exploited creative labourer of the knowledge economy. This includes, but is not limited to, the work of Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, ˇ zek, Theodor Adorno, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Slavoj Ziˇ Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau. The ways in which the art world and the domain of social entrepreneurship have been brought together, a phenomenon which this book sets out to critically document and evaluate, is not simply a means to think of how art might benefit society in broad terms. It also provides a new way of understanding how art can attain greater independence within a global economic system that appropriates creative activity for both social and economic ends. In both art and social enterprise there are inevitable tensions in the relationship between non-economic and economic values. Historically, in both the social sector and the arts, a critical distance from the market has provided a vehicle to sidestep this conflict. However amid the rise of globalized capitalism, neat divisions between public and private have given way to an allencompassing market economy that has appropriated the social sector and the arts in corporate processes. In other words, there is no “outside” of the market from which artists can stage critique.1 Despite all attempts by artists to escape the commercial mechanisms of consumer culture amid the rise of capitalism over the twentieth century, artistic activity continually collapses back into the folds of economic systems; either directly as commodity, or indirectly as advertising for galleries and museums, or providing marketing and cultural value to large commercial corporations.2 Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated in an economic system – it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution, and it is in this sense that art must be understood as an enterprising activity. Even in the case of art that is produced through government and philanthropic funding, artists and art organizations are expected to account for its value either in terms of tourism, employment, or other measures dictated by funders. The line between public and private has become so indeterminate that it is difficult to conceive of anything being funded without some vested interest. However profit-making is often not the goal of artists, and this is where social enterprise may provide a model for alternative forms of

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INTRODUCTION

economic organization in the arts, a model that enables greater creative and critical freedom because it provides independence from reliance on one single source (for example government, philanthropic or market) for financial support, and it prioritizes non-economic values within the mechanisms of the mainstream marketplace. The social enterprise model may also therefore address other inequities in the art system itself, including the financial insecurity faced by many artists and arts organizations and conditions of work for artists and art workers. Enthusiasm about the possibility for social entrepreneurship to promote economic sustainability and social inclusion through art needs to be balanced, certainly, with a degree of caution. As has been recognized by many art theorists and sociologists, the focus on commercial revenue-raising inherent to private enterprise activities runs the risk of compromising the core purpose and creative freedom of artists, as well as presuming that art should be primarily directed towards a social purpose. There has been increasing concern among theorists and critics about the links between social practice in contemporary art and complicity with neo-liberal political agendas.3 And yet this is a situation that the arts already face in the context of a reliance on public funding, corporate support and in the inextricable entanglement of art with the art market. Building on the existing discourse about social practice, this book argues for a far more explicit acknowledgement of and engagement with the role that economic systems play in determining the conditions in which art is made, received, distributed and sustained. The approach taken in this book to the subject of art as enterprise involves several different methodologies. Ideas gleaned from the work of modern and contemporary thinkers working in the scholarly fields of art history, philosophy and sociology are integrated with the findings of less formal, more journalistic forms of writing and criticism by authors in the process of coming to terms with recent developments in the fields of social practice art, creative social enterprise and contemporary art. This approach reflects a dual concern to intertwine more historical, academic analyses with less systematic thinking produced in response to forms and practices which have not yet been formally codified. This duality reflects another aspect of the book which views the latest and most contemporary developments in the interactions between art, social issues and economics in the light of and in comparison to twentieth-century and earlier practices and ideas. The rationale for this

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approach is to privilege neither the historical nor the contemporary but rather to provide a richer, more finely textured background for understanding recent innovations and a longer view within which to situate changes that may seem unprecedented but on reflection are shifts, re-emphases and differences in degree to what has gone before. Beyond this dual interest in both scholarship and criticism and in both the historical and the contemporary, the approach of the book is to ground a new conception of the relationship between art, society and the economic realm in an analysis of specific case studies. These case studies draw upon a field research that includes: an industry roundtable discussion held at the University of Melbourne in 2012 which explored the relationship between art, economic systems and social benefit in contemporary art practices; and international site visits to art organizations, collectives and enterprises in Australia, Cambodia, Ghana, Uganda, the UK and the USA as part of a Churchill Fellowship in 2012. The analysis of selected cases provides insight into practical issues faced by artists and art organizations, giving more weight and depth to the more abstract assertions that writing on modern and contemporary art is often prone to. Chapter 1, Why Art as Social Enterprise?, provides an overview of the field of social enterprise more generally and its relationship to artistic practice in particular, while also considering the important role that art plays in society as an independent and critical practice. Chapter 2, Art, Money and Society, provides an historical background by reviewing the work of artists who have staged critique in the context of the increasing commercialization of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 3, ‘Bad’ Art and its Social Benefits, shifts focus away from questions of aesthetic quality and benevolence in contemporary social practice and instead foregrounds the economic forces that have influenced the rise of social practices in contemporary art. A critique of the charitable ambitions of social practice leads to a discussion of the social value of art that might be considered ‘bad’ rather than ‘good’, taking in a range of both historical and more contemporary practices, including the work of Asger Jorn, the Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot, the Chapman Brothers and Richard Bell. The interest in social equity outside of the art system raises questions about the inequities of the art system itself, including issues of human labour, exclusion and inclusion, and transparency in funding and the interests of sponsors within the art system.

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Chapter 4, Art as Enterprise, therefore explores issues around the exploitation of human labour in the contemporary art world, including unpaid and underpaid art assistants working for Marina Abramovi´c and Matthew Barney, the deliberate exploitation of labour by Santiago Sierra and the use of wage labourers in the socially oriented practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher. As this analysis demonstrates, the art system as it currently stands needs to develop new labour models before it begins thinking about how to address broader issues of class division and social inequality. Chapter 5, Art as Social Enterprise, examines the potential of social enterprise to address these issues through case studies of organizations including Mayamiko Designed (UK and Malawi); Andrea Zittel’s smockshop (USA); The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle (Australia); Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative (Ghana), Osei-Duro (US and Ghana); the Women of Kireka (Uganda) and the Reciprocity Foundation (USA). One of the principal questions posed by the model of art as social enterprise is whether it can sustain artistic practice as a critical, creative and independent activity within the machinery of capitalism. Moreover, how might such enterprises be generating social and economic value, as a result (rather than a driver) of artistic value? This chapter focuses on how these various cases have managed the tensions that lie at the heart of art as a social enterprise; with the potentially conflicting and contradictory interests of artistic, social and economic goals. At the heart of the book is the conviction that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of what can be understood as social enterprise. Artists are striving for independence to create works that emphasize human agency and critical thought on the inside of consumer culture. Art has held an important place in human history because it offers ways of thinking ‘other’. Art as Enterprise examines how this is manifesting in contemporary artistic practices around the globe.

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1 Why Art as Social Enterprise? Contemporary art engages with social and economic forces and this can result in both radical practices that challenge society and it can also result in complicity with the forces of contemporary global capital. Questions that must therefore be asked in this context include: how are these engagements impacting on art’s freedom and critical capacity in society; what agency do artists have in the economic management of their practices; and what inequalities are being produced through the system of contemporary art itself? The very idea of ‘engagement’ means venturing into complex and murky territory. As political and social theorists from the 1970s onwards have continued to discover and describe, the possibility of an external position from which to critically reflect upon and challenge the inequalities produced by advanced capitalism has disappeared. Rather, forms of resistance and social transformation are now occurring within the institutions and mechanisms of production, consumption and exchange. The most effective form that this resistance might take is the subject of differing critical viewpoints; with thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, F´elix Guattari, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Paul Virno advocating a radical critique of contemporary capitalism through the generation of new forms of collectivity, while political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue for organized action within the institutions of representative politics.1 In Agonistics: Rethinking the World Politically, Mouffe writes: ‘I advocate a strategy of “engagement with”. Such a strategy includes a multiplicity of counter-hegemonic moves aiming at a profound transformation, not a desertion, of existing institutions.’2 This idea of ‘engagement with’ is an important framework within 6

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which to understand the emerging phenomenon of art as social enterprise. In contemporary art, the rise of social practice since the turn of the millennium has coincided with the growth of creative and cultural industries worldwide, and an increasing awareness of both the political dimension of art, on the one hand, and the cultural and aesthetic dimension of politics, on the other. An important and often overlooked piece of the puzzle in this area is the economic mechanisms that drive and sustain these forms of artistic practice. Further consideration needs to be given to the specific motivations of those who fund sociallyengaged art projects, the distribution of profits from the sale of artworks that result from social practice, the impact of practical issues of financial sustainability on these artistic practices, and the involvement of those who are presumed to benefit. It is amid these questions that the model of social enterprise in the arts is emerging. This chapter looks at the relationship between art and society in the context of changes in the relationship between public and private funding in the global economy. It provides an overview and background for understanding how the idea of art as a social enterprise is even conceivable. The unique nature of arts enterprises, which often remain small-scale, economically precarious, and heavily reliant on the work of volunteers, has rarely been examined in relation to their affinities with the model of social enterprise. Social enterprises are hybrid organizations situated between the public and private sector that combine enterprise activity with the generation of social benefits. In recent times there has been a growing consensus that the social enterprise model can transform the systems that produce inequality by promoting economic capacity, social inclusion and community development.3 They can also generate shifts in thinking about social problems, encourage a critique of inequities in commercial market economies, and provide avenues for social innovation.4 In this, they share certain qualities with activities undertaken within the domain of artistic practice, which also has a unique ability to generate critical thinking and change within society, and to mediate the relationship between the individual and the collective through the articulation of differences. Art has started to play an important role in the global development agenda, not only because of its specific aesthetic qualities, but also because artistic practice is intertwined with economic growth and social

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development, evident in the rise of creative industries worldwide.5 The affinity of art with global economic and cultural development is both promising and problematic. In The Expediency of Culture, George Y´udice presents an important critique of the way that art has been adopted to advance the interests of cultural capitalism, including its affiliation with the idea of ‘big society’ instead of government support for social welfare. A ‘big society’, as championed by the Conservative Party in the UK, involves an increasing shift from the public sector toward private enterprise, and is worthy of critical attention.6 Yudice also looks critically at the instrumental role art is playing in globalization and how the economic rationalist views of the creative industries have threatened some of the inherent qualities of art. He writes, ‘In this context, the idea that the experience of jouissance, the unconcealment of truth, or deconstructive critique might be admissible criteria for investment in culture comes off as a conceit perhaps worthy of a Kafkaesque performance skit.’7 The contemporary political climate in many countries around the world, which is characterized by everlouder calls to shrink the public sector, means that arts organizations increasingly struggle to gain access to government funds to a degree that philanthropic support can only partly counteract. In this climate, artists and arts organizations have been forced to become more entrepreneurial, both in seeking private sponsorship, and in engaging with commercial markets. Many artists and arts organizations are wary of reliance on corporate sponsors and the commercial market, however, for the risk of compromising qualities of independence, critical freedom and artists’ agency. This helps to explain a growing interest in alternative models of organization including social enterprise, which might allow for greater independence from the demands of both private and public funding. Greater independence has the potential to also provide greater artistic and critical freedom, providing more scope for the kinds of artistic practices that Y´udice refers to above. In order to understand the relationship between art and these new forms of economic organization, it is first important to consider the broader context of art’s relationship with global economic forces.

Art and the Global Economy As the creative sector of the global economy has grown in significance in recent years, art, economics and the social sector have become 8

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increasingly interdependent. There have been crossovers between these fields throughout history, in phenomena like art philanthropy, the art market, and community art projects. Moreover, as a recent exhibition about the Medici family titled Money and Beauty: Bankers Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities demonstrated, the modern banking system developed alongside the Renaissance, the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world.8 What is significant about more recent developments in this space, however, is that initiatives linking art to social outcomes have given private enterprise a newly important role. Some examples are the development of the creative industries; the rise of public/private partnerships in the arts; and the emergence of artists who are strongly business-minded or even take business as their prime mode of operation. The creative industries model currently influencing public policy in the arts assumes that a great deal of modern economic activity has much in common with the activity of artists – the radical, creative disruption that characterizes both entrepreneurial activity and avantgarde practices.9 That the term ‘disruptive innovation’ has become a catch-phrase in business speaks volumes – that it is a synonym for ruthless competition is troubling. As Jill Lepore describes, ‘There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars [. . . ] Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.’10 The benefits of the creative industry model, according to those who advocate for its expansion, lie in harnessing creativity to spur economic growth. An inherent danger of the model is the instrumentalization of artistic activity – seeing it chiefly as an economic rather than aesthetic or social good – and the often insecure, risky and exploitative employment profile of the typical creative industries worker who belongs to a segment of the workforce known as the ‘precariat’. In other words, the creative economy model, which shuns traditional ideas of collective labour protections, also has a significant social downside.11 In another parallel development, the increasing profile and importance of senior business figures on the boards of major cultural institutions has brought an economic rationality and market focus to the decision-making processes of these organizations. This corporatisation of the arts is also reflected in the expansion of the role of arts administrators, who have increasing control and influence over artistic practice and the distribution of funding. The danger is that

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these managerial forces are ‘industrializing’ a sector that is better understood, in Ben Eltham’s words, as ‘a set of social relations’ rather than an industry exchanging goods and services.12 Those on the side of market-based thinking in the arts often promote the idea of the democratization of culture. However as Michael Sandel has argued in What Money Can’t Buy, when activities not otherwise connected to exchanges of money are given a price, the perceived, intrinsic value of the activity dwindles.13 A concrete example of this is found in publicly funded German theatres, where it has been shown that for actors the introduction of economic considerations to their work strongly diminished their artistic motivation.14 In the context of art museums, Victoria Alexander suggests that corporate sponsorship tends to negatively impact on the scope and type of exhibitions being staged. In her study of the impact of funding on the curatorial practices of major art museums and galleries in Australia, she writes: It is clear that funders prefer to sponsor certain types of exhibitions, those that help funders meet the goals behind their philanthropy. In the aggregate, corporations fund more popular and accessible, but less scholarly, exhibitions, compared to exhibitions that museums underwrite with internal funds.15

This puts pressure on artists and art institutions to produce work that is popular, easy to consume and favourable to the underlying marketing and branding strategies of those, philanthropic or corporate, who invest money. While sponsorship of the arts is often measured in terms of cultural capital and social return, it is increasingly expected to translate back into business dollars. As Austin Harrington writes, ‘the new commercial elites have a greater interest in the short-term reconvertibility of cultural capital back into economic capital’.16 The confluence of art with commercial interests is evident in global economic data. According to a report issued in 2012 by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) the value of cultural and creative production in the global economy was measured at 1.6 trillion USD in 2007.17 To put this into context, the value of the cultural and creative industries was nearly twice that of international tourism. Moreover, this is a rapidly expanding sector. Data gathered from OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries demonstrated that in the 1990s, 10

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economic growth in creative economies grew at twice the rate of service industries and quadrupled the growth rate of manufacturing. In the European Union, the growth of the creative sector from 1999 to 2003 was 12.3% greater than the growth of the overall economy.18 While there is conflict about the relationship between cultural and creative industries (considered broadly) and the visual arts (specifically), this rapid economic expansion has been particularly evident in the visual arts, with world export of artworks more than doubling from $10.3 billion USD in 1996 to $22.1 billion in 2005.19 It is difficult, however, to precisely measure the scale and volume of visual arts organizations and producers due to the fragmented, individuated and informal nature of the sector. A report that was issued by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics in 2007 to address precisely these problems of inaccurate data in the creative industries worldwide, argued ‘the cultural sector exploits an infinite raw material – creativity – which proves difficult to trace in physical form’.20 The authors found that there were particular issues related to the documentation of employment in the arts, with classification and data gathering methods tending to overlook the informal and self-employed nature of much creative work. This led to many ‘hidden or “embedded” cultural occupations’ that were not evident in statistics on creative industries, making it difficult to document conditions of employment and production.21 This raises important questions about the equitability of the arts as an industry. What we can glean from available data is that cultural industries, and the visual arts component of those industries, are a significant economic activity in many countries throughout the world. But how is this activity supported financially? While the art market itself is growing at a rapid pace globally, government funding for the arts has been in steady decline.22 This indicates a growing role for the private sector in sustaining artistic practice, production, and reception. Deloitte, a major financial service operating in the art market, issues an annual Art and Finance report documenting trends in the international market. In the 2013 issue, this growth of the market was a preoccupation. The report noted: The unprecedented development of the art market over the past few years has resulted in the ‘financialization’ of the art market. Art is now seen not only as an object of pleasure, however, also as a new alternative asset class with interesting business opportunities.23

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It is interesting to note that alongside this affirmation of the growth in the private art market, the Deloitte report also acknowledges greater difficulties for practitioners in the field as a result of this private expansion. At one point it describes how ‘the globalisation of culture has led art organisations and cultural related companies to confront a number of strategic issues critical to reaching their goals’.24 Part of this increased complexity relates to a decline in government funding, which has traditionally supported the creation and development of art, as opposed to the sale and re-sale of artworks, which is the primary interest of the private market.25 Global data providing a breakdown of funding sources for the arts is very difficult to obtain. Looking at trends on a region-by-region basis, however, we can see a pattern of decline in government support for the arts at the state level, with a parallel spike in the growth of the private sector globally. In the USA, government support for the arts was significantly affected by the global financial crisis of 2008. Since then, with an economy in recession, the arts have seen a continuous reduction in public funding. The Art Newspaper reported in 2011 that arts funding in the USA had reached a record low, with local support declining 21 per cent and federal funding decreasing as much as 30 per cent since the global financial crisis.26 Alongside this was a rise in arts organizations operating at a deficit. Despite positive forecasting, the decline continued in 2012.27 This trend has also been evident in the UK and Europe, which has similarly suffered from the effects of the global financial crisis. A policy report issued by the European Network on Cultural Management and Cultural Policy, titled Responding to the Crisis with Culture, expressed concern about a decline in both public and private support for public art museums, despite the growth of the private art market.28 The report responded to this situation by encouraging new business and governance models. Even in Australia, which was relatively unscathed by the global financial crisis compared with other nations, the same trend has been observed, with a decline in public funding coinciding with a 98 per cent increase in private sponsorship in the period 2001 to 2011.29 Despite such observations and advocacy for the creation of new business models, so far there has been very little offered in the way of a tangible alternative to the existing binary between non-profit, publicly funded institutions and for-profit galleries and auction houses. What this tells us is that the demands of the private art market are becoming an increasingly significant force in determining the

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production and reception of artistic activity worldwide. The explosion of entrepreneurship in the arts can be seen as a response by artists to their struggle for government funding. On the flipside, the resulting increase in self-employment has led to unregulated working conditions and commercial interests impacting on the types of artistic works being produced and disseminated. The uncertain boundary between entrepreneurship and exploitation in the arts provides ground for heated debate. In Critique of Creativity, Gerald Raunig argues that the supposed creative freedom provided by an increasingly privatized arts industry, with its attendant ‘precarious’ working conditions including the predominance of casual and contract labour, is akin to ideological enslavement. He writes, ‘In the context of the creative industry it would thus be more apt to speak of a “massive self-deception” as an aspect of self-precarisation.’30 Equally, there is criticism about the influence of government policy on creative freedom and innovation in the arts. Public policy makers have a tendency to be risk-averse in their decision making about funding, which is counter-intuitive to contemporary arts practice, stimulated by experimentation and risk.31 Over-funding of the arts is hardly an issue at the moment, however, where arts institutions and individual artists are adapting to a public sphere increasingly defined by competition. As David Throsby observes in The Economics of Cultural Policy, ‘Enterprises such as performing companies and public art galleries are facing greater competition for earned revenue, and sources of unearned revenue, such as donations and sponsorship, are harder to come by than they have been in the past.’32 This increasing competition for both public and private funding is having a profound impact on the types of art being produced and exhibited. Annette Van den Bosch raises this in Art and Business, where she argues that not only does competition undermine cooperative relationships between art institutions, but also results in boring exhibitions. She writes, ‘Along these lines, the research suggests that art is shaped by mundane organisational processes.’33 It is hardly surprising, in this context, that artists have been venturing out on their own to find alternative opportunities for the exhibition and distribution of their work. This is by no means a recent development, and has been occurring gradually over the last several decades, partly in line with the increasing privatization of the public sphere in the wake of global capitalism’s growth and expansion. In Arts and Creative Industries, a report commissioned by the Australia Council in 2011,

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the researchers observe a gradual shift toward privatization and individualism in arts production stemming from 1960s ideologies about creative freedom. This has led to an increasingly entrepreneurial spirit: ‘Independent cultural producers were acting in ways akin to small business entrepreneurs; they were self-employed and looked to take advantage of niche, emerging, fleeting markets.’34 The problem with this increased entrepreneurship, as evidenced in the same report, is a simultaneous exploitation of artists for commercial interests and a deferral of responsibility for problems in the arts away from social policy makers and onto individuals.35 There is no doubt that free market ideology dominates many aspects of contemporary society across the globe, including government policy, the non-profit sector and commercial enterprises.36 One of the results of this shift from public to private is that nonprofit organizations are increasingly taking on the responsibilities of government in addressing cultural issues, the distribution of wealth, the promotion of community and the development of local culture. This is reflected in the idea of ‘the big society’ as public policy in the UK and a parallel push for the growth of ‘civil society’ in other countries worldwide, similarly driven by reduced state support.37 The idea is that as governments withdraw funding from social services, the community sector can step in to address the resulting gaps. As a result of these policies, non-profits have greater influence in shaping public policy. As Burton Weisbrod argues in The Future of the Nonprofit Sector, ‘The growth of nonprofit sectors throughout the world is thrusting nonprofits into the central debate over the organisation of society.’38 However in the case of arts institutions, many non-profits are competing for funding and resources, and as a result, are adopting commercial fundraising strategies. As Paul DiMaggio argues, ‘Many legally nonprofit enterprises operate in a manner calculated to optimise revenues or are at least pressed to do so by significant parts of their business environments.’39 This has been evidenced in the explosion of the social enterprise sector; a hybrid of non-profit and for-profit organization models that aim to generate income to support socially motivated projects. It is possible to draw a direct correlation between this rise of social and cultural entrepreneurship and a growth in social disadvantage. Throsby, for example, observes ‘a profound impact on the public sphere – the arena within which policy is made – shifting the locus

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of power from public to private agents’.40 This is having a negative impact on issues of social welfare. As Throsby argues, the move from public to private is ‘diminishing the public sector’s capacity to address serious issues to do with disadvantage, inequality, denial of rights, and so on’.41 The creative industries are an obvious manifestation of this privatization of what once was public, and also indicate a shift in the way we understand the commercial marketplace. While there is much uncertainty and ambiguity about exactly what constitutes the creative industries, there is no doubt that they involve the production, distribution and sale of artistic and creative work across fields of design, media and visual art production.42 They represent an evolutionary development of the ‘culture industry’ of the 1960s as theorized by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school and defined by the rise of mass media and the homogenization of popular visual culture.43 What we now see is that all aspects of art, both small and large scale, ‘high’ and ‘low’, popular and elite, are of interest to business. As David Cropley writes in The Dark Side of Creativity, ‘creativity and the process of exploiting creativity – innovation – are essential ingredients of competitive business’.44 Cropley suggests that not only is creativity exploited in the creative industries, but it can be harnessed for highly detrimental purposes in society including, at its worst, strategies for warfare. He writes, ‘Thus creativity has two basic sides – the bright and the dark.’45 While the creative and culture industries are pushing art to have an ameliorative social role and economic utility, what Y´udice describes as ‘expediency’, art also has an important rebellious function, a capacity to engage with and expose social problems.46 This problematic relationship between art and society is also evident in theoretical tensions between the disciplines of art history and sociology.

Art and Society The question of art’s role in society is an important issue in the context of a rapidly growing private sector, which is creating greater confusion around the lines between public policy, artistic practice and economic development. While conventional sociological views of what makes for a ‘good society’ tend to focus on qualities of efficiency and social inclusion, political theorists emphasize the contested nature of the social sphere, including qualities inherent to democracy such 15

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as disagreement, the negotiation of class politics and political resistance.47 Art certainly has a role to play here; both in mediating the complex relationship between the individual and the collective and in articulating difference.48 This is the basis of Nikos Papastergiadis’ analysis of contemporary cosmopolitanism, where he argues that artists play a significant role in negotiating cultural difference. He writes, ‘I have been arguing that artists do not deliver documents which reveal the condition of cosmopolitanism but, rather, that they take an active role in the mediation of its emergence.’49 Art therefore has a complex engagement with the social; it has the potential to enhance human-to-human communication, while it also challenges existing social hierarchies and gives voice to experiences of social exclusion. Art problematises the idea of ‘good society’ in a number of ways; by facilitating debate, for example, or by deliberately alienating audiences as a form of critique. The drive for art to play a beneficial role in addressing social problems therefore runs into conflict with art’s engagement with political discourses and practices. This is the basis of Jacques Ranci`ere’s critique of the ‘ethical turn’ in politics and art. He argues: Breaking with today’s ethical configuration, and returning the inventions of politics and art to their difference, entails rejecting the fantasy of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious.50

Here we find the source of an ongoing tension between the fields of art and sociology. Within the discipline of sociology art has been a troublesome subject, partly attributable to ongoing debates about the autonomy of art, whether art should be considered for its inherent, particular aesthetic properties, or be considered in the context of its production and reception, its social context. Sociologists have approached art tentatively, not wanting to encroach on the territory of aesthetics. Similarly, art historians have been tentative in approaching art from a sociological point of view, not wanting to run the risk of destroying the sensorial, imaginative and visceral qualities that distinguish art and give it meaning in the first place. While political and philosophical critique has had a huge influence on art criticism from the 1960s onwards, in response to the perceived failings of the project of modernity, the rise of post-modernism brought with it critical impasses; 16

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most notably a predicament where the supposed end of art history and the failure of oppositional critique resulted in an embrace of sensation and affirmation and the a-political, which was prevalent in art of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that modern art was innately elitist and upper class encouraged many artists and critics to reject the traditional institutions of art. Bourdieu argued ‘it can be seen that museums betray, in the smallest details of their morphology and their organisation, their true function which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in others’.51 In response to such an attack on the role of art in society, contemporary art historians such as Johanna Drucker now reject oppositional criticism altogether. In Sweet Dreams, Drucker suggests that ‘criticism’s prescriptive effect paralyzes the inventive impulse of making’ and instead advocates for artistic ‘complicity’ as a way of reviving art in the contemporary economic sphere.52 In Social Theories of Art, Ian Heywood also cautions against political and oppositional art criticism, suggesting, ‘Art needs a history and a theory that is capable of being supportive and complementary to practice.’53 Supportive and complementary criticism, however, runs the risk of affirming the status quo and ignoring the influence of social systems on arts practice. At worst, it presents a cynical celebration of commercialized art. As Peter Sloterdijk argues, cynicism in contemporary consumer culture serves to reinforce conservative ideologies.54 A cynical embrace of art’s commercial utility is evident in the approach of Drucker, who writes, ‘In an already fully corrupted world, one in which consumerism holds sway, commercial images provide a standard for production.’55 The problem with this position is that it overlooks an important aspect of art; its difference to commercial culture and populism, in particular its ability to create space for articulating political differences. For Ernesto Laclau, it is precisely through the process of articulation that class politics emerge. He argues that ‘classes exist at the ideological and political level in a process of articulation and not of reduction’.56 In Art Power, Boris Groys advocates for the political qualities of art, arguing that all modern art is political in its very nature. Each new artwork, he suggests, offers a challenge to the existing canon of art, presenting a provocation and testing the boundaries of the art system – this is the inherent and dynamic nature of art from modernity onwards. By constantly shifting its internal balance of power, art counteracts the

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homogenization of popular culture and ensures a constant differentiation. From this perspective Groys defends the museum, criticized by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as the pinnacle of cultural elitism, and instead suggests it is the perfect site to promote social equality. He sees modern art as an antidote to commercial culture, and suggests that the popular rejection of oppositional art amounts to a celebration of commercialism. He writes, ‘So the call to break loose from the museum amounts de facto to a call to package and commercialise art by accommodating it to the aesthetic norms generated by today’s mass media.’57 The American author Eleanor Heartney also warns against the disavowal of political critique in the arts. In Defending Complexity, she writes, ‘The idea has taken hold that politics is like a virus, sucking all the aesthetic sophistication and formal intelligence out of an artwork, and leaving behind only an empty husk of tired propaganda.’58 As a result, she observes an increasing rejection of both political art and social critique in contemporary arts practice. Instead of destroying the potential of art, she suggests that political and social contextualization can enhance our appreciation and understanding of both art and ourselves: But I don’t believe that the value of art is diminished when critics return it to the complicated economic, political, social and psychic systems that brought it forth. On the contrary, art’s complicity in our messy realities is the real reason that it holds our interest and has something important to tell us about who we are. Because no other participant in the art system is interested in these questions, it is the critic’s fate to take them on.59

In her discussion of the relationship between art and politics, Mouffe also sees the political potential of art emerging in its engagement with society, arguing ‘I am convinced that artistic and cultural practices can offer spaces for resistance that undermine the social imaginary necessary for capitalist reproduction.’60 It is evident, however, that there has been a significant shift away from the idea of art as revolution, evident in avant-garde practices of the twentieth century, and towards the idea of art as ‘engagement with’, evident in the idea of social practice. Critical discourses relating to the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art, accelerated by the 2008 global financial crisis, have sparked new debate about the political role of art, on the one hand, and the social benefits 18

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of artistic practice, on the other. While theorists such as Claire Bishop question the ethical imperative of social practice and instead privilege greater aesthetic autonomy, Grant Kester has been outspoken in his criticism of dominant art theory discourse’s distaste for practices that engage productively with the social. He challenges the tendency for theorists and critics to rely on oppositional thinking and romanticism about the artist’s transcendent role. He writes ‘a simplistic and totalising notion of revolution continues to function as a kind of phantom limb for many artists, theorists and activists’.61 By contrast, he advocates for more complex forms of artistic engagement with social and political systems, forms that allow for both collaboration and individual action. In this regard he draws upon Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of radical singularity, where the subject is shaped through social relations but also has agency.62 These debates around art’s social role are explored in Chapter 3 in relation to specific artworks and exhibitions. For the time being it is important to stress that contemporary art’s engagement with social and political practices reflects a broader conflation of culture and politics, what Michel Foucault described as biopower in the late 1970s, and more recently what Hardt and Negri describe as biopolitical production, the production of social life itself.63 The theoretical conflict evident in art-historical and sociological approaches to art’s role in society points to an important quality of art in modernity; it tends to be problematic, paradoxical, and selfconscious in a way that unsettles a harmonious view of social life. For sociologist Niklas Luhmann, art is important for the very fact that it irritates rational modes of knowledge. In Art as a Social System he writes, ‘Art tests arrangements that are at once fictional and real in order to show society, from a point within society that things could be done differently, which does not mean that anything goes.’64 From this perspective, art has a capacity to incite change, and this in itself causes discomfort for those who are not comfortable with risk and uncertainty. What is obvious is that the relationship between sociology and art is a complex one that speaks of conflict between freedom and social order.65 Moreover, art mediates between individual and shared experience – it is a mode of communication that facilitates both connections and disagreements between people, which is at the core of the very concept of ‘society’.66 The very problematic nature of art in society represents its unique value in undermining conventions and encouraging new ways of thinking. In the words of Theodor Adorno,

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‘the task of art today is to bring chaos into the order’.67 The challenge for art in the contemporary moment is therefore to find a way in which the increasingly business-oriented model of funding in the arts does not destroy art’s ability to question society and articulate social and political difference. One model available in the contemporary context is that of social enterprise.

The Social Enterprise Model and Art Social enterprise discourse has developed in line with an increasing convergence of public, private and non-profit sectors, which we have already seen in the context of the arts. As a result of this convergence, an increasing number of hybrid organizations have developed that bring together business methods with the aim of producing social benefit.68 Definitions of social enterprise vary widely, both in theoretical discourse and in practice. What appears consistently among such definitions and instances is a convergence between public and private models of organization, along with an over-arching priority to privilege social outcomes over economic returns.69 The vast majority of social enterprises are organizations led by a social, cultural, environmental or economic mission consistent with a public or community goal. They trade to fulfil this mission, derive a substantial portion of their income from trade, and reinvest the majority of their profit/surplus in the fulfilment of their mission.70 The field has its origins in cooperative movements in developed countries and in micro-finance initiatives in the developing world from the 1970s onwards, and has seen a critical mass develop at the turn of the twenty-first century. While there is general consensus that social enterprise is a recent and rapidly expanding field, there is uncertainty about the exact scale and scope of social entrepreneurship around the world. In the UK alone it is estimated that there are 68,000 enterprises operating, employing around a million people and contributing over 24 billion pounds to the economy. Similar numbers are cited in other European countries, however the accuracy of these estimates are disputed, partly due to the hybrid nature of many social enterprises, which might also be classified as either NGOs or for-profit businesses.71 The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor conducted a major survey on social enterprise activity in 2009, taking these issues into account. The 20

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survey involved 150,000 interviews with individuals across 54 countries worldwide, in both developing and developed countries, to assess the prevalence of social enterprise activity. They found social enterprise activity rates averaged 2 per cent globally, although this varied depending on the particular geographic region. The areas of strongest activity were the USA, followed closely by the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, with European nations following. This shows that the model has adaptability across economic and social contexts and various stages of development. However there was a strong correlation between social entrepreneurship in liberal political states, showing an alignment with late capitalist economic and social processes. The researchers report that ‘inter-regional variations show that, in general, higher SEA [social enterprise activity] rates correspond to more liberal economies’.72 The category of culture and recreation was the third largest category of social enterprise activity, representing 12 per cent of the total worldwide. This may be accounted for in the increasing emphasis on cultural and creative industries in the global development agenda. The innovative character of the social enterprise model exists in its distinction from traditional social welfare provision, which reinforces categories of disadvantage through a model whereby those in positions of privilege provide assistance to those who are poor. This perpetuates a lack of capacity among those experiencing disadvantage. ˇ zek has been strident in his criticism of this more traditional Slavoj Ziˇ approach to charity. Those who believe in charity, he argues, ‘very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But the remedies do not cure the disease they merely prolong it; indeed the remedies are part of the disease.’73 Instead, he suggests that we need to change society itself; to restructure economic and social systems that enable poverty in the first place.74 Social enterprises go some way to effecting this very change by providing a new model of intervention where the focus shifts from servicing the poor to enabling those experiencing disadvantage to become the agents in their own economic and social development.75 This capacity depends, however, on the ability of those running the enterprise to manage the tensions between social benefit and economic viability, and the degree to which those experiencing disadvantage are involved in the creation and management of the organization.76 Each organization has to negotiate relations of power both within the enterprise itself and in relation to external stakeholders including

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the state, local communities and global economic systems. The issue of the distribution of power is all the more important in the context of international development where histories of colonization intersect with the expansion of global capital in new forms of economic colonialism. There is no single model or solution to address these complexities, and in the field of critical development studies theorists have firmly shifted away from thinking in terms of universal goals. As Walter Mignolo argues in Globalization and the Decolonial Option: Pluri-versality as a universal project is quite demanding. It demands, basically, that we cannot have it all our own way. The struggle for epistemic decoloniality lies, precisely, here: de-linking from the most fundamental belief of modernity: the belief in abstract universals through the entire spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left.77

Thinking about globalization as a complex negotiation of power and difference reflects the characteristics of contemporary capitalism, which involves both great inequality and also greater mobility across economic, geographic and cultural boundaries. This is the focus of Thomas Piketty’s influential book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which looks at the rise of wealth and income inequality in contemporary capitalism. The factors that have influenced this trend towards greater inequality, he argues, are the result of relationships of power and both individual and collective action. He writes: The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.78

It is in this sense that social enterprise can be understood as one of many new forms of organization that bring together individuals and groups with a shared focus on the redistribution of social and economic capital. While the hybridity of social enterprises can make the boundaries between business and social purposes somewhat opaque, thereby leaving room for commercial exploitation, social enterprise differs from mainstream business in its foregrounding of non-economic values and activities including social connection, community development 22

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and education. It is worth noting that in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey, it was documented that the vast majority of enterprises were either non-profit or hybrid models, with only a minority identified as for-profit.79 Social enterprise has activated the commercial marketplace as a ground for generating income for social purposes, particularly employment and income generation for those experiencing disadvantage. This ability to provide employment and ˇ zek’s ideas about addressing the root economic advancement talks to Ziˇ causes of poverty, rather than focusing purely on relief. Any consideration of the social enterprise model in the arts, however, must take into consideration the importance of artistic freedom, critical thought and institutional independence. As we have seen, art has an important role to play in influencing society to think critically and to encourage us to embrace change. Art feeds and also troubles consumer culture, and this is an important factor in stimulating change. Art should therefore be recognized for creating social value in and of itself, rather than being held confined to achieving specific instrumental or therapeutic goals. However alongside these broader questions of art’s ability to generate social benefits, the art world also needs to address its own structural inequalities. In contemporary economic systems, art is enterprise – it costs money to produce, it employs labourers at all levels of production and distribution, and it is increasingly expected to generate profits. In Don Thompson’s survey of the contemporary art market, The Supermodel and the Brillo Box, he describes ‘The very highest levels of the contemporary art world are brand- and eventdriven.’80 Meanwhile in High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity, Isabel Graw describes an increasingly competitive and individualistic atmosphere for artists in the contemporary marketplace. She describes this as ‘increasing economic pressure to succeed in view of the compulsive wholesale exploitation of life in celebrity culture’.81 It is in this light that artists are exploring new forms of economic and social organization including social enterprise – looking for greater agency in the organization of their labour and practice, greater financial independence from funders and sponsors, and a more equitable distribution of profits from art’s production and consumption. Along with financial independence come other ripple-out aesthetic and social benefits including greater space for artistic and social critique, along with the potential for collective action and a critical engagement with

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cultural capitalism. As Y´udice argues, ‘If other institutions of the public sphere will not take us there, then perhaps only art can mine the muck of our fears and confront the clandestinity of corrupt military, oil, pharmaceutical, and surveillance-security enterprises aided and abetted by those who rule.’82 In her critique of the economic conditions of artists, Angela McRobbie actively incites the art community to consider ‘radical social enterprise’ as an alternative to the existing creative economy.83 Art as a social enterprise is not emerging because art should be entrepreneurial; it is emerging because art is already deeply engaged with contemporary economic systems. Artists have not given up on the potential for creative and critical freedom, and the emergence of social enterprise reflects this. However the ability of social enterprise to address structural inequalities in the art system and beyond is uncertain, and depends in large part on the negotiation of power and differences within each organization. A critical analysis of this emergent territory is the focus of Chapter 5. As literature across the fields of public policy, sociology, economics and art theory demonstrate, art is playing a significant role in society at an economic level. However, the economic forces that drive contemporary art’s production and reception also threaten the very qualities that account for art’s relationship to society; including space for critique, artistic freedom and the articulation of political difference. This is an important consideration in a climate that has seen rapid growth in private funding of the arts. Before delving more deeply into cases of social practice and social enterprise in contemporary art, it is necessary to first consider the art-historical background to these developments. Chapter 2 therefore presents a historical review of artistic practices that have aimed to subvert or critique the economic complicity of art, in order to understand the dance of critique and complicity that has characterized art’s relationship to society in modernity.

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2 Art, Money and Society This chapter examines the various responses on the part of artists and art theorists to the problem of how art, society and money interact. Since the mid-nineteenth century, avant-garde art movements have often made direct links between art, money and society. From Charles Baudelaire’s advocacy of artists such as Constantin Guys who focused on the fashions and customs of the new, moneyed classes in nineteenthcentury Paris, to the Italian Futurist’s aggressive marketing strategies and self-promotional rhetoric in the early-twentieth century, to the contemporary context in which artists such as Damien Hirst have made their own strategies for career advancement and economic success the subject of their art, we have seen an intensification of the relationship between art, money and society. The primary definition and purpose of the art object within society now seems to be that it is a commodity bought and sold in a market. Reflecting on this situation for the kind of avant-garde or modernist art that has often been described as a form of opposition to capitalist economies and the society they propagate, James Meyer argued in a roundtable published in 2008 by Artforum on art and its markets that ‘The history of modernism is in part a history of the marketing of the new.’1 Among the many critical responses to this aspect of modern art has been to see art not as autonomous from its social and commercial context, as in the traditional romantic model of the free creative spirit, but rather as a kind of ‘social enterprise’. Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry was a pioneering text in understanding the links between art, money and society under the conditions of modern consumerism. 25

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Partly a manifesto for the critical potential of art, and partly a prophecy of doom for the end of creative freedom, Adorno understood that in a consumer culture, art had to renegotiate its position. As Donald Kuspit explains: Art is for Adorno the social enterprise where the thought of freedom is strongest, and therefore the enterprise in which society endangers its own authority, is at odds with itself [. . .] It is simultaneously an instrument of social conformity and of individual rebellion, of social coercion and selfconsciousness.2

Whether maintaining a critical or complicit position in relation to society, or a combination of both, art has enormous potential to unleash new ways of thinking, new models of community engagement, new understandings of society, and new relationships to commodity culture. Indeed, for every artist who seemed to warmly embrace the blurring of the lines between art, money and society, there have been those who sought to resist that easy slippage, as the following survey of artists and critics will demonstrate. In what follows, some major moments in this relationship are sketched out in order to give a sense of the historical developments that have led to the contemporary situation and to understand the various strategies and tactics that are possible from an aesthetic point of view.

The Nineteenth Century: Art, Design and the Growth of Private Enterprise Since the nineteenth century, artists and art writers have frequently concerned themselves with the proper relationship between art, money and society. In certain intellectual circles in the Victorian era in nineteenth-century Britain the view was that art was a place where the forces of industrialization and commercialization germane to modern capitalist society, with all their deleterious effects, could be halted in favour of a more aesthetically enriched culture, with attendant social benefits. Theorists such as John Ruskin and William Morris argued for a more humane society in which the arts would take a key role, limiting the alienating effects of industrialization and commercialization. Ruskin argued that the spirit of competition inherent to capitalism worked against integrity and beauty in architecture. As a counter to the 26

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modern capitalistic system in which artisans, artists and architects were competing with each other he proposed a collective ethos, reaching back to the Gothic past, in which collaboration between aesthetic workers replaced the economic imperative. Ruskin’s ideas were very influential on thinkers like W.G. Collingwood, who argued in 1900 that the state should ‘undertake education and be responsible for the employment of the artist’ hoping to substitute ‘a spirit of cooperation for that of competition’.3 William Morris, whose thinking was also heavily indebted to Ruskin’s, railed against the commercialism of his era as part of a radical aesthetic programme to resist the penetration of commodification into every sphere of modern life and turn contemporary capitalist society on its head. Like Ruskin, Morris proposed a return to a medieval guild based system that preserved the dignity of work and of the aesthetic objects that were its outcome. In his words, real art must be ‘made by the people and for the people, as a happiness for the maker and the user’.4 At a broader level he proposed a new socialist society built on such principles made of ‘culturally sophisticated communes, democratically controlled by the artist-workers who will constitute their free citizenry’.5 A broad set of initiatives related to these ideas, but at the level of consumption rather than production, also saw an effort in later years to provide broader accessibility of art for working class people – a push which resulted in the establishment of Mechanics’ Institutes and such organizations as the Workers’ Education Association.6 In his designs Morris put great emphasis on handmade artefacts, which for all their beauty and evident integrity at an aesthetic level would nevertheless be prohibitively expensive to produce for a mass market, due to his rejection of the machine made, thus generating the central conundrum of the arts and crafts movement: their work was only accessible to the wealthy.7 Arts and Crafts designers were stuck with either producing for an elite market or with accepting the reality of an industrialized capitalist market.8 In France during the same period several significant developments took place in the relation between art, money and society. One of the great rule-breakers artistically and politically was the painter Gustave Courbet, whose realist style, which incorporated gritty depictions of the working classes and thereby addressed a completely different social stratum than artists normally concerned themselves with, went together with a socialist political sensibility. In 1855, his attempts to get outside the constraints of the official exhibiting system organized by the

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government of the day, he mounted his own exhibition space, called the Pavilion of Realism, right outside the official exhibition venue. This development was quite new as very few artists before this time had so definitively rejected the official organs of exhibition. Courbet, in order to oppose the government, had to set himself up as a kind of private enterprise, with an advertising hoarding, an admission fee and other trappings of capitalist endeavour. So he may have been a socialist but he was also a businessman. For all his commonality with William Morris, Courbet embraced an entrepreneurial model of capitalist selfpromotion in order to make his works and his ideas known and appeal to a public outside of the public sector. As we know from various statements the artist made during his lifetime, Courbet was aware of some peculiar aspects of the market. Noting that the notoriety attached to his oppositional political stance at the time of the 1871 commune had led to a massive increase in the prices paid for his work, he also argued that collectors and the public were ardently focused on the question of what his painting were worth in dollar terms. As Isabelle Grew has argued, such statements can be taken as evidence that ‘in the nineteenth century, high market value was already capable of consolidating an impression of artistic importance’.9 In his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life on the artist Constantin Guys, Charles Baudelaire explicitly connected modernity to ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’.10 Through depicting and responding to the passing quality of newness in modernity, including the changing fashions and customs of wealthy bourgeois society, Baudelaire’s ideal modern artist combatted the academic obsession with the past as ultimate authority. At the same time, for Baudelaire newness also resisted the levelling effects of commodification. As Walter Benjamin explained, in Baudelaire’s thinking newness ‘represents that absolute which is no longer accessible to any interpretation or comparison’, which meant that the ‘inestimable value of novelty’ was an antidote to the degradation suffered by those things which, as commodities, have a price on their head. As Benjamin pointed out, however, what Baudelaire was unable to see was that newness is not only ‘art’s last line of resistance’ but also ‘the commodity’s most advanced line of attack’.11 Modern art’s obsession with newness and ephemerality was not something that inherently opposed the world of commerce but rather was shared by and had its origins in commodity culture.

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The French Impressionists aggressively seized the new modernity and the capitalist society that went with it. This was true not only for their subject matter – the cityscape, cafes, fashion, new industries of tourism, particularly landscape tourism – and style but also in the way they organized themselves. In 1873, they wanted to exhibit outside the official salon system and so formed a kind of corporation, or Joint Stock Company, called the Soci´et´e Anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteur, graveurs. As Richard Brettell has argued, They decided they wanted to be independent professionals, rather than government sanctioned artists [. . .] They paid dues so they had money to rent the space and handle the printing costs [. . .] on the chance that the money could be paid back through the exhibition as a capitalist enterprise.12

This is a crucial aspect of Impressionism – it was a model of free enterprise, an expression of modern bourgeois individualism. Impressionism, which recorded the exhilarating visual spectacle of modernity, and urban and suburban pleasures, gave pleasure and identity chiefly to the middle classes who were its main purchasers and the social segment to which the work was addressed. Although some Impressionist painters documented the tensions of modern, capitalist society, and the price paid for the rise of the new middle classes, Impressionism’s earlier registering of deep transformations in French society ends in a quiet acquiescence in a kind of art for art’s sake.13 Another important factor to consider in the nineteenth century was the role of the art dealer and commercial gallery. The commercial art gallery only came into existence in the mid-nineteenth century, before which time collectors purchased mostly from artists, academies and auctions. As Pamela Fletcher has argued, the new figures and organizations in the art world, dealers and commercial galleries who adopted modern retail practices, including fixed prices and prompt payment, worked in an artist’s favour in granting easier access to regular purchasers and payments, but they also came with strings attached. In the 1860s English dealers such as Ernest Gambart were starting to instruct their artists about what kind of pictures would sell and which not.14 Moreover, dealers such as Durand-Ruel began to profit from the increasing tendency toward the solo exhibition of artists, partly encouraged by the efforts of Courbet and Edouard Manet to set up 29

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their own individual pavilions.15 By promoting the work of individual artists and then purchasing their work so as to establish a monopoly over their trade, such dealers were able to make handsome profits.16 Thus began an influence that would be increasingly telling in the history of the relationship between art, money and society.

Early Twentieth Century: Avant-Garde Art between Opposition and Accommodation In 1909 the Italian Futurist Marinetti, continuing a theme in modern art first discussed by Baudelaire, called for the destruction of libraries and museums and for an art that would dispense with the past and heedlessly pursue the ever-changing spectacle of modernity.17 As Marinetti and Sant’ Elia explained in 1914: the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city. This constant renewal of the architectonic environment will contribute to the victory of Futurism.18

The Futurists proposed a world in which continual obsolescence and renewal were the norm so that they could more effectively dominate the market. As Claudia Salaris has argued, ‘Marinetti possessed [. . .] gifts that he utilized in a self-conscious effort to promote Futurism in much the way that one would promote an industrial product that is to be introduced into the market and publicized.’19 Among the strategies the Futurist leader adopted was to saturate the market, giving away mountains of free copies of publications, touring endlessly, giving public presentations, and deliberately fomenting public disputes in order to attract the attention of the media and the public. These approaches to publicity were inimical to the cloistered ideal of the art for art’s sake model of the Symbolist movement that the Futurists had superseded. They would have their apotheosis in the work of Fortunato Depero who dedicated a great deal of his career in the 1920s and ’30s to producing commercial art, even arguing that all art historically was essentially a form of advertising, thus turning the high/low and elite/popular dichotomies inside out.20 At the same time, the Futurists became embroiled in a series of social movements of a nationalistic and right-wing tenor which led directly into the upheavals of the postwar 30

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period that culminated in the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist party. The Futurists ended up more or less producing an official state art; a kind of advertising for totalitarianism. Elsewhere in Europe and the USA a more clearly ironic attitude to the rise of capitalism and the commodification of culture arose among artists such as the Dadaists. By far the most shocking and profound contribution of the Dadaists in this realm was made by the work of Marcel Duchamp, who, in a series of Readymade sculptures such as Fountain – a store-bought urinal displayed on its side, signed R. Mutt, and entered for an exhibition in 1917 – challenged several preconceptions about the nature of art. These included the relative roles of skill and accident in the work of art; the role of the exhibiting gallery [whether public or private] in ratifying and therefore defining what can be accepted and discussed as a work of art; and the aesthetic status of the unique artistic work in comparison to the mass produced object.21 As Dawn Ades has argued, among the many things the readymade achieved was to respond to the phenomenon of window shopping, wherein consumers of the new, burgeoning range of manufactured goods experienced the commodity object at an aesthetic level, with or without an attached financial transaction.22 In so doing Duchamp’s readymade ‘highlights the traditional hypocrisy of pretending that there is a contradiction between ‘Art’ and ‘Commodity’ and that aesthetic and commodity values are totally opposed to one another’.23 In a later series of works, Duchamp further exploited the ambiguities between art and commerce, such as his Tzank Cheque 1919 (Figure 1), a fake cheque which, signed by the artist, had a potential value determined both by its imagined status as a promissory note and its more viable status, given Duchamp’s increasing fame, as an art work which could be exchanged for financial return. In yet other related projects Duchamp issued virtually unmarketable products including Beautiful Breath perfume and a series of optical illusions on mechanically rotating disks, as well as issuing handmade bonds in a company solely occupied in casino gambling.24 In other contexts neighbouring Europe, such as in post revolutionary Russia, the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in October 1917 by overthrowing the parliament after which time Russia was administered by the Soviet or worker’s council. This led to the complete reorganization of society, the abolition of private enterprise, and the introduction of a centralized government. These

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Figure 1. Marcel Duchamp, Tzank Check, ink on paper, 1919.

political developments had a significant impact on art, in that the revolutionary government – which had nationalized important private art collections – became the principal art patron. Constructivist artists like Alexander Rodchenko dedicated themselves from 1921 to producing a new, abstract art for this new society. Constructivist art would eschew what Rodchenko and others saw as the bourgeois arbitrariness of traditional aesthetic production, as well as its traditional autonomy from the broader social sphere, and embody principles of efficiency, collective production, and utility. In such ideas were founded some of the principles of modern design, which drew upon the egalitarian dimension of William Morris’ thinking but without the natural motifs and tendency to the handmade, and which culminated in the Bauhaus ideal of integrating art, craft and modern industrial production. In line with his ideals Rodchenko also produced advertising for the products of Soviet society including cookies, candy and baby pacifiers. As Angela V¨olker has pointed out, here ‘the artists saw a fulfilment of their desire to exert influence on a grand scale, for they were now publicizing the new political and artistic ideas as the same time as the product’.25 In this sense the artist could serve the revolution by helping the new planned economy to sell products. Few of the Constructivists would continue working in this vein as the Soviet Union in its totalitarian phase lost its tolerance for innovative art. As V¨olker points out, in more recent times the ideals of Constructivism have been continued yet travestied through an aetheticisation of society 32

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in the form of mass advertising and consumerism which is completely at odds with the ideals of efficiency and utility artists like Rodchenko originally favoured.26 Among the European Surrealists beginning in the 1920s, a fascination with the world of commerce made itself felt. Reacting to the reestablishment of bourgeois order in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian and German revolutions of 1917– 1919, the surrealists attacked the settled society of their contemporary milieu with an aesthetic program that sought to undermine the status quo through the weapon of Freudian psychoanalysis. The leader of the Surrealists, Andr´e Breton, praised the irrational thought processes associated with dream states as a salutary antidote to a world dominated by logic and reason and argued for the liberation of subconscious drives, in a romantic privileging of the individual imagination. However, for all this emphasis on the individual, one of the primary motifs of the Surrealist movement, the manikin or dummy, was an image of human identity as a thing, as can be seen in Eugene Atget’s photographs of store window dummies reproduced in the pages of La Revolution Surrealiste. This widespread interest in the manikin among the Surrealists was a response to the shocks of industrial capitalism whereby human beings are commoditized and mechanized. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, relations between people become like relations between things and one contemporary manifestation of this was the reduction of the modern factory worker to a kind of automaton. Another manifestation was the domination of commodity culture, with its logic of infinite exchangeability, which not only rendered products equivalent through money but also people (as consumers) equivalent to things (what is consumed). Like other avant-garde artists, such as Duchamp, the Surrealists were exploring the deathly eroticism within consumer culture. In the 1930s and ’40s, however, they would come in for criticism from modernist critics for dallying too much with consumer culture. Artists such as Dali, who worked closely with Hollywood, were described as kitsch for producing ‘commercial propaganda’ and possessing a ‘sense of chic’ commensurate with the role of a ‘court jester to bourgeois society’.27 Accompanying these developments in the economy of the arts was a gradual growth in the art market, and a proliferation of dealers, both larger, such Durand-Ruel and Bertheim June, and smaller, such as

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Berthe Will and Ambroise Vollard, particularly in Paris.28 Another figure, Andr´e Level, organized an investment group of collectors known as the Peau d’Ours who purchased from dealers and artists from 1904. After several years of purchasing, in 1914 they sold their collection, which included Matisse and Picasso, making a considerable profit, and voluntarily donated 20 per cent of their profit to the artists.29 At this sale it was therefore discovered that ‘the avant-garde art of the past [. . .] was highly profitable as an investment’.30 Another important development in this period was the phenomenon of collectors becoming dealers, as well as critics and artists becoming collectors and dealers in their own right. Andr´e Breton, who attacked speculation on art in his writings, operated or advised commercial investments in art of his own or others. Marcel Duchamp also worked as an art dealer on and off in the 1920s. As Christopher Green has commented, in the case of Breton’s own collection as installed in his house in Paris, ‘It provided an alternative space for an alternative life lived against the middle-class grain, and yet this was a life funded at crucial moments by profit in a buoyant art market.’31 Clearly the art market remained important for even the most radical and innovative art practices.

Postwar Art: Gestures to Pop Many art critics with an eye for the social impact of the arts have fought strenuously to maintain the boundaries between high art and commodity culture. Most famously, Clement Greenberg, in his article Avant-Garde and Kitsch of 1939, argued that Pablo Picasso’s modernist paintings demand a self-reflective, mental activity on the part of the viewer that is anathema to the easily digestible, ersatz art – Hollywood film, pulp fiction and pop music – produced by industrialized mass culture. Nevertheless, in the same article he argued that: No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold [. . .] And now this elite is rapidly shrinking.32

In other words, for Greenberg it was not the avant-garde’s connection to an economic base that was at issue, but rather through what means, and how it would be maintained in the face of a diminishing 34

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wealthy class to pay for it. In 1939 Greenberg still believed that the most appropriate base would be a socialist one. What such statements failed to take into account, and could not foresee, was the massive commercialisation of the avant-garde that would take place almost immediately after World War II. The contemporary art world on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1950s was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the movement known in Europe as Art Informal. This gestural painting movement had sought a completely novel and abstract artistic language to lend freedom and bodily immediacy to artistic creation and thereby defeat the world of industry, commodification and administration. However, it had fallen prey to the forces of the commodity, as artists, dealers, collectors and journalists turned the novel expressive gesture into a recognizable art brand that could be purchased to decorate corporate lobbies, form the backdrop for haute couture fashion photographs and adorn the covers of chic magazines. Jackson Pollock, who became a kind of media superstar almost in spite of himself, thus paved the way for a new relationship with the market forces that had been conditioning the art world in previous decades. There were several responses to this co-optation of the avant-garde artist. Some artists sought mediums and approaches that excluded them from the commodity system in ever more radical ways. Artists in the Minimalist, Earth Art and Performance genres of the 1960s and 1970 created art works that were site-specific, outside the gallery system or connected to the physical presence of the body and its ephemeral appearance in time and space in an attempt to circumvent the institutional, discursive and marketing dimensions of the modern art market, all with limited success, as galleries expanded their operations to incorporate such works and traded in artefacts related to the ephemeral or larger scale aspects of their work. Another approach artists took was to directly invite an explicit entanglement in the broader commodity system that underpinned their production, a path followed by some Neo-Dada and Pop artists of the postwar period. The use of mass cultural detritus, mechanical or chance operations, and readymade strategies were exemplary of Dada and Constructivist attacks on the institution of art and its autonomy from the broader social context through breaking down the distinction between the aesthetic work and its social substrate. When these techniques were taken up again in the work of Neo-Dada and Pop artists, including Robert

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Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Daniel Spoerri, one response on the part of historians and critics, such as Peter B¨urger, was to describe these latter artists as a ‘neo-avant-garde’: a collapse back into the art institution and its economic underpinning in the commodity culture.33 As Hal Foster argues, many of these artists, particularly the ‘protopop and nouveau realiste reception of the readymade did tend to render it aesthetic, to recoup it as an art-commodity’.34 However, there is currently a very lively debate about these figures’ exploration of avantgarde’s entanglement in commodity. One approach to understanding the commodity status of innovative visual art in the first half of the 1960s lies in an observation made by the literary historian Merrill Cole who points out that there are two types of novelty. One type, associated most closely with the commodity system, ‘consolidates the ego’s petty securities and its sense that the world is as it should be’.35 Another type of newness, which associated with certain forms of Modernism, achieves two things: it ‘shatters the rigidities and complacencies of the ego’ and holds out the ‘painful promise of what the world and the self could become’.36 These comments apply to the work of many artists in this period but to give a concrete example here, the following discussion focuses solely on the work of Claes Oldenburg. Claes Oldenburg’s work directly after World War II sought to ‘restore the excitement and meaning of simple experience’, by transcending art’s ‘use as a commercial counter’, and his 1959 installation of trash, The Street engaged with the dejecta of society and exemplified disorder and decay.37 As trash lacks value and has outlived its usefulness, it cannot be readily appropriated or recycled by society for any purpose and thereby defeated the enervating process of commodification.38 However, by the 1960s there was a system in place whereby such works could be accepted into the system of capitalist exchange. As Oldenburg observed, ‘the whole thing had become totally commercial [. . .] People were arriving in Cadillacs’.39 Oldenburg sought to resolve this dilemma by engaging directly with the realm of commodities in his next work, The Store, in 1961 (Figure 2). This was an installation in a disused storefront on the Lower East Side of New York City. Visitors to the shop were invited to purchase a series of plaster and muslin objects painted in brightly coloured enamel paint that formed replicas of merchandise such as food and garments.

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ART, MONEY AND SOCIETY Figure 2. Claes Oldenburg in The Store, installation view of exhibition at Ray Gun Mfg. Co., 107 E. 2nd St., New York, USA, 1 December 1961–2 January 1962.

In the case of his depictions of edible items, by wilfully savouring the way food is presented in shop displays and advertisements – its glossy texture, its fluidity – Oldenburg emphasized the visceral quality of his work by evoking the bodily processes of ingestion and digestion. Oldenburg, who was concerned with the somatic dimension of the human body, was depicting commodities from an earlier historical period belonging to the childhood experience of the viewer. The gaudy colours and glistening surfaces of Oldenburg’s painted plaster merchandise look back onto a past of the commodity, when the fulfilment and participation embodied in a child’s fantasy of fulfilment rummaging in the five and dime store or drooling over lollies at the local general store was still a living possibility. However, the suggestions of degradation and decay bring about an awareness that any shiny new commodities will also fail to satisfy and are destined to become the useless garbage of tomorrow. Oldenburg tackled the commodification 37

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of his own art by provoking reflection upon the perishable nature of the commodity form per se.

The 1970s and 1980s: Late Modern and Post-modern Art By the 1970s and ’80s many critics were aware that the entanglement of art and money in modern society had reached a particularly intense point. The position reached by the contemporary artist was described in this period by Jameson as follows: What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.40

For many critics the most evident sign of this in art was the work of artists such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle of the 1980s in the USA, whose figurative paintings combined a recycling of historical artistic styles with a brash and regurgitated version of modernist expressive brushstrokes. Such works were defended in certain circles as a welcome return to the traditional function of art to represent identity, history and society at large. However, in many respects they represented a cynical appeal to an art market desperate for attractive and relatively understandable narratives painted in a style that gratified a complacent belief in the sanctity of the romantic-era inspired genius artist. In Hal Foster’s words, such work ‘sought a reconciliation with the public (which is also to say the marketplace) [. . .] this reconciliation tended to be both elitist in its historical allusions and manipulative in its consumerist clich´es’.41 To some extent this reconciliation with the market had its predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s generation of conceptual artists, who with their uncompromisingly anti-aesthetic works composed of bland documents, photographs and routine operations, nevertheless have been viewed as an advance arm of the global industries of commodity production and marketing. As Alexander Alberro explains, conceptual art’s insistence on art as idea facilitated conceptual art’s emergence as the ultimate commodity through the power of dematerialization, 38

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which resulted in an increased emphasis on art as brand in the same sense that a commodity is a brand. By shifting from the material to the immaterial, conceptual artists mimicked consumer culture in which marketing, advertising, and branding is the very thing sold rather than any material product. The situation which the conceptual artists helped to propel us into therefore was one in which the artist doesn’t have to do anything at all other than market their ideas.42 There were, however, as in the immediate postwar period, several alternatives to this collapse into pure marketability. One was presented by Hans Haacke, who, beginning in the 1970s, started drawing attention to the intertwining of art, money and society by mounting or proposing to mount exhibitions which targeted the financial and economic underpinnings of society and culture. In Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings [. . .] of 1970 he proposed an installation at the Guggenheim Museum that documented the properties in Manhattan rented out to poor, minority-group families owned by wealthy families and conglomerates. These pieces, which ‘linked the workings of corporate capital, elite family interests and malpractice with the slum reality of deprived ethnic groups’, were rejected by the museum as overly political, and as a potential threat to the economic sponsorship of the gallery itself by wealthy American families and individuals.43 In the 1980s, Haacke shifted to a more explicit exposure of the financial structures supporting art and the museum industry, targeting specific collectors, museums and institutions with displays revealing their economic basis, including details of industry sponsorship, provenance of works in the collection, and other details revealing the entanglement of art, money and society. In all of his installations Haacke provokes thought on the part of the audience about their relationship to financial power structures that is often obscured by the aesthetic pleasure of encounters with works. In a telling example of the difficulties of staging such critique in the contemporary art market, one of Haacke’s works, On Social Grease (1975), a piece that was pointedly critical of the involvement of corporate sponsorship in the arts, was purchased at auction by Gilman Paper Company in 1987. Haacke’s work sold for a record price, and was purchased for inclusion in Gilman Paper’s corporate art collection, raising questions about the possibility of artistic subversion in an art market that places an economic value on artistic subversion. As Chin-Tau Wu observes, ‘Gilman Paper’s ownership of Haacke’s work has not only minimised

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the critique that the art was attempting to make in his works, but has actively, and radically, redefined the very meaning of the piece.’44 Another, similar alternative was offered in the work of Stephen Willats, whose work Learning to Live Within a Confined Space (1978) addressed the interface between cultural and social relations in the daily lives of a public housing project, and included a set of photographs, charts and diagrams recording the everyday lives of residents.45 An additional important development completely distinguished from these initiatives was the contemporary rise of the community art movement, an outgrowth of the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s and which, in the words of Alison Jeffers, ‘was committed to the notion of providing the opportunities and the means to make the creation of art available to everyone regardless of age, education, race, income or social class’.46 A further significant aspect of art in the 1970s and 1980s, a period which has come to be known as post-modernism, was a deliberate but not always cynical intensification of the artist’s interest in mass marketing, advertising and commodity production more generally. These latter artists were continuing a tradition that went back at least as far as the late-nineteenth century to the work of the impressionists. As Thomas Crow argued in his 1981 essay Modernism and Mass Culture with respect to this artistic lineage, mass culture has provided modernism with material for resisting capitalist culture and should not solely be viewed as what must be expunged from radical art practice.47 However, the impact and meaning of the works of individual artists has to be studied carefully as while each one mimics the processes, looks, placement and techniques of the culture industry at large, there is a range of meanings from mere affirmation to critical interrogation in such works, and the final reckoning about the significance of such works at a social level is a subject of debate. Many of these artists, rather than resisting the commodification of everyday life, seem to wilfully propel the realm of art, with its traditional values of artisanal, handmade production, profound experience and unique individuality, into the realm of the commodity spectacle described by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. As Debord argued in the 1960s, ‘all that was once directly lived as become mere representation’. Describing this situation as ‘spectacle’, he argues that ‘reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation’.48 For Baudrillard this was a new ‘hyperreality’ or ‘simulacrum’ in which images, fetishes and signs take the place of actual, physical experience.49

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Jeff Koons, by appropriating products and advertisements already available in the culture, comes closest to being a kind of aesthetic advertiser. Borrowing not only from modern marketing but also from the Duchampian readymade – the latter of which he treats as a kind of a product to be imitated and disseminated – he dissolves the already porous boundary between art and merchandise. In New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker (1981), a plexiglass case containing three vacuum cleaners, Koons imitates the technologies of both merchandise and artistic display announcing that the two have merged fully in the modern museum and gallery marketplace. As David Joselit has argued, in such works, in which ‘products are glamorized’, both a literal and cultural vacuum is evoked and this voiding of meaning in contemporary culture is fetishized like a modern totem.50 In other works reliant on the Pop Art tradition, Koons monumentalizes some of the most ludicrously tawdry aspects of mass culture, as in his 1980s polychrome sculpture of Michael Jackson which fundamentally disturbs the fine art/low art division. Where Koons corrodes most effectively and disturbingly the distinction between art and merchandise is in his selfpromotional strategies, wherein his own empty media celebrity itself became the concept and the work being consumed.51 Another contemporary American artist working on the porous boundary between art and commerce is Barbara Kruger. She borrows the stark graphics, bold messages and punchy designs of billboards, mimicking the look of advertising art to the degree that it’s difficult to distinguish whether her work is art in the traditional sense or not. With her ambivalent, sometimes humorous messages – such as ‘I shop therefore I am’ – Kruger presents the viewer with visual and textual conundrums that strike to the heart of the rhetorical strategies used by the culture industry to interpolate and manipulate individuals into the broader capitalist, patriarchal system. With her origin in the commercial magazine industry where she learned and borrowed a series of graphic design techniques, and by relying on older, outmoded images and forms of address, Kruger’s work ‘unnerves by assertively exposing the powerful subtleties of socialization’.52 Jenny Holzer, who works exclusively with words rather than images, takes a comparable approach in her Truisms series, where slogans such as ‘Money Creates Taste’ alongside other statements, not all of them critical of capitalism, were broadcast through various media, including large electronic digital screens in prominent urban sites such as New York’s Times Square.

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Completely integrated with the spectacular mass media, these ambivalent messages works work like stealth bombs that question the reigning ideology of consumerism. Because Kruger’s artworks are so attuned to advertising, they have been susceptible to commercial interests; both of galleries and museums, who have commercialized her messages for retail product sales, and of advertising, which has re-appropriated and copied her ideas. For example, Kruger’s iconic I Shop Therefore I Am has been reproduced on key chains, t-shirts and shopping bags in art museum stores, and has also been appropriated by the likes of Barbie to ironically promote the idea of shopping to kids. As Maud Lavin writes, ‘How critical is a piece like one widely reproduced image – a hand holding a placard announcing “I shop therefore I am” – which appears not only in galleries, but frequently on postcards and shopping bags, with greater or lesser degrees of irony?’53 Kruger is also aware of these complexities, and she dismisses the idea that her works are either completely oppositional, or totally absorbed, by art and advertising. She claims, ‘To me, life is far more complex than either being pure or co-opted. I don’t think anyone exists outside the gravitational pull of power and exchange. I believe that we can be effective when we come to terms with concrete social realities.’ Here we see the increasing acceptance by artists that in the context of global capitalism, there is no possibility of critique from the ‘outside’. Artists are instead working from within economic and social systems to open up spaces for critique.

Contemporary Art: Twenty-first Century Art, the Market and Society At the turn of the twenty-first century, and up to the present day, the relationship between art, money and society has been increasingly conditioned by new and advanced forms of capitalism which characterize our current moment. The ever-escalating commodification of art in the capitalist economy means that all objects are ‘enchanted’ through the process of commodity exchange. Publicity, sponsorship and celebrity are prominent features of the current art market. Concluding a process that began earlier in the twentieth century, artists themselves are bankable commodities and they talk, act and work under the assumption that they themselves are brands that can be bought and sold. Even a position that asserts the distinction between art and commerce, in 42

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this sense, can ultimately serve commercial interests, by asserting a special quality that exceeds the current condition of the market, thus making the product more desirable while at the same time disguising the connections between art and the commercial world. The virtual disappearance of the distinction between art and commerce is perhaps nowhere more visible that in Takashi Murakami’s celebration of the reified commodity. The sculpture Hiropon (1997) depicts a life-sized anime sex doll inspired by the Japanese erotic manga genre known as otaku. A teenage girl’s tiny body, balanced on a single pointed foot, appears to be on the brink of toppling over under the weight of two enormous breasts that burst out of a string bikini top. A plastic lassoo of breast milk spouts out and encircles her, playfully grasped by the girl like a skipping rope. Her unnatural body, naked except for the bikini top and devoid of pubic hair, is complemented by waves of bright blue hair in pigtails. This sexualised adolescent figure was shameless in its appeal to the otaku market, and Murakami admitted it was ‘really no different than making a sex doll (a Dutch wife) in the context of the anime figure’.54 Despite its outlandish design, Hiropon was not created as a critique of the objectification of the female body in otaku comic culture, and instead appeals directly to the market. This interest to conform to, rather than challenge, the otaku stereotype led Murakami to later remodel the character into Miss Ko2, a less overstated sexual fetish object depicting a voluptuous blonde waitress wearing a barely-there dress and high-heeled shoes. At the time of designing the figure, Murakami approached a leading otaku designer known as ‘Bome’, who observed that it was ‘an utterly artless pandering to stereotypical otaku fetishism’.55 Many comparisons have been made between Murakami’s commodity fetishim and Warhol’s ambivalent approach to consumerism.56 This link is not inferred; Murakami openly references Warhol in his works, for example his work My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) is a reference to Warhol’s film Lonesome Cowboys (1968), Murakami’s flower motif, which appears throughout numerous works, is a reference to Warhol’s series of lithographs titled Flowers (1964) and his signature character DOB references Warhol’s depictions of Mickey Mouse (1984). Murakami certainly demonstrates a perversity in his celebration of popular culture, however this seems to play to a cultural cynicism, which is also indicative of global capitalism and the tactics of mainstream advertising. In an article for The New Yorker, Jerry Saltz, used the Warhol-Murakami comparison to make a larger

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statement about art and commercialism in general, writing ‘Murakami is no longer playing the market; the market is playing him – and so many others’.57 The problems associated with this critical ambivalence become more apparent in the context of Murakami’s subsequent forays into overt commercial production. Partly in reaction to these problems of commercial appropriation, and partly in spite of the impasses of post-modern critique, a sense of political optimism has emerged since the late 1990s, gaining greater and greater traction and resulting in a groundswell of social practices in the twenty-first century that emphasise human agency and reinvigorate utopian social visions of past eras.58 An interest in the focus on relations between people, rather than exchanges of commodities and currency has been evident in the influence of Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics (2002).59 Building upon the ideals of the modernist avant-garde, Bourriaud advocates for artwork that reconfigures relational experience as aesthetic form; in the process facilitating community through a focus on experiences and human interaction. With an idealistic perspective that summons up the spirit of the 1960s Situationist movement he writes, ‘the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real’.60 Bourriard champions the work of artists who facilitate social connection through their work, such as Rirkrit Tirvanija, known for preparing and sharing meals to celebrate the concept of hospitality in galleries. The turn towards relational aesthetics is certainly more hopeful than the cynical embrace of commodity culture evident in Murakami’s practice. However Bourriaud’s approach does little to address the age-old dilemma of art’s critical autonomy from utilitarian social purposes. The creation of a harmonious experience between viewer and artwork erases the critical space needed to reflect on social relations and the artwork itself, which is the basis of Claire Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics. Bishop argues that when art enfranchises its audiences, this can come at the expense of democratic debate, arguing, ‘a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased’.61 In this sense relational aesthetics falls prey to some of the same problems faced by the institutionalization of community arts programmes. As Rachel Fensham once argued in relation to such programs, ‘As a political agenda, community can assist the potential for sharing and

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acknowledging differences between subjects but, on the other hand, it refuses to address the misunderstandings, conflicts and incomplete resolutions of social subjects which are the likely conditions of that difference.’62 This relates to Bishop’s argument that artworks should maintain a tension between engaging with culture and reflecting upon it. Importantly, Bourriaud’s idealistic position overlooks the ways in which the relations between people are also subject to late capitalism’s economic systems. This is most evident in the field of design, where human behaviour is researched extensively in order to manipulate and shape human experiences; both in the context of the public domain, for example in the design of cities, and in the context of privatized commercial spaces, for example anticipating shopper’s movements and behaviour in retail precincts, and more recently in the sphere of online commerce.63 Artists have responded to the increasingly bio-cultural tendency of commerce by engaging more overtly with design, as in the case of Lucy Orta who combines relational aesthetics with the creation of products. Her Refuge Wear series from the 1990s, for example, sought to address homelessness through clothing design that could be converted into tent-like temporary shelters. A more direct link to relational aesthetics was evident in the way the individual garments could be connected together to encourage social networks, in the form of Collective Dwelling (1998/1999). Orta employs design in an attempt to liberate consumers from the more deterministic and selfish aspects of consumer culture, redirecting the design process to consider fundamental human needs such as housing and social connection. This kind of relational design nevertheless conforms to systems of industrial production, and has the potential to inadvertently reinforce the values of consumer capitalism that it aims to resist. As Ben Davis argues, ‘What appears at one juncture to be radically opposed to the values of art under capitalism often later appears to have represented a development intrinsic to its future development.’64 At least such projects acknowledge the political and conceptual foundations of design. Andrea Zittel’s work is relevant in this regard because it does not reside simply within a gallery, offering a hopeful solution to the problems of global consumerism, but instead operates as a commercial design studio, albeit a slightly dysfunctional one. Zittel’s repeated attempts to find freedom and autonomy through commercial design continuously fail, which reveal the restraints and limitations imposed

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by design.65 Zittel’s products lead consumers to consider the personal, subjective and psychological mechanisms of capitalist production, creating a critical space in the field of design that revives the potential of art as critique. Design is used to implicate consumers as both producers of culture and participants in cultural production. Contemporary art’s seemingly heedless collapse into a commodity production, without any kind of resistance or irritant as a counterpoint to the existing conditions under which all art must operate, has its parallel in certain kinds of critical writing. Critics and historians like Dave Hickey have launched an all-out attack on the critical theory tradition that has accompanied the reception of modern art, accusing academics who insist on the power of negation once asserted by the avant-garde of weighting the experience of contemporary art with an unnecessary difficulty and also with a depressing narrative of opposition to what is. As an alternative, Hickey proposes an aesthetic and a reception that is attuned to the democratic character of the attractive and the beautiful, of a taste which does not automatically see involvement with the commodity market as a form of compromise. Although there is some truth to Hickey’s point of view, and in many respects his emphasis on positivity has its salutary aspects, his enthusiastic embrace of the market and what it desires, as Julian Stallabrass has argued, boils down to a notion that ‘“democracy” is embodied in market mechanisms’, a claim which does not hold water when one considers the considerable barriers to entry into – and the manipulated character of – the art market.66 Indeed, the contemporary art market is characterized by an unusual level of manipulation by collectors, dealers and artists, including price fixing, artificial limitations on supply, severe restrictions on information about the market, as well as historical events including large amounts of money laundering through art which took place in Japan in the 1980s which heavily distorts the prices paid.67 In the words of New York art critic Carlo McCormick, ‘The influence of collectors is probably at an all-time high [. . .] Art is highly professionalised and market-determined at every level.’68 In 2007, a skull encrusted with diamonds created by Damien Hirst and titled For the Love of God was put on the market by the artist for a price of 100 million USD. This artist, whose reputation and fame seems to know no bounds, is an exemplary case for a study of the contemporary conditions of art and its relation to money and society. Hirst’s face appears in magazines and popular media as a kind

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of constant, generating fascination and sensation in a way that the publicists who wrote copy about and took photographs of Jackson Pollock in the 1950s could only dream about. Hirst’s consolidation as the absolute epitome of what high art represents in the twenty-first century, demonstrated by his inclusion in important private and public art exhibitions and collections, his omnipresence in the media, not to mention his unprecedented move of selling his work directly through the secondary auction market rather than to collectors or through a dealer, means that the very significance of his work, regardless almost of its medium, theme, scale or content, is purely financial. Hirst’s understanding of this situation is evidenced by For the Love of God (2007), a work which has significance solely on the basis of its price tag, as the meanings that might be associated with it pale into insignificance – and are in any case extremely shallow, even kitsch, in and of themselves – in comparison to the price for which it is offered. It makes no sense really to see this as a comment on the situation of contemporary art as it is merely a reflection of what actually exists, proposes no alternative and offers no critique. A different approach to the contemporary problem presented by Damien Hirst can be observed in what has come to be termed ‘social practice’, building on the idea of relational aesthetics presented by Bourriaud in the 1990s. This recent trend foregrounds artistic practices that directly engage with the social – the community sector and the ‘non-art’ world – in an attempt to overcome the problematic of a commercialized, elitist art system. These practices have come under scrutiny, for their potential to create greater traction between art and society, for their alliance with neo-liberal agendas that encourage a ‘big society’ at the expense of government support for the social sector, and also for providing something of a mask over deep and complex social problems by presenting short-term, temporary and tokenistic solutions. As Ben Davis observes: it is vulnerable to all the weaknesses of non-profit focused activism: Having to lower one’s rhetoric to please donors, mopping up the symptoms of social problems instead of going after the disease itself, and, ultimately, reducing the vital work of political organizing to a symbolic gesture – the very pitfall of political art that political artists have always tried to escape.69

In this context there is an imperative to consider the social value that comes as an effect of artistic practice, in and of itself, rather 47

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than looking at social value as the driver of artistic production. This means considering the social value of art that is anti-social, a-social or considered ‘bad’, rather than trying to ‘do good’. This is the focus of Chapter 3. What has become evident in this survey of artistic and critical responses to the relationship between art, money and society, is that artists, art movements and critics have adopted two opposed strategies or understandings of how art might relate to a society increasingly dominated by economic and commercial factors. On the one hand, artists and thinkers such as William Morris, the Minimalists and Hans Haacke measured their success in the degree to which they could question and resist art’s subsumption within a commodity model of artistic production and reception, seeking avenues for using art as a means to totally resist and critique the economic imperatives of contemporary society. Other artists and thinkers have argued for seeing art in favourable terms as a mere component of a broader culture industry, erasing almost to the point of invisibility the distinction between the mass produced consumer good and the art work, visible in the work of artists such as Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, in artistic groups like the Italian Futurists, and in the thinking of critics like Dave Hickey. However, for the most part the position of artists and thinkers in relation to the nexus between art, money and society has been to see the relation as complex and interdependent.70 A degree of more or less open complicity with the economic bases of artistic production and reception has often, and necessarily, gone hand in hand with critique, both of art’s status as a commodity but also of its relationship to the status quo of existing society with its injustices and inequalities, of which art itself as an institution and a consumable good are an essential part. It is in this sense that art since modernity has always been, and continues to be, a form of social enterprise, an economic activity that problematizes and challenges the economic systems in which it operates.

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3 ‘Bad’ Art and its Social Benefits Part I – ‘Good’ Art Social practice in the arts has emerged as an increasingly dominant force in contemporary art over the last decade, with a particular escalation evident following the global financial crisis of 2008.1 While building on precedents such as the Situationist International of the 1960s and the institutional critique of artists such as Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser, there has been a stronger focus on communitybuilding, promoting social cohesion and a benevolent approach to artmaking evident in the practices that have emerged since the late 1990s, particularly linked to the influence of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics which was first published in 1998.2 There are numerous drivers for these developments, including; artists reacting against the commercialism of the contemporary art market with an interest in reviving historical avant-garde practices that aim for art to create real world impact; government funding and public policy agendas, particularly the idea of ‘the big society’, which places greater emphasis on individuals and communities to address social issues with less support from government; and the corporate social responsibility objectives of private sponsors, with a greater interest in aligning brand image with social and community benefit following the global financial crisis. The relationship between art and money is clearly an important factor in each of these developments; however the discourse around social practice tends to focus on the political and social efficacy of 49

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art, on the one hand, or the potential loss of aesthetic and critical value, on the other.3 What is evident from this brief overview of the drivers behind the growth in social practice, however, is that money is an important piece of the puzzle, and social practices in the arts can’t be looked at in isolation from the economic systems that provide funding for them. This chapter reorients the discussion about social practice in contemporary art to consider the economic and political drivers of this trend. The interest in issues of social equity outside of the art system raises questions about the inequities of the art world itself, equally worthy of artistic attention; for example, the precarious employment and poverty of artists, gender inequalities in the exhibition of artworks internationally, and the environmental impact of artistic ˇ zek’s critique of practices. The first part of this chapter takes Slavoj Ziˇ charity as a starting point to critically examine two social art projects with a community development agenda, No Longer Empty (USA) and Creative Spaces (Australia), which aim to regenerate abandoned spaces and create benefits for artists, communities and the private sector alike. While No Longer Empty maintains an external community development agenda, both of these projects also engage with and highlight some of the social justice issues produced within the art world. The second part of this chapter takes a historical turn and considers modern and contemporary art in terms of qualities of ‘badness’, as opposed to social benevolence, to contextualize the impact of art as a critical force in society. As Eleanor Heartney argues in Defending Complexity, dealing with political issues and ideas in the art world is unpopular because it also implicates all of its agents; artists, art historians, curators, and critics.4 Social practice seems to offer an alternative; going outside the art system provides a respite from the politics of the art world itself. However art is dependent on the economic systems of society – from the private sector, government and philanthropy – and this dependence inevitably leads to compromise, complicity, and the incorporation of artists, art curators and art historians alike. Commercial complicity is evident even when artists are practicing in communities, working outside of the mainstream system, and claiming a position of critique. As Ben Davis argues in his critique of social practice, ‘the fixation on escaping the commercial art world itself shows a narrowed understanding of art’s role in a capitalist society’.5 He continues by describing the way big companies align themselves with radical and social practices to ‘put on

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‘Brand positioning and alignment’, ‘social responsibility’ and ‘employee engagement’ emerged as the key areas where arts partnerships align with the corporate priorities of companies that sponsor the arts (‘arts supporters’).7

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a good face’.6 This argument is supported by research that addresses corporate sponsorship of the arts from a business perspective. A report commissioned by the Australian Art Business Foundation in 2011, for example, observes:

The art world tends to sidestep this complicity with money in a number of ways, both in its claims to social engagement, and in its claims to aesthetic autonomy. Julian Stallabrass is impassioned about the pretence that contemporary art is not engaged with the social and economic sphere, arguing ‘The more art is useful (for investment, tax scams, money-laundering and entry to the elite) the more it parades its principled uselessness.’8 In this sense, we must be careful in how we go about critiquing social practices – asserting the socially autonomous, aesthetic elements of art (the default position when criticizing social practice) enables art to continue to grow in an economic sense while appearing to maintain a distance from its social entanglement. Regardless of whether art is aesthetic, formal and autonomous, or socially engaged, community oriented and ephemeral, it is dependent on financial support for its creation and dissemination. Those who give money to artists for the production of artwork rarely give it freely, without some kind of social, political or cultural criteria that align with either corporate values, or public policy. This raises valid concerns about the potential instrumentalisation of art for the purposes of social policy, at the expense of real social welfare delivery.9 This is connected with the rise of ‘big society’ as an alternative to government service provision. However by focusing these concerns onto social practice, we divert attention from the same problems occurring in every aspect of contemporary art. Art produced for exhibitions is often either produced with the interests of the private market in mind; or in the interests of funders, both government and corporate. We don’t much like to talk about money in the arts, aside from reporting on record auction prices or changes in major government funding policies.10 However the mundane reality of the art world involves sourcing money from various sources including grants, sponsorship, artwork sales, shop retail and audience fees to support the creation, 51

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presentation and dissemination of art. And in most cases, artists and exhibitions are supported through a mixture of both public and private funding.11 As discussed in Chapter 1, art sponsorship is expected to result in measurable economic returns for investors, whether in the form of marketing value, or increased business. Government expects the same return from arts funding, either in terms of supporting public policy outcomes, or showing a financial benefit to the community in terms of tourism and other quantifiable economic returns. The growth in socially minded artistic activity points to this economic complicity, but does not necessarily escape it.

The Social Turn A broad popular rejection of the excessive profiteering that signalled the global economic crisis of 2008 has led to an increase in business and community projects that prioritize community interests over commercial returns.12 The very fact of a ‘social practice’ in the arts reflects this shift, and (indirectly) implicates the mainstream art world in activity that might be considered anti-social, a-social, or incompatible with the social. In part the social practice trend is a rejection of the commercial nature of much contemporary art, evidenced in the incredible growth of private auction sales over the last decade.13 It also connects with a refusal of the elitism of the art world, as evident for example in the exhibition Air Kissing at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2008, which attacked the pretentiousness and commercial complicity of contemporary art, even when it appears to be staging critique.14 Despite post-modernism’s drive to democratise art, this sense of elitism can be seen to persist in both the economic values of art, along with the discourses that surround contemporary artistic practice. This points to a long-standing historical tension between art as a democratic, socially engaged practice (with the ensuing problems of potential instrumentalisation for political agendas), and the idea of art as an autonomous, culturally significant and specialist field (with the ensuing problems of elitism, commercialism, and disconnection from social reality). Avant-garde movements including Dada, Constructivism, Fluxus and the Situationists all reacted to this very problem in different ways throughout the twentieth century.15 We also see this tension in the vexed relationship between sociology and art, pointing to the fact that art both mediates, and also expresses 52

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a conflict, between individual freedom and social systems.16 It can promote communication and social cohesion, but it also challenges and puts into question the supposed cohesion of the social. This is an important aspect of art that has led recently to theorists including Claire Bishop and Boris Groys reclaiming the idea of art’s aesthetic autonomy, and even its elitism, as a way of protecting the critical, and socially antagonistic, potential of art.17 While there is merit in this defence of the aesthetic and critical aspects of art, it has the potential to divert attention from the ways that art, even in its most aesthetic and critical forms, is nevertheless entangled within social and economic systems. The art system itself is an expression of social inequality. Research internationally shows that the art world is manifest with precarious employment, artists living in poverty and limited opportunities at the emerging and mid-career stages for artists, while the majority of wealth is condensed in the sale of prominent artworks. A survey of the income of US artists from 1939 to 1999, drawing upon census data, showed a consistent pattern, year on year, of precarious employment and low incomes for artists, with a significant disparity in earnings between artists and other workers. The researchers observed: Artists work fewer hours, suffer higher unemployment and earn less [. . .] Artists earn less across all years even when only members working fulltime year round of each group are compared. The earnings of artists display greater variability than those of other professional and technical workers.18

One of the issues involved in current data gathered in the US about artists’ wages is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics only measures the wages of full-time, year-round artists. This gives the false impression of higher earnings. As the longitudinal study by Alper and Wassal demonstrates, the reality of working conditions for artists is that many are employed on an ad-hoc, part-time, casual or contract basis, and therefore the true disparities of income for artists can only be accounted for when all employment types are taken into consideration.19 Data in the UK offers greater insight into these realities. In 2011, Bournemouth University and the University of Cambridge collaborated on a survey of earnings for 5,800 arts workers including visual artists, designers, photographers and illustrators.20 The research team found that of the various creative professions, visual artists experienced 53

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the lowest incomes, with a median wage of only £10,000, an amount less than half of the average income in the UK. They also noted that visual artists in particular faced ‘precarious careers’.21 Moreover, the income gap between the top and bottom earners was much greater than the average income gap for other professions. The researchers reported, ‘The top 7% of visual creators earn about 40% of total income [. . .] while the remaining 93% earn 60% of the total income.’22 The situation was particularly bad for women artists, who were reported to earn only 46 per cent of the income of their male colleagues. Similar findings were observed in a Swedish report on artists’ wages in 2007, commissioned by the national Arts Grant Committee and drawing upon data from Statistics Sweden.23 The report had a particular focus on gender inequalities in the incomes of artists. It was observed that the net incomes of artists were low compared to the rest of the population, that visual artists faced ‘the least amount of economic security’, and in particular, there was high prevalence of artists receiving unemployment allowances.24 They also observed that women artists earned less than their male colleagues. Of particular concern to the researchers was a push towards self-employment for women artists, which they found led to a higher gender income gap, despite prevailing views that suggested otherwise.25 In Australia, an economic study of professional artists from 2010 found that 47 per cent of those surveyed had applied for unemployment benefits in the time-period studied. The average wage for artists, including income from all sources (not just their creative work), was 35 per cent lower than the average wage. According to the researchers, ‘half of all artists are unable to meet their minimum income needs from all the work they do, both within and outside of the arts’.26 The researchers also found inequalities in gender participation, with women only earning 53 per cent of a male artist’s income, when looking at income generated directly from creative work. Taking into consideration the total artist’s income, including art and nonart sources of income, there was a gender pay gap of 28 per cent, significantly higher than the nation’s average of 17.5 per cent. We see from this data a consistently strong pattern of economic inequity for women artists. Anonymous blog CoUNTess was established in 2008 to document and draw attention to gender inequalities faced by artists, particularly the ratio of women and men represented in major galleries and institutions.27 CoUNTess surveyed the participation of

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artists in the Venice Biennale in 2013, for example, where women were outnumbered three-to-one in the solo pavilions. In the Biennale’s curated show The Encyclopaedic Palace, male artists represented more than two-thirds of the works exhibited. This is just a snapshot of some of the art system’s social inequities; it doesn’t take into account the issues of the production and sale of indigenous art around the world, nor does it even begin to look at the issues involved in the production of art in terms of outsourced labour, supply chains, funding sources and environmental impacts. As Julian Stallabrass writes, ‘The mobile, event-driven global art world has become ever more environmentally damaging. In the culture of digital flows, social distinction is manufactured by couriering heavy lumps of matter all over the world.’28 Many of these issues are under-researched, and will remain under the radar of the art world’s attention because the discourse has favored a focus on external, rather than internal, social issues. ˇ zek’s important critique of the role This problem points to Slavoj Ziˇ of charity in capitalist society discussed in Chapter 1. In a lecture in ˇ zek raised these issues by re-visiting Oscar Wilde’s thoughts 2009, Ziˇ on socialism, particularly the idea that by trying to help people in need, charity actually creates greater divisions between those that are privileged and can help, and those that are disadvantaged and need ˇ zek firstly observes the good intentions from which charity help. Ziˇ emanates. He describes, ‘People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this.’29 He then goes on to argue that these well-intentioned acts of charity, such as feeding the poor, providing temporary shelter, and giving money to address the symptoms of poverty, only validate and reinforce the very fact of poverty in the first place. This is a problem in the context of social welfare; however, it is even more problematic in the context of benevolence enacted by large corporations, whose complicity in creating disadvantage is offset by gestures of community goodwill. In the context of art, by going outside the art system to help people in the community, for example, artists reinforce the division between art world (good) and social problems (bad), and in the process disguise the systemic problems that have led to this situation in the first place. ˇ zek argues, ‘The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such Ziˇ a basis that poverty will be impossible and the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.’30 In other words, artists

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enacting social benevolence outside the gallery are hiding, and indeed reinforcing, the social problems embedded within the gallery system. This dynamic can be subtle. Two projects that are relevant in this context are the initiatives No Longer Empty and Creative Spaces, which aim to regenerate abandoned and derelict urban spaces, and in the process create benefits for artists, communities and property developers alike.

No Longer Empty and Creative Spaces No Longer Empty’s core mission is to widen the public engagement for contemporary art, to promote the work of socially conscious artists, and to demonstrate the capacity of art to revitalise communities. They do this by presenting site specific, public art exhibitions in the heart of disadvantaged urban communities, for example the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York, with the goal to positively impact on these communities by creating a welcoming and accessible cultural hub and stimulating development.31 The social practice focus of their work is front and centre. They are financially supported by A Blade of Grass, a philanthropic organization with an explicit focus on promoting social practice art, and fostering evaluative discourse about social practice art.32 An exhibition staged by No Longer Empty in 2012 called This Side of Paradise brought four curators and 34 artists into the Bronx to engage with local arts organisations and to stage a series of community-spirited events, workshops and interventions. The project was located in the Andrew Freedman Home, a dis-used historical mansion that once cared for the elderly, with a focus on those who had ‘lost their fortunes’.33 The home, in its original context, provided a luxurious lifestyle for those who once were rich, but subsequently found themselves destitute. For the exhibition, these ideas of simultaneous fortune and poverty, history and the social and economic context of the Bronx were prominent themes. The exhibition occurred over a three month period from April–June, while parts of the building were being re-developed into new luxury accommodation. In this way, it promoted the development of the building, as well as drawing attention to its past and engaging with local community members through events such as an Easter egg hunt, children’s activities, live music, parties, dance performances and public talks. The curatorial team collaborated with a dozen or so local organizations, bringing the art world’s attention to local arts spaces, for 56

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example the Bronx Arts Alliance, the Bronx Museum of Arts and the Bronx Documentary Centre. They were hugely successful in attracting large crowds from the Manhattan arts community, bringing affluent visitors to the neighbourhood with considerable consumer spending power, along with potential to harness support for affiliated arts centres and community development initiatives. There are ways in which the exhibition created a positive impact for both the artists involved and the Bronx community; however the project also raises questions in terms of the long-term impact of a temporary exhibition, and the economic underpinnings of the venture. Community development and economic capacity building is not something that occurs over a span of weeks or months, it takes longterm commitment to generate real change. Social policy theorist Martin Mowbray describes short-term initiatives in community development as, ‘cynically conceived, cut-rate, short-term, boosterist programmes located on the fringes of government’.34 Without providing a longterm and sustainable approach, there is a risk that such projects are not only tokenistic, but in providing a gesture of social justice they inadvertently mask the true extent and complexity of social problems. This Side of Paradise provided a momentary uplift in cultural, social, and economic activity in a very specific area in the Bronx. However, it did not draw attention to the ongoing social disadvantage in many underprivileged areas of New York’s boroughs. While it may seem unfair to expect an exhibition to extend its reach in this way, there remains a risk that such affirmative exhibitions make it seem to mainstream New Yorkers that by supporting this arts project, entrenched social problems had been addressed, when in fact they hadn’t. This is evident in the positive critical response the show received. In a review for The Huffington Post, Tina Orlandini described, ‘In this downtrodden economy in which the arts are often seen as superfluous and secondary, it is inspiring to see a young arts organisation thriving and actively changing the ways in which people engage with nomadic art making.’35 The No Longer Empty team emphasize the link between their artistic activity and real economic and social impact created. For example, they claim to re-generate the economic capacity of the sites and areas they engage with. A spokesperson for No Longer Empty says, ‘Filling these spaces after we leave is another part of our mission. Around 40% of the properties that we have worked with in the past have received a lease as a direct result of our exhibition.’36 They also describe their

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work as ‘cultural tourism’, indicating a particular approach whereby individuals from more privileged communities travel to, and patronize, communities considered to be more disadvantaged. This attitude towards community development is problematic in a number of ways; however, the focus for the current discussion is the assumption that the art world is associated with affluence, benevolence and good-will, while communities are associated with disadvantage, the receipt of ˇ zek charity, and a need to be helped. This is precisely the issue that Ziˇ raises in his critique of charity in capitalism – it maintains a system that privileges some, and disadvantages others, and enables those in a position of privilege to feel good about their complicity. It also overlooks the inequities of the art system itself, which as we have seen, is not immune to social inequity. An Australian counterpart, with a less explicitly social focus, is Creative Spaces, supported by the City of Melbourne. This project facilitates the use of vacant buildings and derelict sites for artists’ studios and creative projects. It has resulted in the redevelopment of a number of buildings and forms part of a mission to promote the arts in innercity areas, where they are at risk of being dispersed due to high rents and lower incomes of artists. The project focuses on creating social opportunities for artists and improving the arts ecosystem within an urban context, and also offers financial benefits to the private sector. For example, commercial developers can reap financial returns in the form of temporary rental income without investment in infrastructure and interior fittings (because artists will take whatever they can get), providing short-term leases while they wait for development to begin, and improved security due to occupancy.37 While Creative Spaces appears to be the result of public policy rather than artistic practice, it is important to note that many of the developments began at the initiative of artists. Institutional support followed after the projects had gained traction and the potential for economic and social benefit had been demonstrated.38 Initiatives such as No Longer Empty and Creative Spaces respond to the economic precariousness of the arts in a number of ways; they are non-profit, they bring the wealth and resources of the art audience and art world into areas experiencing economic disadvantage, and they stimulate artistic practice at a grass-roots level. These artistic practices talk to the cynicism of a generation that knows that global capitalism is not good for society, but continues to participate regardless. This issue

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In the neocynical attitude, world-historical learning processes of bitterness come to fruition. They have stamped the traces of the coldness of exchange, of world wars, and the self-denial of ideals in our consciousness, which have become sick with experience. Hey, we’re alive; hey, we’re selling ourselves; hey, we’re arming.39

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is at the heart of Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical text, Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), wherein he describes an enlightened false consciousness, characterized by cynicism, as the defining feature of the contemporary world. He writes:

The effect, Sloterdijk suggests, is not an enlightened participation in the systems of a new world, but instead the repetition of the very historical conditions that elicited the cynical attitude. He writes, ‘In this way cynicism guarantees the expanded reproduction of the past on the newest level of what is currently the worst.’40 The ironic humour and appropriations of Generation Y, in this sense, only reinforce the socially disadvantageous aspect of capitalist production. The turn to social practice, then, is problematic in the degree to which it either capitalizes upon, or resists, the opportunities presented by commercial partners in terms of funding, marketing, and development and how this relates to agendas of social gentrification and economic development. From a critical point of view, it could be argued that projects like No Longer Empty and Creative Spaces exploit the cheap rents produced by economic disadvantage, along with the perceived ‘otherness’ of marginalized urban regions, to produce shows that benefit art world participants more than the communities they engage with. While art certainly has the potential to creative social benefits, it is also embedded in messy and complex economic and social systems that also have the potential to cause harm.41 Any assumption that art can ameliorate social problems ‘outside’ of the art world needs to be counterbalanced with an assessment of how the art world might also be contributing to social problems. Without engaging in the complexity of this field, art can do little more than ‘greenwash’ social issues.42 A benevolent approach to art also denies the ways in which art already has social value, in and of itself, as a critical and provocative process. As discussed in Chapter 1, many art historians, theorists and sociologists see that art is important for the way it challenges society. From this perspective, art has a capacity to incite social change, and 59

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it does so without necessarily having that agenda. The second part of this chapter therefore considers the social impact of ‘bad’ art from the mid-twentieth century to today.

Part II – Bad Art Asger Jorn, the Guerrilla Girls, the Chapman Brothers, Pussy Riot, Barbara Kruger and Richard Bell are just a few artists who have aimed to have an impact on society without the motivation of promoting harmonious experiences in the gallery or doing ‘social work’ in the community. In fact all can be considered to be ‘bad’ artists in a number of ways, including their tendency to misbehave or upset social conventions, the aesthetic form of their artworks and the controversial reactions they elicit from audiences and critics. The term bad is defined by what it lacks, what it is not – the literal meaning is simply ‘not good’.43 The quality of badness therefore is highly subjective, determined in large part by social taste, or what we consider to be good, and how it differs from this normative value. However the adjective bad can also be described by certain characteristics; for example unpleasantness, or non-conformity. There are two particular elements that are relevant for this discussion of artists; firstly, the Oxford English Dictionary elaborates on the term bad by describing it as ‘unpleasant, offensive, disagreeable; troublesome, vexing, trying, difficult’. These are all qualities that can be attributed to avant-garde artistic practice. Secondly, in the case of a child’s behaviour, the word bad means ‘unruly, disobedient, naughty’, and when this is related to adults, bad takes on a humorous or funny connotation.44 The following discussion considers artistic practices that deliberately embrace these aspects of bad to provoke and potentially incite change in the way we perceive structural social issues. Badness in art is considered firstly in its aesthetic sense, as ugly or unpleasant visual form that challenges the presumptions of art as truth or art as beauty, and secondly in terms of bad behaviour, of artists being unruly or provocative in order to critically negotiate the social power relations of art production and reception. Artists of the Dada movement in the 1920s and 1930s were direct in attacking the institutions of art, eradicating the formal qualities of art by introducing chance and mechanical operations and celebrating the end of art itself.45 Here badness was a device used to protest against the social

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values of the time and their entanglement with war. Dada strategies were later re-invented by Fluxus and neo-Dada artists post World War II, with a similar link between art-as-protest and disaffection with prevailing social values.46 Despite the proclamations of the end of art celebrated by Dada artists in their manifestoes and early exhibitions, such ambitions were hardly realized, and many avant-garde gestures of negation were later appropriated into new institutions and hierarchies of modern art.47 This is an important criticism of both Dada and neoDada; that being against art doesn’t achieve anything except the end of art itself, which is (a) hardly imaginable, and (b) actually serves to affirm the status quo. As Andreas Huyssen argues, ‘Out of negation alone, neither a new art nor a new society can be developed.’48 Perhaps in response to some of these issues, a much more politically engaged and affirmative art movement emerged in the late 1950s in the form of the Situationist International (often referred to as the SI). The SI was a group of revolutionaries with very restricted membership. Founded in 1957, the movement reached its peak of influence in the general strike of May 1968 in France. With their ideas rooted in Marxism and Dada, the SI advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by capitalism, in particular the fulfillment of human desires.49 The ideas were underpinned by the influential book The Society of the Spectacle, in which Guy Debord argued that the entertainment ‘spectacle’ of consumer culture was in fact a fake reality, masking the capitalist degradation of human life.50 To overthrow this system, the SI supported the May ’68 revolts, and called for direct action in political life. The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, especially the kind of abstract formalism espoused by modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg at the time. Debord suggested that such art was used to eliminate the potential of subversive artists and intellectuals, arguing: At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (which thus makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol).51

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pure commodity. For the SI, this kind of art was sterile, banal and subservient to capitalist society. Instead, they were inspired by practices that brought art and the social conditions of life together. In this sense, they celebrated art as a social practice, but a politically motivated, misbehaving and in this sense bad social practice. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of activities, including the Derive, which involved walking through the city streets being aware of the psychological effects of the urban landscape, and the detournement or assemblages of existing art materials, thus disavowing authorship and revealing the art object to be part of its external social context. They also played with words, language and ideas to shift the autonomy of art as perceived in a gallery, and to re-situate art as an experience out in the world. Debord proclaimed, ‘Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention; and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle to disrupt and destroy it.’52 Here we see that art is considered as a social practice, however this social engagement is considered through its destructive and rebellious potential. For Debord, art was considered a way of life that could change the conditions of social life, rather than an aesthetic or benevolent social experience. The most prominent visual artist from the SI movement was Danish painter Asger Jorn, who was involved in the movement from its formation in 1957 until 1961, when he left due to artistic differences with other members of the group. Jorn’s works can be considered bad both in aesthetic terms and in the vandalistic actions he utilized to challenge the values of modern art and consumer society. Like many of the Situationists, Jorn was interested in the way that language codes, structures and influences behaviour, and this impacted his artistic practice. As part of his involvement with the SI, Jorn also published a series of newsletters called Creation Ouvert celebrating the qualities of artistic freedom along with social critique. In a collaborative book with Guy Debord in 1957 called Fin de Copenhague (Figure 3), Jorn and Debord collaged together detritus from popular media and then destroyed it with lurid splashes of brightly coloured ink. They started by gathering newspaper and magazine clippings, which had been stolen from newsstands in Copenhagen. The collages were transferred onto lithograph plates and printed in black and white. Jorn then stood atop a ladder and splashed ink onto etching plates below. The paintsplash etchings were then printed in bright colours over the top of the

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Figure 3. Asger Jorn, Fin de Copenhague, (detail), artists’ book, 1957.

black and white collaged pages, destroying the legibility and coherence of the text. Like their Dadaist predecessors, they relied on chance for the final result. Combining the randomness of paint splattered from a ladder onto the material below with the refined repetition of printing, Jorn and Debord confounded the distinctions between high and low, original and copy, authentic gesture and found material. In this way, visual form was used to subvert or undermine the written word and vice versa. In many of Jorn’s interventions with text and images, graffiti marks were scrawled over original content to make it illegible, unreadable, and written text was appropriated to undermine the supposed authenticity of visual expression. For a number of years prior to joining the SI, Jorn had been exploring painting and gesture in this kind of haphazard, graffitiesque manner, moving from the heroic expressionism implied by the European Informel and American Abstract Expressionism to a more grotesque and artificial mode of mark-making.53 In particular, he rejected the commodification of art in the name of abstraction. This critique was indicated, for example, in the work A Soul for Sale (1958–9). The brightly coloured, loose-form abstract painting exuded a freely gestural, all-over effect; in this way seeming to capture the 63

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spirit of abstract expressionist painting. However the title alluded to the way that such expression had become the ultimate commodity. The artist’s soul was translated into painterly form and consumed firstly by the spectator, and secondly by the buyer of the work. The words in the title ‘A Soul for Sale’ worked to undermine this passive act of consumption, in a similar way to Fin de Copenhague’s combination of accidental gesture with found text, rendering both unreadable. Jorn’s work during his association with the SI thus targeted the false-heroism of high modernist painting, bringing art back into the realm of social relations, and in this way reviving the spirit of Dada. He also maintained an element of figuration in his works that ran against the grain of pure abstraction. This was most evident in his exhibition Detourned Painting in 1959, which featured a series of paintings celebrating the SI tactic of detournement. These paintings were the major body of works created in line with the objectives and tactics of the SI movement. Jorn first referred to the works as kitsch paintings, before adopting the SI term ‘detourned’; however, they are also known as modifications and defigurations. In the series of works, Jorn first appropriated already-existing paintings, and then painted over them in grotesque, haphazard and disorderly form, while still preserving elements of the original. He bought paintings by mostly unknown or obscure artists from flea markets, thereby considered to have no real value. He chose paintings considered to be in bad taste, thereby negating the idea of high art both in the initial appropriation, and in the subsequent modification. As part of the exhibition he issued the following declaration: In this exhibition I erect a monument in honor of bad painting. Personally, I like it better than good painting. But above all, this monument is indispensable, both for me and for everyone else. It is painting sacrificed. This sort of offering can be done gently the way doctors do it when they kill their patients with new medicines that they want to try out. It can also be done in barbaric fashion, in public and with pomp. This is what I like. I solemnly tip my hat and let the blood of my victims flow while intoning Baudelaire’s hymn to beauty.54

His sacrifice occurred in the act of modification, which was done in half graffiti, half abstract expressionist gestural style, while nevertheless retaining elements of the original. It was both regressive, by returning 64

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to historical works, and an affirmation of agency by re-working them to relate to the present context. Indeed, he claimed, ‘It is impossible to establish a future without a past.’55 Detourned Painting contained direct political statements along with attacks on well-known high art. The work Big Fuck to the Cardinal of America (1962) featured an original painting of what appeared to be a Catholic priest, indicated by a white robe and a gold gothic cross medallion around his neck, holding what appears to be a bible in his hand. Jorn modified the painting by adding a bright yellow crown with crudely formed black cross at its peak, masking the face with flat white and red paint to create a beard, and adding long brownish curls of hair to the back of his head, which strangely feminized the male figure. Aside from rendering the serious pose kind of absurd, and making the original face indecipherable, he added in a figurative form to the right of the figure’s head; a mass of blue brushstrokes in different hues, interposed with scratches of orange, red and white paint that seem to demarcate the shapes of a mouth and eyes in profile. A bird-like creature thus emerges from the dark ground of the painting, appearing to attack the central figure from the side. Along the bottom of the canvas a light blue claw-like shape appears to reaching up to clutch away the bible from his hand. Jorn uses paint to mock the religiosity and seriousness of the original portrait, with a child-like fairytale taking place in bright brushwork across the sombre painterly surface. Like A Soul for Sale, an important part of the work’s meaning is gleaned from the words of the title, a protest that matches the messy and irreverent brushwork. The phrase Big Fuck to the Cardinal of America expresses contempt and disgust both for the Catholic Church and for American society in an era of increasing international wealth and dominance. In another of the Detourned Paintings, Jorn takes aim at high art, specifically a portrait of a lady painted by French Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin. The title is explicit in directing this attack, and is simply called Poussin, 1962 (Figure 4). The original portrait has formal similarities to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A woman with long dark hair looks at the viewer with a slightly downturned face and upward looking eyes. In his detournement, Jorn has left the face and gaze almost entirely intact, painting over the forehead and chin with white triangular teethlike shapes, and adding a couple of red brushstrokes to either side of her cheeks. In her hair appear two eye-like blobs of white and green paint, and from a distance the woman appears to be in the process of

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Figure 4. Asger Jorn, Poussin, oil on canvas, 1962.

being devoured by a wolf-like ghostly form. Her centrally placed hand at the bottom of the canvas erupts with vertical stripes of red paint, which could indicate blood or perhaps a dagger. The black background of the painting has been over-painted with lurid blue, tinged with lighter tones of blue and dashes of white, again lending a vibrant, dream-like, child’s fairytale element to an otherwise subdued tonal palette. The work is clearly influenced by a tradition of Mona Lisa defacements, including Kazimir Malevich’s Composition with Mona Lisa (1914) featuring a ripped up reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a 66

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big red cross over her face and a smaller red cross over her chest, and Marcel Duchamp’s later version L.H.O.O.Q (1919), where the reproduced original was scribbled over with a moustache and goatee. It is not clear whether Jorn’s Poussin reiterates these historical gestures of negation as a deadpan statement of the failure of the early modernist avant-garde and subsequent futility of such critique, or as a means to reignite their spirit of irreverence, protest against convention and belief in the power of art as an agent of radical social change. Claire Gilman describes Jorn’s detournement paintings in both terms, writing ‘Jorn’s paintings suggest that nothing is given once and for all and that therefore, even if artistic opposition is uncertain or impossible under present circumstances, there is always the future.’56 The use of old or historically-located paintings as source material can be seen as a criticism of modern art’s determination to pursue innovation and the forever ‘new’, entangled with the ideology of progress in modernity. It was also a reminder of the critical impasses of modern art in an increasingly commoditized world, while affirming that art could still engage with the social and political. This affirmation of artistic agency, in spite of the challenges of critique, is expressed in the title of Jorn’s painting The Avant-garde doesn’t give up, another in the series of detournements from the 1959 exhibition. Here Jorn appropriates a portrait of a child by an unknown painter. In the original work, a surprisingly large, adult-like face sits upon a small body, dressed in a frilly, layered white dress with a ribbon held firmly across the waist. The woman-girl holds a skipping rope in her hand and stares intently at the viewer. Jorn has Duchamp’ed the painting, adding the same moustache and goatee that we see in Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. In addition, he has graffitied the background with the words ‘The avant-garde doesn’t give up’ in a scrawly white text, along with a roughly painted human stickfigure, a bird, and his own name tagged in the bottom right corner. The work celebrates regression – regression to historical paintings, regression to bad taste or kitsch painting, regression to the strategies of the avant-garde, and regression to childish gesture and text. It seems that for Jorn, regression was a step towards a future – neither pure anachronism nor negation, Jorn’s return to the past was a statement of the historically embedded nature of political action in the present and an expression of the entanglement of art within past and present social conditions. Bad painting, both in gesture and action, was the means for Jorn to express both dissent and affirmation of art’s potential.

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The badness of Jorn’s painterly aesthetic had been developing over several decades prior to joining the SI. A kind of abject ugliness was manifest in the brushwork of his earlier paintings. Karen Kurczynski describes his abstract painting Untitled (1956) in visceral terms, referring to ‘the outward seepage of dirt-colored oil paint’, and describing an abstract shape in the work as a ‘monster’ that is ‘deliberately ugly and formless’.57 Helle Brons, in describing the problematic representation of gender in Jorn’s paintings, describes the work Poussin in terms of the portrayal of ‘horrifying, sexualized female beasts’ while brown paint in the work Allmen (1961) is described as resembling ‘fecal brown stains’.58 This is certainly bad painting. Susanne Neuburger considers Jorn’s aesthetic to sit within a tradition and style of bad painting in the twentieth century, related to anti-classical and anti-modernist tendencies in twentieth-century art. She writes, ‘It is primarily the fact that they are not only marked by breaking with patterns, but also inhere a high degree of reflexivity, that makes Bad Painting a figure of thought within the pictorial arts.’59 She refers to painters including Picabia and Magritte as setting the foundation for this pursuit of bad painting, which is then later picked up by feminist artists and neo-Expressionists in the 1980s onwards. Nueburger suggests that such artists pursue this bad aesthetic quite deliberately, and quotes Magritte as proudly stating, ‘I’ll certainly find some way to slip in a big fat incongruity from time to time.’60

Bad Painting In 1978 Marcia Tucker curated a show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art called Bad Painting that celebrated this history of unpopular, incongruous painting styles. She focused on artists whose works and painterly styles were under-represented in major galleries and museums at the time. In particular, painting that was seen to be expressive, subjective and figurative was out of vogue. Joan Brown’s painting Woman Wearing Mask, for example, featured a life-like and life-sized female figure standing alone in an empty room, hands on hips, dressed in underwear and high heel shoes adorned with bows. Her head was replaced with the face of a cat, disproportionately large and sketched two-dimensionally in the style of a mask. The childlike portrayal of the cat’s face, slightly blank and absurd, rendered the whole image somewhat odd and discordant, even silly. In the 68

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catalogue text for the exhibition Bad Painting, Marcia Tucker wrote, ‘the freedom with which these artists mix classical and popular arthistorical sources, kitsch and traditional images, archetypal and personal fantasies, constitutes a rejection of the concept of progress per se’.61 It is worthwhile noting that Tucker included a number of female artists in this show, a counter-narrative to the tendency for such painting to be associated with heroic and highly independent male painters, going against the grain of artistic style, for example in the case of Magritte as historicized by Neuberger. A more defiantly feminist take on bad art was later taken up by Tucker in the show Bad Girls in 1994, also held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. At the time of the 1978 Bad Painting show, the curatorial mix of relatively non-established figurative artists was a challenge to the dominance of minimalism, with its emphasis on formal qualities and the eradication of subjective, personal gesture. The show was not very well received in critical terms – the provocation of the title Bad Painting implying that the art world was dominated by taste-makers and hierarchies of value, a critique that ran counter to the intentions of early post-modernism, which seemed to promote a democratic proliferation of differences in art and culture. Critic Lawrence Alloway was outraged at this suggestion, writing in his review of the show, ‘The fact that she represents the artists as breaking away from abstract art confers a dominance on abstract art that it does not have. Would Tucker put on a show of abstract art painting and call it “Empty Art” as has been argued by partisans of realism?’62 Clearly hitting a nerve, the show highlighted the works of obscure painters whose style was under-represented in the context of mainstream art, particularly in its idiosyncratic, personal and iconographical tone. While the show was not popular in 1978, it anticipated the aesthetics of 1980s post-modernism, which proliferated with these kinds of eclectic, disparate, non-aesthetic and anti-formalist tendencies. Artists such as Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel were able to use kitsch and personal subjectivity to carve out a new niche. These later iterations of bad art were arguably conforming to social taste, rather than challenging it, as evident in their easy commodification, popularity in the art market and lack of obvious criticality.63 The exhibition Bad Painting, however, was neither popular nor benign. A link can be drawn between the unpopularity and discomfort elicited by Bad Painting and its avant-garde predecessors, both in shocking contemporary audiences, and in showing a total disregard of

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art world convention. However it would be reductive to situate Bad Painting in a canonical history of art linked to a progressive modernist narrative. Partly the subject of humour and derision, the genre of bad painting is often maligned for representing artistic weakness, poor taste or a period of stylistic regression in an individual artist’s career. Despite the efforts of curators such as Tucker, a prevailing sense of condescension towards such work persists. Sometimes this condescension manifests as mock-celebration, evident in the examples of the Museum of Bad Art in the USA, and the Museum of Particularly Bad Art in Australia. The artwork featured in both Museums is considered to be silly, funny, populist and kitsch, of little monetary or real artistic value and celebrated for its everyday, low-culture implications. It is worth noting that the artists selected by Tucker for Bad Painting suffered from the same derisory public perception, with few of them going on to receive either commercial or critical acclaim beyond the exhibition at the New Museum.64 In a sense the humour and derision that underpins much of the interest in bad art undermines its real potential, politically and socially, to challenge hierarchies of cultural value – the ironic embrace of badness turns it into entertainment, a kind of sideshow of the good art world, which inadvertently reinforces the normative value of good or high quality art. In his book Bad Art, Quentin Bell suggests that bad painting stems from insincerity, from a yearning to conform to social taste, and failing.65 It is this failure that becomes funny in the context of places like the Museum of Bad Art. Bell’s assessment of the bad and good of painting sets up a self-reinforcing dichotomy, where both categories depend on each other for meaning. If badness stems from insincerity, from trying to conform to social norms of beauty; then goodness stems from authenticity, from innovation, linked to the idea of the avant-garde and a progressive modernist narrative. For example, the good artists are those who try new things and disregard convention, evident in Bell’s argument that ‘Art history never goes backwards.’66 In some ways, Jorn and Tucker’s Bad Painting could be considered good in Bell’s terms for their disregard of social fashion. However they don’t conform to his progressive narrative of art – in fact, they represent a regressive turn to outmoded, historical painterly styles, and in the case of Jorn a celebration of old kitsch painting. To return to the definition of bad, it is the unruly behaviour of a child, which in an adult has a humorous element. The social and political aspect

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of Jorn’s art lies both in its bad aesthetic form, and also in the bad actions involved; for example taking valueless art objects, painting over parts of them, and re-presenting them in a contemporary context as a form of protest. Badness was a direct means of engaging with the commercial and cultural institutions of art, and was intentional rather than accidental. Embracing insincerity, ugliness of form, anachronism and pop culture or kitsch, was a way of challenging the social power structures that determined what was considered to be ‘good’ in the historical context of 1950s modernism. Incorporating the work of other people in Detourned Painting was a means to create a dialogue between the artwork and its social context, showing art as a product of social relations, connected to history and implicated in contemporary social life. In particular, it represented a shift away from the idea of art as a pure expression of the individual creator. Social practice for Jorn was not a site of harmony and community, as it has been considered in the discourses of relational aesthetics and social practice since the late 1990s. Instead, Jorn saw social practice as conflicted and political. Badness in aesthetic form was matched with a badness of intention, undermining the supposed ‘truth’ of artistic expression (the artifice of art), the originality and progressiveness of the avant-garde, and revealing the ways in which artistic expression might contest notions of individual subjectivity rather than affirm them. He was direct in criticising abstract expressionism for precisely these reasons, declaring: The success of so-called action painting is due to a pseudo-activity which claims to be based on ‘internal necessity,’ but is in fact nothing more than a faithful recollection of external necessity. In other words the social facts of life are accepted in a thoroughly harmless and orthodox way. This attitude is a denial of art because art ought to contest these social factors.67

In this statement, he points to the importance of social politics in all artistic practice. Moreover, he advocates that socially engaged art should embrace conflict rather than cohesion; ‘art ought to contest these social factors’. He also expresses frustration with both orthodoxy and art that is ‘harmless’. It is interesting to note that art historical interpretations of his work in the 1960s and 1970s tended to skip over the more confrontational, vandalistic aspects of his work, focusing more on aesthetic form and the formal qualities of his painting.68 The very 71

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discomfort this suggests is revealing in terms of the effectiveness of his strategies in challenging prevailing orthodoxy. The purpose of this brief review of Jorn’s work, however, is not to elevate his oeuvre as an heroic example of social resistance; in fact, many aspects of his work can be considered problematic in these terms; not least of which is the representation of gender in his work.69 Moreover, Jorn’s work cannot be considered in purely activist terms, as it has a very strong artistic trajectory, using aesthetic form as the means for questioning social and political truths, rather than inciting direct protest. Indeed, Jorn separated from the SI movement after a few short years, partly because his approach to social critique was rather more affirmative, generative, and artistic than that of his colleagues. Discussing Jorn’s amicable resignation from the SI in 1961, Claire Gilman writes: In their very bounded materiality Jorn’s paintings suggest that avant-garde failures can be contained and so disposed, that one should transcend the spectacle and reified art forms for a space that resembles Sartrian negativity: pure creative spirit unencumbered by obstacles. Gradually the Situationists came to reject artistic structures altogether as, one by one, artists affiliated with the S.I. either were excluded or, like Jorn, chose to resign.70

The SI was later dissolved in 1972, and in its short life, many associated artists were expelled from the group for not adhering closely enough to its political ideology. Jorn was careful to defend Debord in his strict policing of the political ideology of the SI, however, writing: He invites others who want to march in the avant-garde of this era to follow these new rules [. . .] However, on one point he is rightly dreaded by the entire artistic milieu. He will not stand being denigrated by anyone who pretends to accept these rules but who uses them as stakes in another game – that of worldliness, in the broadest sense: being in accord with the accepted world. In such cases he is without mercy.71

This indicates a fundamental issue in terms of the collusion between art and politics: creative freedom can be the first victim of such collusion. This is ironic in the case of the SI which proclaimed wholehearted support for creative freedom as evident in the title of the publication Creation Ouvert. 72

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Where does that leave us in terms of the debate around contemporary social practice? In his alliance with the SI, Jorn demonstrated that socially engaged art does not necessarily have to be benevolent; it can embrace artistic and critical freedom, it can cause conflict and disorder, and social discourse may be generated through practices that are bad both aesthetically and politically. We see these strategies taken up in the work of many contemporary artists who may not explicitly lay claim to the field of social practice, and yet their work clearly has impact and resonance on the field of the social.

Bad Behaviour Marcia Tucker’s exhibition Bad Girls revisited some of the themes of Bad Painting but two decades later, and in the context of feminist political action. An important part of the show was an exhibition of posters and ephemera by the anonymous feminist art-action group the Guerrilla Girls, who by this time had established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the art world. The curatorial premise of Bad Girls was relatively light; badness was not over-theorized, rather the concept was a starting point to gather together works by many male and female artists, performers and activists who had an interest in feminism. There was a general tone of playful irreverence, postmodern irony and celebration of the popular trends of punk in consumer culture.72 Some of the works included, for example, an executed Barbie doll in the work Sayonara Cinderella by Kathe Burkhart (1980), Louise Bourgeois’ plaster dildo, Filette (1968), a Barbie doll wedged within male genitalia in Keith Boadwee’s Jasmine Swami (1993), gender-bending performative photography including Lynda Benglis’ advertisement in Artforum depicting a naked female figure holding a long dildo (1974), and Janine Antoni’s photographic series where a middle-aged woman and man are depicted in family-style portraits together swapping gender roles through devices of masking, make-up and wigs in Mom and Dad (1993). The Guerrilla Girls have been hugely successful in using bad art, in terms of both aesthetics and behaviour, to address issues of social justice in the arts, mixing absurd images of women wearing gorilla masks and gorilla suits with slogans and statistics about the under-representation of women and diverse cultural groups in the arts. A key work in Bad Girls was a poster depicting an image of a classical reclining nude female, 73

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Figure 5. Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, colour poster, 1989.

viewed from behind, with a large comic-style gorilla mask collaged over her head and a phallic looking feather duster in her hand. Bold printed text was superimposed to the right of the figure asking Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? and in smaller font below Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female (Figure 5). The use of gorilla imagery, and playing with the term guerrilla, was a deliberate use of aesthetics considered ugly, non-aesthetic, and in bad taste, to provoke debate about the hierarchies and power structures within the art world. The Guerrilla Girls’ tactics included hiring billboards, buying advertisements, holding exhibitions and conducting protests to bring art into the social and political realm. Their activities provoked both positive and negative opinion, and certainly generated debate. They were also subject to significant criticism, particularly for their choice to act in an anonymous capacity. Prominent art dealer Mary Boone denounced their work, saying ‘the Guerrilla Girls is about an excuse for failure [. . .] If women allow themselves to make excuses for their regrets, for what they don’t have in their lives, then the women’s movement becomes nothing but an excuse for mediocrity.’73 For others in the art world, it was precisely the strong and hostile reaction generated by their acts of activism that indicate the strength of their practice. Marcia Tucker claimed, ‘I think the greatest sign of the Girls’ success is that so many of their posters are torn down or defaced by people who’d rather not see their name in these particular lights!’74 A similar approach is evident in the political actions of the feminist performance art group Pussy Riot, who have gained international 74

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notoriety for public performances that criticize the Russian government’s human rights record, particularly in relation to LBGTI communities, feminism, and the links between President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. The group formed in 2011, with a number of public punk-rock music performances, later edited into video pieces and posted to the internet. Like the Guerrilla Girls, they use anonymity as a means to speak out, wear masks that add a theatrical and absurdist element to their practice, they combine performance, public intervention and art to draw attention to issues of social equity, and have gained a lot of support from the art world. The significant difference between the two different women’s activist groups is context; in the USA the tactics of the Guerrilla Girls created debate, drew public attention to gender issues in the arts and effected some real changes without any ramifications for the anonymous artists involved. In Russia, two of the members of Pussy Riot were imprisoned for close to two years, on the basis of hooliganism and ‘religious hatred’, shifting the emphasis of their activities into the realms of political, rather than purely artistic, activism. Art has enabled them to reach a broad audience, however, particularly in the West. One member of the group describes, ‘It’s an art group, not a musical group – this is very important [. . .] We work from the space or the problem.’75 It’s debatable whether their tactics have created the kind of social change they pursue, or inflamed the already difficult conditions for activists in Russia. After the artists’ arrests, for example, the Russian government cracked down further on freedom of expression, limiting the rights for political dissidents to speak out, including bans on the wearing of masks and reduced freedom of association in public spaces. Pussy Riot certainly appeals to the liberal values of a Western audience (their fans include Madonna and Paul McCartney), however it would be shortsighted to dismiss their work on this basis. While they may not have brought greater harmony or social cohesion to Russia, they have certainly been effective at drawing attention to human rights issues. In particular, the artists in prison were able to communicate problems relating to the working conditions of prisoners. According to one prison official, a letter written by one of the artists was considered to have ‘stirred up the swamp’, creating dialogue among prisoners and officials and leading to some real changes in working hours and wages.76 In this case, as in the case of the Guerrilla Girls, it is the tactics of unruly

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behaviour in an art context that resulted in increased social debate about issues of equity.

Bad Aesthetics Other artists intertwine the social and political within their aesthetic and pictorial means. A preoccupation with abject form, for example oozing paint, stained materials, or sculpture that resembles the traces and forms of bodily fluid, has been evident in the work of many post-modern and contemporary artists, including Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, and Tracey Emin, just to name a few. Abject materiality has often been a trigger for exploring the relationship between social power and individual psychological adaptation, by eliciting physical and emotional responses from the viewer that evoke both fear and desire, and point to the ways in which our bodies are controlled by social and familial expectations. Psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva developed the idea of the abject in an essay in 1980, related to natural bodily and material processes that we are socially conditioned to reject, and which therefore becomes symbolically opposed to social reason. She writes, ‘The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery.’77 For Kristeva, the abject is a means to understand our complex social conditioning. Jake and Dinos Chapman, also known as the Chapman Brothers, use abject form as a means to consider social perversity. Their sculpture features mutilated, deformed human bodies and body parts, sexualized children, genitalia out of place and horrific acts of violence, depicted with plastic forms that refer to children’s toys and mannequins, recalling the sculptural mutilations of Hans Bellmer’s dolls. The inclusion of dolls and children’s bodies provides a lens through which to see the adult atrocities of war and oppression as absurd, illogical and in violation of basic moral codes. The epic installation work, The Sum of all Evil (2012– 13), portrays an apocalyptic scene of horror in the form of several dioramas that feature masses of dead and dying bodies, juxtaposed with figurines of Ronald McDonald and other McDonald’s marketing characters, icons of American consumerism, Nazi officers, war tanks and dinosaurs, thereby offering a glimpse into the worst potentiality of late capitalism and a total collapse of history.

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Alongside the dioramas, the artists also included a number of modification paintings, in a direct reference to Jorn’s aesthetic vandalism, where classical portrait paintings were mutilated. For example, an elegant woman’s face appears to be decomposing from the inside out, while a nobleman appears to have a laceration on his forehead. As in Jorn’s work, ugliness, bad aesthetic form and bad behaviour are deliberate artistic devices that relocate the artwork in a social context and call into question the supposed truth, or artifice, of representation. As Christoph Grunenburg describes: The border between imagined reality and truth, regression and consciousness, inside and outside, is broken down and the abject emerges in the shape of intestines, rotten flesh and excrement and blood trickling down from the putrid boil that has broken out on the skin of this natural paradise.78

The Chapman Brothers wholeheartedly embrace the potential of bad art, in the form of ugliness, bad taste, horror, stupidity and silliness, to create a nauseating discomfort in the viewer, implicated in the conditions of social life. They also reiterate gestures of the avant-garde, including the tactics of shock, to express their political dissent. Their work treads a fine line between emptying history of its context and meaning, sensationalizing and thereby numbing audiences to the true impact of such violence and atrocity, and challenging the complicity, cynicism and passivity of contemporary viewers. Theorists such as Peter B¨urger argue that the avant-garde tactic of shock fails because over time it loses its effectiveness.79 Dave Beech defends the Chapman Brothers’ use of shock in the wake of a cynical cultural climate, suggesting that it is the viewer’s responsibility not to be desensitized to such horrors. He argues that our ability to be shocked links to our ability to resist spectacle culture, and writes, ‘We should preserve our shock at the sight of all these commonplace horrors as if we were preserving and protecting our very humanity.’80 Abject materiality is not the only way of implicating the viewer in the power structures of contemporary consumer culture. Barbara Kruger’s billboard work, Don’t be a jerk, is a simple statement that both accuses the audience of stupid consumption, particularly in the sexual objectification of women in advertising, while also inviting the viewer to break out of this mindless habit. The image features a sea of faces, collaged together from black and white photographs from the earlier 77

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part of the twentieth century, and recalls the photomontage work of the Berlin Dadaists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. The four-word slogan ‘Don’t be a jerk’, is overlaid in the centre of the billboard; a simple block of text, white italicized font on a red background, channelling the power of both advertising and propaganda. Kruger’s work, a billboard situated in public space, reminds us that the foundations of democracy lie not in unity but in political debate, argument, disagreement, disunity and that collectivity is not about harmonious cohesion but a multiplicity of different voices. Kruger’s works draw attention to the way the aesthetics of consumer culture, particularly advertising, mask social reality. As Paula Scher explains: Kruger’s words in icon-smashing bands emerge from a generation of young baby boomers confronting lies and disappointments. Her words capture the spirit of this generation, who turned to irony and cynicism to express their anger at the truth. The truth that their families weren’t really like the ones on ‘Father Knows Best’ or ‘Ozzie and Harriet’, that women weren’t failures if they didn’t behave like Donna Reed. The truth that black people weren’t invisible, that Vietnam wasn’t like World War II, and that using a new deodorant wasn’t going to fix any of this.81

Badness, here in the form of a verbal attack on the viewer, enacted through art, is a way of drawing attention to the conflicted nature of social relations, specifically the way gender stereotypes are constructed and reinforced through advertising. Like Kruger, Richard Bell employs a tactical use of words to make the viewer aware of the power of language and visual form in shaping social stereotypes. Bell is an Australian artist and political activist who came to notoriety after his painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) won the 2003 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. The large and brightly coloured, abstract expressionist style painting, was disturbed with the words ‘Aboriginal Art – It’s A White Thing’ scrawled across the surface. Using the words in such a direct way intervened in the supposed ‘truth’ of abstract painting; here we see a link again to Jorn’s painterly vandalism. Bell hit on a major contradiction in the mainstream art market’s approach to traditional Australian indigenous art – in many cases, the work has been taken out of its geographic, social and cultural context, and placed in the context of a white walled gallery, arguably for the consumption of a 78

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predominantly white, middle-class audience. As Australian indigenous artist Peter McKenzie describes, ‘It seems that if you have a suntan and can drop a dot onto anything, you must be an Aboriginal artist. Just ask the white (and black) entrepreneurs who’ve made a bloody big quid exploiting just that.’82 Bell has been clear in expressing his discomfort with race politics in Australia, arguing, ‘White culture took away my tribal language and in return gave me a language that, on the social level, doesn’t work.’83 Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the work was controversial and had a mixed reception, including public calls to withdraw the artwork, along with derisory critical reviews.84 This was partly due to the work itself, and partly due to the behaviour of the artist, who wore a t-shirt to the award ceremony that read, ‘White Girls Can’t Hump’. For art historian Rex Butler, Bell’s work exposes the colonial attitudes of contemporary Australia society, which often maligns contemporary indigenous art in favour of an idealized and narrow view of traditional art. Butler argues: Bell seeks to make the point that ‘Aboriginality’ is not innate and natural to indigenous Australians, but a kind of projection on to them by white Australians, is only to see themselves through white eyes [. . .] In a number of recent public performances in which Bell wears a black T-shirt with the words ‘Ooga Booga’ to openings of Aboriginal art, he is proposing – and here the fine line he treads between criticizing the ‘primitivism’ of the artists or the ‘primitivising’ of them by their white supporters – that it is urban artists like himself and not Desert-based artists who are the ‘true’ Aborigines.85

Just as we consume advertising by being lured into it as willing participants, we are used to consuming Aboriginal paintings in a particular gallery context, and with a sense of aesthetic pleasure or enjoyment. Both Bell and Kruger undermine the assumption that viewing art will make us feel good, or better about ourselves. Their work represents a symbolic slap in the face, inviting us to wake up to the fact that consumption is not passive – by viewing we construct and create certain social truths. In another of Bell’s paintings, The Truth Hurts, this point is made quite literal. A bright red background is overlaid by the three words, ‘The Truth Hurts’, painted in a slightly different shade of intense red. It is hard to read the words, which are partly camouflaged by the textural 79

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effect of the red-on-red colour palette. The effect is that the words take on a tone of secretive profundity; only if you look closely enough will you discover the meaning. The painting is purely symbolic – art as language, art as a message. Bell points to the idea that truth is not always revelatory or pleasing – it can equally be painful, problematic and conflicted.

Chapter 3: Conclusion The work and processes of the various artists discussed in this chapter demonstrate that art does not have to ‘do good’ to have social impact; art has a history of generating changes in attitudes, perceptions and public debate by virtue of provocation, conflict and discomfort, and such qualities can result in a productive engagement with society. Indeed, society itself exists by virtue of relations between different people, with different values, attitudes, beliefs and differing levels of access to power and authority. As Jeremy Tanner argues, the link between sociology and art relates to this negotiation between individual autonomy and the social collective. This provides a sound argument for why the two disciplines should intersect. In his words, ‘to trace systematically the interconnections between particular forms of artistic volition and collective patterns of experience rooted in social structures and processes of group life’.86 The rise of social practice in art over the first two decades of the twenty-first century points to a bigger problem than art being used for social work or therapeutic ends – what we are seeing is a reaction to art’s incorporation within the machinery of global capitalism. Artists, art historians, curators and critics are all compromised in this system by virtue of art’s association with, and dependence on, money. This is the case both within, and outside of, the mainstream gallery system. Art needs to address its own complicity in the systems of capitalism and the ways in which it produces social inequality, including precarious employment, gender inequalities, the promotion of cultural hierarchies and detrimental environmental impact, among other things, before we can begin to assess its social benefits in a broader sense. The challenge is not how art can create greater social benefits for society, but rather how artists can radically transform the economic inequalities of the art system itself. 80

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As this chapter has argued, what is missing from much of the discourse that surrounds social practice is an understanding of the economic drivers of this work; how the production of such artworks and art projects have been funded, whether they have generated profits or other kinds of economic value to their financial partners and if so, how this profit might have been used; all questions that have a direct bearing on how we understand the impact and implications of their social engagement. The social dimension of art does not begin and end in its consumption; it is very much entangled within the conditions of production. This explicit focus on economics is the subject of Chapter 4.

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4 Art as Enterprise Part I – Art’s Exploitation of Labour The starting point for this chapter is a gala dinner event held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA) in 2011. Each year, LA MOCA’s gala offers up an extravagant, decadent celebration of contemporary art for patrons and art world VIPs, designed to attract financial support for the museum. The 2011 ‘art director’ for the event was performance artist Marina Abramovi´c, known for gruelling endurance acts that use her own body as material.1 On this occasion, 750 guests arrived, dressed in their finest, ready for an evening of fine dining, drinking, music, art and entertainment. On arrival, guests were assisted to put on white lab coats, part of Abramovi´c’s artistic direction for the event. As the guests approached their allocated dining tables, they were confronted with one of two scenarios. In the first, they found at the centre of their table a rotating, live, human head (Figure 6). As the head slowly circled, the performer’s face was impassive, expressionless, locking gaze with guests who were brave enough to make eye contact. In the second scenario, guests found a naked woman at the centre of their table, lying beneath a life-sized, plastic, human skeleton. As the woman breathed in and out, the skeleton’s frame would also rise and fall. This was a re-enactment of Abramovi´c’s own performance, Nude with Skeleton (2002), in which the artist had performed with a human skeleton. The table performances continued throughout the evening until the guests departed.

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ART AS ENTERPRISE Figure 6. 2011 MOCA Gala – An Artist’s Life Manifesto, Directed by Marina Abramovi´c – Inside, colour photograph, 2011.

The art world is no stranger to confrontational performance art and in this case the gala dinner encapsulated what many art audiences expect from a contemporary art museum. Abramovi´c’s LA MOCA performance, with the objectification of human bodies as centrepieces at a luxurious and exclusive gala dinner, literally exposes the idea of art as consumption, entangled in a system of commerce, and complicit in the objectification and aestheticisation of human labour. The critical reception of the piece might have rested with this idea of institutional critique, were it not for the outspoken voice of one performer, Sara Wookey. Wookey had attended a full-day unpaid rehearsal in the lead up to the event, along with 200 other prospective performers and had subsequently been selected to work on the night, along with 85 other successful candidates. As a result of what Wookey described as ‘problematic, exploitative, and potentially abusive’ conditions of work, she opted out of participating in the event.2 She first raised her concerns with Yvonne Rainer, a well-known choreographer and professional mentor, who published an open letter to Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the museum. This sparked public debate, which led Wookey to issue a public statement that detailed the pay, legal requirements and work conditions of the performance, along with her specific reasons for not 83

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participating. The details of this story will be explored further in this chapter. As a starting point, it opens up important questions about the economic and social conditions of labour in the art world. While these questions have important philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, this chapter also draws attention to the material circumstances of people working in the business of art production. Due to the opaque nature of much of this reality, examples have been selected that make these processes transparent. The chapter begins with a consideration of the use of paid labour in Abramovi´c’s performance along with the experience of a painting assistant in Jeff Koons’ studio. It also examines the use of volunteer labour in Matthew Barney’s 2013 film set River of Fundament, considering the ideological function of Barney’s work in terms of class politics and labour in the creative industries. This leads to a consideration of the wilful exploitation of legal and illegal labour by Santiago Sierra, who is known for employing people to perform menial and often degrading tasks in the space of the gallery, mimicking the relations of power in industrial society. In all of these cases, the financial conditions of artistic production are considered, including the amount of wages paid to workers, the costs of the artworks’ production, the sale price of artworks and the distribution of profits. In the second part of the chapter, attention turns to the artistic re-imagining of wage labour in industry by Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher, two artists who are known for collaboration with non-art world participants. Ukeles has a long history of collaboration with maintenance workers, beginning with an exhibition that drew attention to the realities of maintenance work at the Whitney Museum in 1976. This led to her ongoing residency with the New York Sanitation Department, where she has been making artistic use of the paid time of sanitation workers since 1977. In 2002 Harrell Fletcher collaborated with mechanics and customers at Jay’s Garage in Portland, mis-directing their usual work time to produce a short film called Blot Out the Sun, inspired by James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses. Despite the apparent difference in context between the more aesthetically oriented work of Abramovi´c, Barney and Sierra with the social practice of Ukeles and Fletcher, similar issues of agency, free choice and transparency of employment conditions arise when paid workers in industry are asked to collaborate with artists as part of their usual employment.

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At stake in all of these artistic practices is the question of whether art, by attributing qualities of meaning, desire and subjectivity to paid ‘work’, may serve to disguise social and economic inequalities in human labour. Does artistic labour represent a radical alternative to the alienated labour of capitalism, as the avant-garde might have believed, or does artistic labour now represent the ultimate capitalist dream, where work is immaterial, knowledge-based and creative, and the worker is responsible for their own conditions of employment? The problems raised in this chapter point to the need for the art world to consider new models of production, including labour relations and economic organization, before artists and artworks can effectively address broader social issues of class inequality, labour exploitation and economic disparity. All of the artists considered in this chapter create work that has an impact at an aesthetic level and the following discussion does not intend to diminish these qualities. Rather, the discussion aims to expose an important contradiction in the way that artworks are received in the contemporary art world, where attention to the aesthetic result of artistic process can serve to disguise problems in the conditions of its production. To avoid succumbing to a perspective that is self-defeating, at various points in the chapter hypothetical alternatives are presented in the form of questions that point to the potential of productive critique; demonstrating that art can engage critically with issues of labour and class inequality on both aesthetic and material terms. Indeed, the aesthetic is intertwined with its material processes. Of course, these hypotheticals are a means to consider alternatives, and are not intended in any way to be prescriptive or enacted. The discussion that follows therefore attends to the conditions of art’s production, as well as its reception, in order to demonstrate the need for greater transparency about art’s entanglement within its economic and social context. In Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea describes the way in which subjectivity and work have become ever more enmeshed in the creative industries: As the economy shifts from commodity production and exchange toward information-oriented services and short-term contracts, participating parties are drawn into more intricate social collaboration, and subjectivity itself gets inducted more completely into productive and economic processes.3

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This interest in the labour conditions of artists and the relationship between art and industry, or art and business, is by no means new. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Takashi Murakami have openly declared the similarity between art and for-profit business, unashamed at exploiting the processes of industrial production and the labour of assistants and industrial workers to produce art-commodities that generate profit.4 Minimalist and conceptual art rejected the individualistic gesture inherent to modernist painting, along with the idea of the painter as labourer epitomized in the ‘action painting’ style of Jackson Pollock. Instead, they embraced detached, instructional styles of art production that de-emphasized notions of skill and the importance of the artist’s own hand. Donald Judd used industrial labour and materials such as steel, copper and iron to produce geometric sculpture under his ‘direction’; Robert Rauschenberg’s immaculate White Paintings (1951) were first executed by the artist with paint rollers and industrial paint, and subsequently re-created a number of times by painting assistants in order to preserve their pure whiteness; and Sol LeWitt’s mathematical wall drawings were produced through the painstaking labour of assistants. In Work Ethic, Helen Molesworth argues that this managerial approach by artists in the late 1950s and 1960s reflects a widespread shift from manufacturing to service in developed economies: Indeed, artists’ ability to remove themselves from the production process was partly bound up with their sense of themselves as being professionals like any others [. . .] artists would now routinely participate in the social codes once associated with white-collar professionals such as lawyers, doctors and small business owners.5

Other artists reacted against the de-humanizing aspects of industrial work by enacting physical labour as performance. Chris Burden produced a work called Hard Labor (1979) that involved the artist using his residency at an art school to spend three days digging a ditch; the Hi Red Center Japanese art collective fastidiously scrubbed clean a city street in their work Be Clean (1964) which was later repeated by Fluxus artists in New York’s Times Square; Vito Acconci turned his body into an absurd commodity in Trademarks (1970), biting into his own flesh repeatedly until he was covered from head to toe in teeth-marks, a literal enactment of his own ‘brand’. Meanwhile Sherrie Levine 86

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made a mockery of artistic labour by re-photographing the works of famous male artists and claiming them as her own, thereby creating a new art object with minimal labour, for example in After Egon Schiele (1982). Other feminist artists questioned the drudgery of housework and motherhood in works such as Womanhouse (1971–2) a cooperative exhibition featuring the work of 21 artists, led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Many of these artworks and practices have explored labour as artistic content, either by aestheticizing or disavowing the artist’s own labour. It is rare, however, for artworks and artists to reveal the actual labour conditions of those who work for them, from the factory workers who process industrial steel to the artist assistants who created screenprints in Warhol’s factory, to the interns and exhibition preparators who install and maintain works of art in museums and galleries. It is even less common for such workers to be acknowledged or credited for their participation. In the context of contemporary art, which involves ever-larger scales of production amid international art fairs and biennales, along with the spread of contemporary art across geographic and political borders, these questions about the transparency of work conditions are even more important to consider. As Relyea observes, ‘It is precisely the euphemism of a “creative life” [. . .] that provides ideological cover for the shift in labour conditions to more chronically intermittent employment with longer work hours and no benefits’.6 It was therefore a significant moment when performer Sara Wookey spoke out about the conditions of employment in Abramovi´c’s performance at LA MOCA’s gala dinner.

Self-Exploitation: Marina Abramovic´ In her open letter, Wookey explained the terms and conditions of Abramovi´c’s performance, as outlined to her in the audition she attended. She had been instructed to stay silent during the performance and ignore any potential harassment from guests, sign a legal confidentiality agreement with a one million dollar liability, commit to 15 hours rehearsal time plus the event itself, agree to perform on the night for up to four hours without a break, and be paid only 150 dollars. Taking into consideration the rehearsal time and performance, this payment averages out to less than 8 dollars per hour. The low wage was particularly conspicuous considering that the ticket prices 87

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for the event ranged from $2,500 to $100,000 USD.7 It is therefore somewhat paradoxical that the performance was perceived to challenge the structures of power, and economic disparities, of the art world. In an article in the LA Weekly, for example, an artist who assisted guests to put on white lab coats is quoted as saying, ‘The nature of the power structure started to crumble in a really delightful way’, while one of the performers described, ‘The only person who gave me more than five minutes [of eye contact] was the mayor. But that was a pretty fun experience – to stare down the mayor.’8 During the event, Abramovi´c addressed the audience from the stage, where she read out her manifesto, described the event as an ‘experiment’, and drew attention to the fact that LA MOCA had requested there be no naked male performers.9 By inviting the audience to complain about this one aspect of the performance, the artist diverted critical attention away from the ethics of the performance itself. Wookey explained her refusal to participate in terms of both unfair payment, and also a lack of safety with regard to the performers’ welfare: If there is any group of cultural workers who deserve basic standards of labour, it is us performers working in museums, whose medium is our own bodies and deserve human treatment and respect [. . .] The time has come for artists in Los Angeles and elsewhere to unite, organize, and work toward changing the degenerate discrepancies between the wealthy and powerful funders of art and the artists, mainly poor, who are at its service and are expected to provide so called avant-garde, prescient content or ‘entertainment’ as is increasingly the case – what is nonetheless merchandise in the service of money.10

Wookey was not alone in her concerns. A number of artists turned up to the event and protested, others started discussions about organizing artists’ labour, and debate broke out in the media and in public forums.11 A key problem raised by the performance was that of ethics; does the art world have a mandate to ensure ethical practices, or does art transgress the very idea of moral and ethical codes? As one of the gala guests, Susan Michals, described: ‘But the question still remained – was this event exploitative? Our tablemate, who preferred not to be named, blurted out, without missing a beat, “Isn’t it supposed to be?”’12 88

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This observation that the work was supposed to be exploitative points to Claire Bishop’s critique of relational aesthetics – where she advocates for art that exposes and maintains relations of social conflict, rather than attempting to provide resolution or amelioration.13 Bishop is influenced by the work of Jacques Ranci`ere, and particularly his critique of the ‘ethical turn’ in contemporary politics and art. In The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics, Ranci`ere argues that prevailing humanitarian sentiments stymie real political action and social change, instead privileging a social ‘consensus’. This consensus, he argues, results in a condition where differences ‘disappear in the law of a global situation’ and politics ‘disappear in the indistinctness of ethics’.14 The influence of this ethical turn in art, he suggests, is the prevalence of artworks that focus on recuperation; either by forming social bonds between participants, or by bearing witness to catastrophe. This eradicates the potential for politics, which he suggests relies upon division, difference, ambiguity, precarity and most importantly, dissensus. In Artificial Hells, Bishop builds on Ranciere’s argument and links it to the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, reconsidering ethics in terms of the de-sublimation of desire through Lacan’s notion of jouissance. This leads her to advocate for artworks that are not beholden to questions of morality. She writes, ‘the most striking, moving and memorable forms of participation are produced when artists act upon a gnawing social curiosity without the incapacitating restrictions of guilt’.15 It is one thing for art to explore problematic ethical terrain as a means to activate the political, express difference and challenge social conventions. It is another thing, however, for art to cross the line from critique to complicity in sustaining conditions of social inequality. Here we find an important gap in the discourse about socially engaged art. While much of the focus of critical attention is directed at either the content of the work of art or its reception, there is a tendency to overlook the actual conditions of its production. As a result, there is a tendency to privilege the aesthetic experience of the art work above its social, political, economic and ethical entanglements. These entanglements influence and inform all aspects of the aesthetic experience; from the funding of a work in the first place, to the conditions and means of its production, to its reception by an audience and its circulation in the market. This is all the more important in the context of an artist like

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Abramovi´c, who used other people’s paid labour in a work that turned the human body into an object of display. Even if the selected performers at the LA MOCA event had been open and willing to participate in the event, and had no objections to the rate of pay, any apparent agency was undermined by the requirement for them to sign a legal document preventing them from discussing their conditions of work. Moreover, the mandate that they ‘remain in performance mode’ during the event similarly denied their autonomy of action.16 If the critical function of the performance was to expose relations of power in the art world – between those objectified and those objectifying – this critique was negated by disguising the actual conditions of the social contract between performers and institution. In Artificial Hells, Bishop briefly discusses the use of labour in Abramovi´c’s performance for the LA MOCA dinner, but does not address the performers’ conditions of work or agency. Rather, she criticizes the aesthetic quality of the work for its ‘banality and paucity of ideas’, which she considers to be a ‘media stunt dressed up as performance art’.17 Here she privileges aesthetic judgement over questions of economic and material production. In the case of what she calls ‘delegated performance’, where artists use other people’s labour, Bishop argues that the critical potential and autonomy of art outweighs the moral and ethical concerns of its production. She writes, ‘To judge a work on the basis of its preparatory phase is to neglect the singular approach of each artist, how this produces specific aesthetic consequences, and the larger questions that he/she might be struggling to articulate.’18 From this point of view, the aesthetic concerns of the artwork, its content, and the artist’s critical perspective are of greater importance and value than the actual entanglement of an art work with social and economic conditions in its production. For Bishop, the exploitation of labour in such performance may elicit discomfort from the viewer and participants alike, however this discomfort is likened to ‘perverse pleasure’, that involves a de-sublimation of desire, enabling the individual to attain greater awareness of their own position in society.19 Not only does this overlook the ways in which the artwork might repress, rather than liberate, the desire and agency of its participants, but it also points to the ways in which artists and art workers have come to embrace their own self-exploitation in the creative industries.

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If the LA MOCA event was clearly underpaying the performers and requiring them to work in difficult conditions, as it was ‘supposed to be’ according to guest Michals, why then did the 85 performers agree to participate? As a purely economic transaction, the pay did not justify the amount of time and effort required. What the work provided in excess of money, however, was the aesthetic experience, along with the potential for career advancement. The performers might have been drawn to participating in the work, for example, due to its formal, aesthetic qualities, creating a motivation in excess of financial and even ethical interests. In the circumstance that the performers were not motivated by aesthetic pleasure, but rather career advancement, then the short-term financial and personal sacrifice would be an investment for future gain. Yvonne Rainer takes this view, describing: Their desperate voluntarism says something about the generally exploitative conditions of the art world such that people are willing to become decorative table ornaments installed by a celebrity artist in the hopes of somehow breaking into the show biz themselves. And at sub-minimal wages for the performers, the event is economic exploitation as well, verging on criminality.20

The debate that erupted over the LA MOCA event is indicative of widespread concern about the conditions of artistic and creative labour. In Gregory Sholette’s book Dark Matter, for example, he talks about the ‘revenge of the surplus’, in reference to the masses of unpaid, underpaid and unrecognized people who form ‘the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society’.21 The reluctance of Wookey to speak out in the first instance, when she initially contacted Rainer, points to another predicament faced by artists – their dependency on social networks and relationships with people in positions of power in the art world.22 Class politics in the art world therefore operate along both social and economic lines. The tendency for artists and art assistants to stay silent about their work conditions makes it incredibly difficult to address the effects. In 2012 one of Jeff Koon’s painting assistants, John Powers, wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine detailing the experience of working in Koons’ demanding studio. His brief article puts into question the idea that aesthetic experience accounts for the willingness 91

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of emerging artists to submit themselves to arduous work at low pay. The assistant described a highly professional work environment with exacting standards for the painting work, including for example the directive ‘to hand-fashion a flat, seamless surface that appeared to have been manufactured by machine’.23 Here the artist’s labour was supposed to mimic the processes of industrial production, whereby expressions of human subjectivity are eliminated in favour of reproducibility. The effect is telling; the finished painting, a gesture of artistic skill and creativity, disguises its artistic labour, which is completed not by the artist, but another, unknown painter. Koons was described as ‘a perfectionist who promptly fired assistants whenever they failed to meet his standards’.24 Despite being paid an hourly wage of $14, which is above minimum wages in the USA, Powers quit after a painting he had been working on for months, Cracked Egg, was accidentally damaged. Faced with the task of starting all over again on the work, he chose to resign. His disaffection with the tedious labour itself, in this case, outweighed the aesthetic and economic incentives of working for Koons’ studio. Powers expressed a deep frustration in discovering later that this same painting, Cracked Egg, had sold at auction for the sum of $501,933 in 2003. The perceived difference between a successful and emerging artist is, of course, a fundamental aspect of the way art attracts economic value. This is illustrated when Powers describes, ‘At the time it was Koons’ most expensive painting. Everything else I made in college ended up in a Dumpster on West 115th Street.’25 Considering the incredibly technical nature of a painting like Cracked Egg, along with the sheer number of hours required to create the work, the lines between artist and worker, concept and material, labour and value easily start to blur. It is important to note the link between the willingness of art assistants like Powers and emerging artists like Wookey to accept demanding conditions when they are working for high profile artists. Wookey describes this in her open letter, where she explains ‘I’m not judging my colleagues who accepted their roles in this work and I, too, am vulnerable to the cult of charisma surrounding celebrity artists.’26

Complicity Dressed as Critique: Matthew Barney In terms of celebrity artists, none gets much bigger than Matthew Barney in the sphere of contemporary art. In 1999, The New York Times 92

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declared, ‘Barney is the most important American artist of his generation.’27 Described variously as ‘unbelievably talented’, with ‘magical hands’, his work has been linked to a ‘mad virus’, and ‘high end eye candy’.28 Barney has a daughter with the singer Bj¨ork and has gained significant attention through the production of epic Hollywoodstyle blockbuster art films, which bring together an incredible visual aesthetic with references to art history, science, archaeology, ancient myth and popular culture. Such is Barney’s star power that over 100 people signed up to work for free as extras on the 2013 film set for his new project, River of Fundament. The film is an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings, which was itself a re-telling of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with a highly abject and sexualized lens. River of Fundament brings this narrative into the context of contemporary North America, with references to the car manufacturing industry in Detroit. The call-out for volunteers described that the work would include a considerable amount of physical labour, including a ten hour work day in hot weather, requiring that volunteers ‘must be in good physical condition and willing to get your feet wet’.29 In exchange for their time and labour, the extras would receive a signed t-shirt and lunch. One of the volunteers, Dan Duray, wrote about the experience in a humorous piece for the Gallerist NY. Duray explained that the extras ended up working for 12 hours in extremely hot weather conditions, with a mixture of chanting, marching, scampering, walking and singing. At the end of the day, Duray described, they were ‘exhausted’.30 He also explained the reverence for Barney among the volunteers and staff working on the set. The volunteer extras were organized into groups, each with a group leader. In what seems like a scene from a cult, Duray described: ‘“This is Matthew Barney camp”, I heard one leader tell his group. “And I am your counselor.”’31 The way that Duray describes Barney also points to the mythic status of the artist: ‘Our orders came from him, but almost divinely, through levels of walkie-talkie crew bureaucracy until the counsellors, each with a curly Secret Service style earpiece, vocalised them.’32 The flippant and comedic tone of Duray’s observations points to an important aspect of Barney’s work. It often combines irony with its highly sensual visual aesthetic to privilege entertainment over content. This is how reviewer Alfred Hickling describes River of Fundament, writing, ‘The film stands as a brilliantly rendered, giddily self-referential

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satire of contemporary American culture; though much the same could be said about the Lego Movie, with which River of Fundament shares more in common than it may care to admit.’33 High production values are combined with the use of celebrities to maximize commercial entertainment value. In the case of River of Fundament, the cast included the likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elaine Stritch, Salman Rushdie, Debbie Harry, Ryan Robinson and Paul Giamatti. In Duray’s description of his day as a volunteer, it seems that the entertainment aspect of the River of Fundament film set distracted those involved from the reality of the arduous and unpaid physical labour that they were carrying out. Duray describes, for example: The scale and weirdness of Barney’s projects seem to encourage gawking (this article is itself guilty of some of that ‘did you hear about the time he did this?’ gossip). Between shots, a competition emerged in which Barney die-hards tried to out-Barney one another by recounting the strange things they’d seen and done in the six years since Barney began making this film.

This points to a more complex analysis of Barney’s artistic practice by Stephen Tumino, who describes the use of irony and ludic ‘play’ in Barney’s most famous work, the Cremaster Cycle, as an ideological strategy that disguises the realities of class politics. The epic Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) is Barney’s most famous and celebrated work, consisting of five feature-length films that explore evolution, hybrid sexual identities and artistic creation. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, which controls the contraction of the testicles.34 The Cremaster Cycle presents a fragmented, mythic, and strange world that repeatedly returns to the theme of reproduction; there are many scenes, for example, that relate to early sexual development, at the point in embryonic development when gender is uncertain. This uncertainty is often read in terms of potentiality, hybridity, and a utopian future, or in Francesco Bonami’s terms, ‘an atrophied, temporal dimension and in a space which is expanded to the extreme with no narrative discourse’.35 The films contain a mixture of spiritualism, references to art history, iconic architecture including the Chrysler and Guggenheim Museum buildings in New York, pop culture including punk music and jazz dancers and ancient mythology. Throughout the Cremaster Cycle is a sense of competition, overcoming 94

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and the power of the artist’s journey, best captured in a mythic struggle between Barney, who plays an apprentice, and minimalist artist Richard Serra, who plays a master architect. The two artists re-enact a Masonic myth about the architect of Solomon’s Temple. In the narrative, Serra constructs minimalist sculpture and Barney then creates his own sculpture, until both are ultimately destroyed. Despite these strong narrative elements, the Cremaster Cycle presents a sequence of images and music that is purposely unreadable, heightening the sense of potentiality and the sense that the audience can take whatever they want from it. Frazer and Ward describe this as ‘the “let images wash over us” school of criticism’.36 One sequence of the script for Cremaster 3 provides a glimpse of this abstraction. It reads, ‘At this point in the narrative the film pauses for a choric interlude, which rehearses the initiation rites of the Masonic fraternity through allegorical representations of the five-part Cremaster cycle.’37 The unreadability of the work is exacerbated by the way the films were released; each one of the five instalments was released out of sequence, and over an eight-year period, making it impossible to piece together the fragments of narrative until after they had all been released, and retrospectively. Barney’s curator, Nancy Spector, describes the Cremaster Cycle as ‘a self-enclosed aesthetic system’, suggestive of an abstract formalism that surpasses narrative meaning.38 It’s important to understand the hype and excitement that surrounded the release of these films. Each one was released at a different time, mirroring the spectacle of Hollywood trilogies such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, building up excitement from audiences and critics alike. This served an important economic function – Barney transformed the ephemeral art practice of performance and video, historically marginal in market terms, into a successful commercial art product. As Noah Horowitz explains: When he first gained notoriety for edgy sexually and athletically-charged performances and films in the early 1990s, there was hardly much of a robust market for these alternative mediums. Yet Barney and his dealer Barbara Gladstone would ultimately write a new chapter in the market’s recent history by creating a host of ways to monetise these pursuits – through complex editioning practices and sales of ancillary goods – and assure their place in the canon.39

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Critics tend to read Barney’s work as breaking free from ideology by creating a mythic and indeterminate landscape in which identity politics and historical conflict are suspended.40 As Bonami writes: By bringing the psyche back into the organism and its anatomical location, the work is freed from a potentially puritan interpretation of Western civilization and affords an unexpected perspective on the artist’s role, obliging him to reconsider the limits of his actions. On the one hand it overcomes aesthetic formalism, and on the other, it surpasses political action.41

However Tumino argues that this anti-ideological gesture is in itself ideological, implicitly reinforcing the values of contemporary capitalism. He writes, ‘The most reliable guide to the ideological function of Barney’s work is how it, albeit in an ironic tone, yet legitimates the deeply conservative reading of art as “free” of class interest in the world divided between profit and need.’42 The idea that the artist creates a space that is free from prevailing social and political values has particular alliances with the interests of commercial culture, particularly when the resulting work is sold for high prices on the commercial art market. As Keith Wagner argues: Cremaster 3 could be used as a yardstick in measuring the more selfaggrandizing and negative features of 1990s culture in New York – heightened consumerism in the dot.com boom, anti-ideological sentiments as well as commodity fetishism epitomized by other artists of the time, mainly Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

In this light, it becomes difficult to perceive the River of Fundament film set experience described by Duray in terms of leisure, pleasure and play for the volunteers. Barney’s choice not to pay his extras is curious considering that his movie sets are notorious for big art film budgets. Just one of the Cremaster Cycle movies was estimated to have cost more than eight million dollars to produce.43 Indeed, there is a lack of transparency about the costs of his films, with his gallery refusing to release information about the production budgets.44 As Keller and Ward observe, this is even less transparent than in the unashamedly commercial domain of Hollywood.45 What is known in terms of the economic context for his filmmaking is that Barney attracts investment 96

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for his projects in advance of their realization, in much the same way as a commercial film would be financed. He then commercializes a variety of products and merchandise following the release of each film, including for example the sale of ten limited edition DVDs for prices as high as $571,000 (USD) for a single edition, along with the sale of sculpture and props from the film sets, the sale of photographic stills which have been auctioned for as much as $457,000 USD for a series of 5 photographs, and the sale of general merchandise such as t-shirts and posters.46 The obvious commodification of his art work would be less of an issue if the content did not so directly infer a critique of capitalism. In the case of River of Fundament, for example, the narrative focus on the American car industry in Detroit is unavoidably connected to the high levels of unemployment and poverty that followed the global financial crisis of 2008. The city of Detroit was declared bankrupt in 2013, linked to changes in the auto industry and the fall out from high risk profiteering in the US markets. As Robert Kuttner describes in The Huffington Post, ‘Detroit is partly the victim of economic trends far beyond its control, the downsizing and outsourcing of the auto industry and the collapse of the sub-prime bubble, to name just two.’47 The duality of Barney’s approach, which combines a celebration of the power of branding, commercial investment, success and consumption, on the one hand, along with a representation of class struggle in the context of late capitalism, on the other, is indicative of the ways in which consumer culture transforms critique into affirmation. As Naomi Klein explains in No Logo, advertising has been particularly adept at appropriating techniques first used by artists and activists to intervene in, and subvert, advertisements. She writes, ‘What began as a way to talk back to the ads starts to feel more like evidence of our total colonisation by them.’48 This leads Keller and Ward to question Barney’s appearance of critical autonomy. They argue ‘Barney’s elaborate and expensive productions can hardly be seen to participate in the critique of the commodity but rather in its celebration’.49 To return to Tumino’s argument, not only does Barney’s work conform to the logic of consumer capitalism in its financial instrumentalisation, it does so in aesthetic terms. While River of Fundament refers to the economic fall-out of the global financial crisis, the Cremaster Cycle elevates and mythologizes the concept of artistic labour. Barney appears in Cremaster 3, for

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example, with a mutilated and bleeding face, while simultaneously using brute strength to climb the spiral staircase, walls and ceiling of the Guggenheim Museum. In 1987, around the time Barney was starting his artistic practice, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker published ‘Theses on the disappearing body in the hyper-modern condition’, where they suggested that in the new knowledge economies, the body would become irrelevant and superfluous to contemporary labour: If, today, there can be such an intense fascination with the fate of the body, might this not be because the body no longer exists? [. . .] Everywhere today the aestheticisation of the body and its dissolution into a semiurgy of floating body parts reveal that we are being processed through a media scene consisting of our (exteriorised) body organs in the form of secondorder simulacra [. . .] In technological society, the body has achieved a purely rhetorical existence: its reality is that of refuse expelled as surplus-matter no longer necessary for the autonomous functioning of the technoscape.50

Barney seems to play out, and subsequently resolve, this anxiety in the Cremaster Cycle, where the body is torn apart and then subsequently re-fused into new hybrid forms, and where the new body is even more spectacular than the old. Physical labour is literally transformed into an abstract aesthetic experience. Indeed, Barney describes his early performance work in precisely these terms: I realized that through those experiences I had an ability to use my body as a tool toward a creative end, and if my body could belong to a sculpturemaking language, as artists like Beuys had proven, this crossover in the studio would feel very natural to me. [. . .] I believe that Field Dressing was the first work I made that suggested that kind of abstraction of the body.51

This aestheticization of human labour has affinities with the creative industries. Keti Chukhrov argues that the very idea of ‘immaterial labour’, as promoted in discourses that surround the information age and knowledge industries, disguises the realities of human labour in a globalized economy, where the self-exploitation of knowledge workers in developed economies occurs alongside the continuing exploitation of physical labour in developing economies.52 Both types of labourers are increasingly working under precarious conditions, and this is rife in the arts. Of particular concern is the way that art workers have come 98

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to internalize the logic of work as inherent to their own personal, creative expression. Chukhrov writes, ‘The creative industries exploit enthusiasm, desires, ideas, and feelings while simultaneously teaching that they should be expediently “packaged” as artistic services.’53 Barney’s Cremaster Cycle aligns with this new economic landscape. Past ideological struggles are absorbed into new forms of creative labour and presented in the form of a visual spectacle, all the while selling volumes of commercial products, both inside and outside of the art gallery. According to Tumino, this confluence of aesthetics with commercial reality is precisely why Barney’s art work has become so collectible and popular.54 The paradox of Barney’s work, which appears to critically engage with issues of subjectivity and labour in contemporary capitalism, while nevertheless affirming its structural logic, plays itself out in terms of content, financial structure and means of production. Moreover, all three elements are intertwined. Barney’s films would not be produced if commercially-motivated investors did not reap benefits from their distribution. The benefits that accrue to investors are economic, aesthetic and ideological. The decisions, economic conditions and means of the production of the art work, therefore, play a very important role in determining its aesthetic experience and reception. When Duray described his day of work on the River of Fundament film set, he raised a separate example of the use of labour on the film set. He relates a story told by one of Barney’s ‘counsellors’: ‘Why the porn stars?’ someone asked. ‘We have this scene where Maggie Gyllenhaal just reads her lines straight into the camera, and in the background two of them are eating each other’s asses out,’ he said. ‘We also have this scene where one of them just pees, just urinates right on a table, I was giving her water for hours, and then she just had to hold it until we said “go”.’55

The use of pornography actors in the film links to the hyper-sexual narrative of Mailer’s novel, the basis for the film’s narrative. It also represents the extreme end of the spectrum in terms of the commodification and exploitation of human labour in the entertainment industry. If River of Fundament presents a critique of the commodification of sex in popular entertainment, does that aesthetic dimension compensate for the actual commodification of pornographic actors in its production? And does including the narrative element of Detroit’s 99

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declining economy similarly counteract the impact of not paying one hundred extras in the production of a large-scale work with a budget that can be expected to be in the millions of dollars? The fact that Barney’s volunteers may have wanted to work for free only exacerbates the predicament of the contemporary creative industries worker. As philosophers Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari argue, the continued growth and expansion of capitalism relies upon the desire of workers to submit to poor conditions: There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments. That is why, when subjects, individuals or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests [. . .] it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled [. . .] It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.

This brings us full circle to Abramovi´c’s performers in the gala dinner at LA MOCA, where the performance was perceived to destabilize power differentials in the art world, while the event simultaneously reinforced those very inequalities, with the performers willingly subjecting themselves to objectification. What would the same performance have looked like if the performers were able to react and speak back to dinner guests at their tables; if they had been paid $2,500 each, the cost of a single ticket to the gala; if they had been able to talk openly about their work conditions without signing a legal confidentiality agreement; or more radically, if they were released into the dining room on that evening with free will to do and act as they liked? These issues are also central to the work of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, notorious for employing illegal workers and financially destitute people to perform pointless and often menial tasks in art galleries and museums for very small sums of money.

Unapologetic: Santiago Sierra Santiago Sierra’s practice has attracted significant critical attention, partly because his work provokes a visceral reaction from audiences, drawing attention to conditions of labour not only in capitalism generally, but more specifically in the context of art and partly because his 100

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work represents an indictment of the luxuriousness and commercialism of the art world. In 1999, Sierra used the space of a gallery in Cuba to tattoo a 250 cm line across the backs of six men from Old Havana, who were each paid 30 dollars.56 The title of the work, 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people, is an indication of the way in which the people he employed were de-humanized by the performance, reduced literally to ‘paid people’. The description of the work on Sierra’s website elaborates on this title, describing the group as ‘unemployed young men’, which implies vulnerability, both in terms of their age and also their employment status.57 In the gallery, the six men were transformed into performers, lined up in a row facing one wall while a tattooist progressively tattooed a line across each body in turn. Due to their variations in height, some of the men were tattooed below the shoulder blade, some above, but most squarely across, creating the appearance of a symmetrical line. Sierra filmed and photographed the process in a pared back, black and white documentary style. The resulting images have been presented in exhibitions, while the photographs have been sold in limited editions. The film footage from the performance shows the men in physical pain as they endure the tattoo. One man, for example, pushes his arms against the wall and hangs his head, wincing. The pain of being tattooed varies in intensity, and many people willingly undergo the process for visual pleasure. In this sense the aestheticization of the men’s labour was enacted both literally and symbolically. It also recalls performance artists from the 1960s such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, who exposed the viewer to the artist’s pain in works that were often intense and difficult to watch. In Sierra’s simultaneous objectification and aestheticization of human pain, he transfers this artistic exploration into a financial exchange – where other people offer up their bodies in exchange for money. In the process, he raises uncomfortable questions about the ethics of artistic work, the manipulation of bodies in performance, and the exploitation of cheap human labour. 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people was re-enacted a year later in Spain in 2000, at the El Gallo Arte Contempor´aneo in Salamanca, this time titled 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People. In the new iteration, Sierra recruited four female prostitutes who were addicted to heroin, and paid them the equivalent of $67 USD each, which was equivalent to the

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price of a shot of heroin. The performers in this work were seated on chairs, again facing the wall, and like the men in the first work, the women were topless while the tattoo was inked across their backs. The requirement to be semi-naked might have gone unnoticed in the first performance, but the second time around the women’s exposed breasts highlighted the commodification of their bodies as prostitutes in their daily work and as an aesthetic object in Sierra’s artwork. In a manner similar to the first performance in Havana, Sierra emphasized the women’s economic desperation and vulnerability in the description for the work: Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between $15–17, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about $67.58

Selecting prostitutes addicted to heroin as performers and subjects in the work points to an extreme form of alienated labour. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx describes alienation as the inevitable result of capitalist production, which requires the worker to produce goods that they do not use, and which generate profits outside of their direct experience, leading to a dejection of the self. He wrote: labour is external to the worker [. . .] in his work, therefore, he does not affirm but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.59

By drawing attention to the women’s heroin addiction and the commodification of their labour as prostitutes, Sierra emphasizes a sense of helplessness and a lack of free choice; as if the four women were forced by their circumstances to participate in the art work. Sierra thereby paints a portrait of capitalism at its most inhumane. As Carlos Jimenez observes, ‘Sierra wants to establish a truly tragic ethics.’60 Turning his performers into commodities and aesthetic objects in the gallery is a strategy that draws attention to the realities their labour, while also forcing the art world to consider its own moral and ethical boundaries. It is questionable, however, whether Sierra’s work simply aestheticizes 102

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and thereby reinforces the horror, or whether his work has the potential to incite resistance. Sierra chooses to pay his workers the minimum amount possible. He explains his rationale for this decision as follows: Also, if I compensated these people more, they’d be talking about how ‘good’ I am. But if I find someone who does something that’s hard for 50 Euros and it usually costs 200, I use the person who does it for 50. And of course extreme labour relations shed much more light on how the labor system actually works.61

By choosing to re-create extreme labour relations, Sierra certainly exposes the potential for capitalism to promote great injustice; however, this does little to address the structural inequalities that are raised. ˇ zek argues, ‘true radicality does not consist in going to the As Ziˇ extreme and destroying the system [. . .] but consists in changing the very coordinates that define this balance’.62 By presenting, and indeed creating a structure of social injustice within the space of the gallery, Sierra treads a fine line between critique and complicity. The issue of complicity is even more complex considering that Sierra sells documentation from his performances for generous sums of money. Most of his photographs, for example, average an edition price of 10,000 dollars and have sold for as much as 23,765 dollars. Sierra, for his part, is open about this commercial complicity: If I thought about how to give real visibility to these people, I wouldn’t have chosen the art world as a platform to do it, but rather a determined political activism – but I don’t do that either [. . .] When you sell a photograph for $11,000 you can’t possibly redeem anyone but yourself.63

The tone of cynical pragmatism evident in this statement is echoed in an exhibition catalogue for Sierra’s work 21 Anthropometric Modules Made of Human Faeces By the People of Sulabh International, India (2007). The work involved the recycling of human faeces by labourers in India, which was then modelled into sculpture, in the form of large, minimalist, geometric slabs. These objects were exhibited in Lisson Gallery in London, along with their packing crates, drawing attention to their transportation across geographic borders. In the catalogue, Pilar Villela Mascaro writes that Sierra ‘will be selling shit to art 103

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collectors and explicitly stating that its surplus value has been provided by labourers who sponsored the piece by working for free’.64 The cynical tone reflects Sierra’s own cynicism, suggesting that by recreating the conditions of labour exploited by big business, art can make a pointed critique. Moreover, they both suggest that this critical function justifies the fact that the sale of the artwork affirms the very conditions that it criticizes. Indeed, Sierra describes, ‘Self-criticism makes you feel morally superior, and I give high society and high culture the mechanisms to unload their morality and guilt.’65 At its best, Sierra highlights the inequalities of power brought about by the economic motivations of capital. At its worst, his work transforms menial and degrading human labour into a fetish, an aesthetic device, and a commodity. In this sense it has surprising parallels with Barney. Indeed one of Sierra’s works, The Penetrated (2008), precedes Barney’s use of paid pornographic actors in River of Fundament. In Sierra’s work, he employed more than 40 people for 250 dollars each to perform anal sex as part of a performance. The production contained eight different acts, each presenting a different combination of race and gender. For example, the first act described ‘10 white race men penetrated 10 white race women’, while the final act described ‘10 black race men penetrated 10 white race men’.66 The actions were filmed, photographed, presented in galleries. Photographs from the performance were also sold as individual art works. Reviewers described the work in surprisingly formal terms, focusing for example on the minimalist composition of the scene, including the placement of ten rectangular rugs on which the couples performed, the framing effect of mirrors in the performance, and the tonal qualities of the finished photographs. This served to deflect attention from the obvious: the presentation of an artificially constructed orgy, sex turned into entertainment. Scott Indrisek described the video as ‘studies in pattern and reflection’, while Amanda Church discussed the photographs as ‘rigid formalism and angular interiors’, leading to an aesthetic effect where ‘Neutrality of space and affect prevails’.67 If Sierra’s intention was to de-humanize the labour of the performers, and turn it into an abstract commodity, then the formal aesthetic devices helped to serve this purpose. Nevertheless, questions around the issues of exploitation, commodification and agency persist. As Church comments, ‘The question of the artist’s responsibility and

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the balance of power lingers: Sierra is treading a thin line between detached conceptual criticism and complicity with the very economic exploitation and human objectification he is critiquing.’68 While Sierra presents human labour as artistic content, very little context is provided, for example there is very little information provided about the individual workers’ social and economic context, their motivations for participating in the artwork, or their experience in the performance. Individuals are defined by the group to which they belong, for example ‘unemployed young men’, or ‘prostitutes’. By decontextualizing the workers from their usual environment and placing them in a new context in the gallery as art work, it becomes difficult to apprehend the specific conditions that result in their extreme alienation and subordination. In her essay Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop contrasts Sierra’s work with Nicolas Bourriaud’s advocacy of aesthetics, connected to a sense of social cohesion. Bishop argues that Sierra’s practice is ‘better art’ precisely because it does not pretend to create real change in the circumstances that it exposes.69 In response to the question of complicity, Bishop argues that complicity is less important than the audience’s reception of the work, privileging its aesthetic and critical qualities over the ethics of its production. Rather than offering the promise of social harmony, she argues, Sierra’s work offers ‘a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today’.70 In this way, she suggests, Sierra enacts a kind of ‘ethnographic realism’, the effect of which is to draw attention to ‘unspoken racial and class exclusions’.71 What is missing from Sierra’s engagement with low paid workers and socially excluded participants, however, is any sense of their agency. We do not know, for example, if the men and women that were tattooed in 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people and 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People consented to participate because of the money they were paid, or if they were motivated by other interests, for example to participate in an art work. Would they have agreed to be tattooed if it was not an artwork in a gallery? Similarly, we don’t know if the performers in The Penetrated were aware of Sierra’s artistic practice and the aesthetic context of the performance, or if they were simply working for money. It is also unknown if people were asked, and subsequently refused, to participate. This lack of context is quite deliberate. As Bishop explains:

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performance is outsourced via recruitment agencies and a financial transaction takes place that leaves the artist at arm’s length from the performer; this distance is evident in the viewer’s phenomenological encounter with the work, which is disturbingly cold and alienated.72

However if the point of the work is to make visible the experience of ‘under-represented constituencies’, as Bishop describes, the lack of attention to the actual circumstances and motivations of these subjects is problematic.73 In Artificial Hells, Bishop defends aesthetic autonomy over a consideration of ethics, arguing: If one is not to fall into the trap of merely condemning these works as reiterations of capitalist exploitation, it becomes essential to view art not as part of a seamless continuum with contemporary labour, but as offering a specific space of experience where those norms are suspended and put to pleasure in perverse ways.74

The question that such an argument raises in the first instance is the degree to which the kind of autonomy of which Bishop speaks is any longer possible; this is a world where the art work has been almost entirely reduced to the status of a commodity to be traded in the market as object of financial speculation, and where the life-world has been aestheticized to the point where individuals can experience their own exploitation as an artistic experience. Furthermore, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Empire, it is precisely through the specific context of production that the structural inequalities of society emerge, along with forms of resistance. They write, ‘The realm of production is where social inequalities are clearly revealed and, moreover, where the most effective resistances and alternatives [. . .] arise.’75 The lack of opportunity for resistance is an important sideeffect of the aestheticization of Sierra’s labourers. There is an assumption in Sierra’s work that people who are economically disadvantaged are therefore automatically disempowered. Sierra describes, for example, that, ‘The forgotten people want to communicate.’76 This statement implies that the subjects of his work are incapable of speaking. A similar attitude is evident in the reception of his work. Ruben Bonet writes, ‘The people paid for the action generally do not understand the project, immersed as they are in an act that transcends their comprehension of art and the business of 106

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cultural spectacles.’77 Yet without providing an opportunity for the participants to speak for themselves, how can we know that they ‘do not understand the project’, or that their activity ‘transcends their comprehension’? Sierra has also been direct in suggesting that poverty automatically reduces a person’s self-worth. He says, ‘A person without money has no dignity.’78 Even if this may be true of some people in some circumstances, such a generalization sets up a binary between those that ‘have money’ and those ‘without money’, which only serves to further stigmatise the people employed in his performances, and their lack of agency. Such an opposition is hard to maintain in the context of a contemporary financial system in which most people, along with business and governments, operate in debt to mortgages, credit and other loans. As Marx observed long ago in his analysis of capitalism, it is a system where ‘The capitalist robs his own self.’79 As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), capitalism involves a complex negotiation of power between workers and managers, managers and businesses, businesses and government, government and banks, between financial incentives and productivity, and it is a landscape in which class distinctions are constantly shifting as economies develop.80 This issue of the worker’s choice is particularly important in the context of the art world, where many workers choose to work with minimal benefits in the name of artistic freedom. As Lane Relyea describes, ‘Artists and designers are made into role models for the highly motivated, underpaid, shortterm and subcontracted creative types who neoliberals imagine will staff their fantasy of a fully freelance economy.’81 While Sierra suggests that ‘The forgotten people want to communicate’, this opportunity is not provided. Rather, communication is mediated through the artist’s gesture. It is not really the workers who communicate but Sierra, who expresses his own powerlessness to effect change. As he explains: I can’t change anything. There is not any chance we can change things with our artistic work. We do our work because we do art and because we believe art must be something, it must follow reality. But I don’t believe in the possibility of change. Not in the context of art, and not in the context of society.82

This position is, above all, deeply cynical, expressing a negativity and defeatism about the state of politics and social justice that resonates 107

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Figure 7. Patrick Robert, Civil War in Liberia, photograph used in United Colour of Benetton Campaign, 1992.

with Peter Sloterdijk’s observations of the cynical reasoning of contemporary culture. Sloterdijk describes this as an attitude of ‘Hey, we’re alive; hey, we’re selling ourselves; hey, we’re arming’, which reinforces conservative ideology by perpetuating the same conditions, without change.83 Sierra’s artistic position, which offers a detached presentation, or representation, of social injustice in the space of the gallery, has an interesting parallel in advertising. In the 1990s, fashion brand Benetton ran a very large and successful campaign that used photojournalistic photographs of horrific social problems. The campaign was overseen by an award-winning photographer, Oliviero Toscani, in collaboration with other photojournalists and included images such as: two hands held together by handcuffs, one white and one black; a photograph of AIDS patient David Kirby, just before death; an image of a black woman holding a white baby; an image of a terrorist car bombing; and a soldier holding a human thigh bone in his hands (Figure 7).84 The campaign represented a major shift in direction away from their previous ‘United Colors of Benetton’ strategy, which had promoted social cohesion through images that celebrated multicultural harmony. This previous strategy had lost impact amid increasing economic, 108

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social and political problems in Europe and North America, and as a result the brand shifted to Toscani’s strong and disturbing images, expressing a detached view of social life at its worst. As Henry Giroux explains, this appeal to the social real was a deliberate strategy designed to boost sales, as opposed to generating political action or social change: There is no sense here of how the operations of power inform the construction of social problems depicted in the Benetton ads, nor is there any recognition of the diverse struggles of resistance which attempt to challenge such problems.85

Giroux continues by discussing the problem of the way the images are taken out of their original context, leading to ‘a spectacle of fascination, horror, and terror that appears to primarily privatize the viewer’s response to social events’.86 The same could be said of Sierra’s work, where cheap labour is taken out of context and placed in a gallery as aesthetic experience. While the resulting performances, photographs and films might generate reactions of shock and dismay, the effect is de-politicizing because there is no opportunity for resistance. The effect is reminiscent of that associated with a news media genre recently described as ‘disaster porn’ featuring galling images of human suffering and social chaos completely removed from any broader historical or political analysis.87 As Dave Beech observes in a review of Sierra’s work, ‘The problem with the political instrumentalisation of art is not that it is politicising but that it is not politicising enough.’88 This is not to suggest that Sierra’s work should be ‘saintly’ in the manner that Bishop associates with the ethical turn.89 Rather, it is to suggest that a problematic and troubling engagement with issues of social justice might lead to a productive, rather than cynical, form of critique. What if Sierra had instead focused more explicitly on the process of recruitment, where individuals had the opportunity to reject the offer to be tattooed for money, or to perform anal sex for a performance, thereby indicating the potential for resistance? He might also have included his own labour in the performances; or recruited ‘cheap labour’ for an exhibition and left the workers to use the gallery space as they liked. Perhaps he could have used an exhibition budget to pay illegal labourers not to work, leaving the gallery empty. Why not focus on the actual use of labour in the art world by creating a 109

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work with exhibition preparators, interns and art assistants, rather than constructing ‘artificial hells’? Without understanding the full context of the artwork’s production, including the recruitment process and motivations of the workers involved, the individual differences of each worker in terms of their social and economic context, and the negotiation of power between artist and performer, all we are left with is a generalized statement about class division in industrial capitalism, taken out of context of the complex and messy reality, transformed into spectacle. Inequalities in labour relations cannot be understood in isolation from the means of their production, for it is precisely within the process of production that these issues arise and are contested.

Part II – Work as Art Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher also address issues of labour in art production; however, both artists leave the space of the gallery to engage workers from industry in a collaborative process that involves mis-using paid work time. In both cases, the artists prioritize the social context of their work alongside aesthetic concerns. While the socially engaged focus of their work appears to enable greater agency and transparency, similar issues arise in terms of the workers’ free will and ability to communicate, the transparency of their conditions of work and rates of pay, and the use of other people’s labour in the creation of art work. The majority of finance for the artists’ work comes from grants and public commissions. As a result, there is less information available on the public record relating to the sale price of their works or their market activity.90 This does not negate responsibility in terms of the way in which the artists use other people’s paid labour, and indeed raises other issues of complicity and instrumentalism.

Maintenance Work: Mierle Laderman Ukeles I’ve been up all night, tryna get rich. I’ve been work, work, work, work, working on my shit.91

These are the lyrics from rapper Iggy Azalea’s break out song in 2012, where she narrates the story of a young recording artist struggling to develop and establish her career in the tough music industry. It reflects 110

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the spirit of the millennial artist – through hard work, struggle, and creative talent she believes she will achieve great wealth and prosperity. It also reflects an ethic of work embedded in the creative and cultural industries, both in the form of paid jobs that support emerging artists’ practices, and in the pursuit of commercial professional careers. Work is now infused in the culture of artistic practice, presented as a force for potential liberation. Where in previous generations, artists might have protested against the idea of work to privilege alternative modes of human experience, the new anthem is reflected in Azalea’s cry, ‘work, work, work, work, working on my shit!’. Artist Mierle Ukeles takes this interest quite literally, exploring the manual labour of sanitation workers such as garbage workers, cleaners and maintenance staff. The difference between wage labour and artistic labour was the focus of Ukeles’ exhibition I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day of 1976, held at the Whitney Museum in New York. The piece was presented as part of a group show titled, ART WORLD, located at the 55 Water Street branch of the museum, a skyscraper with over 300 maintenance staff working to maintain its pristine appearance. At the beginning of the project, Ukeles wrote a letter to all 300 of the employees, inviting them to choose one hour of their usual work, and to ‘think of that work, that one hour, as art’.92 She then met each of them on their shift at random times, where she took Polaroid photographs and asked if they considered what they were doing to be ‘art’ or ‘work’. Her presence was presumed to influence and mediate their decision. She describes, ‘I would show a picture to them when it came out of the camera and said, “Is this art or work?” In other words, have I crossed your path during that hour that you picked?’ The decision of the worker to consider their labour as ‘art’, in this sense, was influenced by the artist’s presence. After speaking with each employee, Ukeles labelled the photographs with either ‘Maintenance Work’, or ‘Maintenance Art’, depending on their response to her question. These photographs were displayed on the walls of the gallery, forming an artwork that slowly evolved from a blank wall at the beginning of the exhibition, to an encyclopaedic grid of over 700 photographs by the end, a map of the labour of those who maintained the appearance of the museum as a clean, uninhabited space.93 The responses of the employees to Ukeles’ question varied greatly, from one worker who declared to Ukeles, ‘This is not art! This will never be art! This is not art!’ to others who embraced the experience

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including one woman who said to Ukeles, ‘I’ve been waiting for you every night for six weeks.’94 It is worth noting that these comments were not included in the exhibition itself, but were relayed by Ukeles in an interview with Tom Finkelpearl in 1996 and the exhibition contained only the photographs pinned to the wall. The goal of the exhibition was to make visible the labour of those who are ordinarily ‘invisible’, while drawing attention to the menial tasks of cleaning that are required to support the appearance of the museum as a rarefied space, emblematic of the intellectual, emotive and spiritual aspects of art.95 When an artist collaborates with people who are paid and ‘at work’, to what extent do such workers have the freedom to say no? In this example, the maintenance workers involved in the project were employed by the very museum that the artist was creating the work for, and they were asked to collaborate during their paid time. Ukeles asked each worker for their permission prior to taking their photograph, which acknowledges their agency and provides an opportunity for them to decline to participate. It is interesting to note, however, that every single worker consented. If the artwork was to foreground the choice of each worker in terms of how their labour was defined, surely at least one person would have chosen to opt out of representation? For Ukeles, this universal consent aligns with her belief that maintenance workers want and indeed deserve, greater cultural visibility. She described the final display of photographs as ‘a grid of voices of the people who didn’t have a way for their choices to have a cultural venue [. . .] Of course, there were many, many stories that people began to tell me about how they didn’t like being invisible.’96 Ukeles’ observation resonates with Sierra’s claims about the ‘forgotten people’, suggesting that the artist is in a unique position to give voice to those who are marginalised, and who would not otherwise have an avenue for representation. And yet the opportunity for expression afforded to the museum workers in I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day was limited to a choice between two options, either ‘maintenance work’ or ‘maintenance art’. This effectively excluded many other kinds of identification that the maintenance workers might attribute to their daily labour. Their images were then labelled and presented in a homogenous format along with the images of three hundred of their colleagues, further de-limiting the opportunity for each worker to express difference. The perspectives of the maintenance

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workers were mediated by the artist; both in the visual framing of their images and the linguistic framing of their work. This mediation also occurred in the artist’s subsequent commentary about the workers in public discourse.97 The risk with such ethnographic approaches to artistic collaboration is that the artist’s voice comes to stand-in for the multiple and differing voices of those with whom they are collaborating. In The Artist as Ethnographer, Hal Foster criticizes this tendency for the institution to conflate an individual artist’s identity with that of an entire community. He writes: I am sceptical about the effects of the pseudo-ethnographic role set up for the artists or assumed by him or her. For this set-up can promote a presuming of ethnographic authority as much as a questioning of it, an evasion of institutional critique as often as an extension of it.98

As a documentary project I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day was less interested in activating the political potential of the workers, however, than in drawing attention to the kinds of labour that are institutionally subordinated in the museum. Manual labour was represented as something important, even noble, aligned with the artist’s political views about the unrecognized labour of women in childcare and domestic service. Ukeles’ ongoing interest in maintenance work stems from her early career as an artist, where she confronted unexpected professional and personal barriers after having her first child. She describes a sudden shift from her professional life to the mundane work of being a caregiver, where her time was absorbed in maintaining her baby and her home. In an interview with the Observer, she explains, ‘When I had a baby, people suddenly got uninterested in me. It was like I suddenly got put into this box of mothers with children, as if they automatically knew everything about me. This made me furious. And I became a maintenance worker.’99 In 1969 Ukeles issued her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, composed of two inter-related parts; firstly, an outline of her position, and secondly, an exhibition proposal. In the first section, she observes, ‘Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.’100 Here she highlights the perceived difference between the domain of culture and the realm of work, which informs her ongoing commitment to 113

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improving the ‘cultural status’ of maintenance workers, both in the art world and in public service. In the second part of her manifesto she outlines a proposal for an exhibition, never realized. The exhibition, she proposes, will present her own maintenance work – as an artist, wife and mother – in the gallery. This would be accompanied by interviews with people inside and outside of the gallery canvassing their views on maintenance work, their daily life and ideas about freedom. A third part of the exhibition would involve the transformation and purification of polluted material and waste. Several themes emerge in the manifesto that continue throughout her practice, including the idea of elevating maintenance work to the field of culture, and transforming both work and material waste into an aesthetic experience. The manifesto focused on the artist’s own labour as primary resource and content for the creation of artwork, linking to ideas of motivation, volunteerism and unpaid labour in domestic life. This is somewhat different to Ukeles’ subsequent projects, where she has used the labour of paid employees, on paid time, raising a different set of questions about motivation, contract, obligation, power and choice. Where Sierra presented the obviously exploited labour of workers in the gallery, Ukeles portrays a more ambiguous worker-to-workplace relationship, where it is not clear if the workers are being exploited, or liberated, by their participation. Providing visibility for the workers’ conditions in I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day may have come at the expense of generalizing their specific experiences, and thereby reinforcing stigma. Along with the presumption that all maintenance workers want visibility, for example, is the presumption that maintenance work is demeaning. This leads to Ukeles’ interest in changing the cultural status of maintenance workers, elevating their labour to the realm of art. This aligns with the historical change from a manufacturing to service economy, and then from a service- to knowledge-based economy, where work is infused with workers’ desires and motivations. As Chukhrov describes, ‘capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods (and its surplus value) are produced; it absorbs all of the worker’s time, as well as his or her existence, thoughts, and creative desires’.101 By encouraging the maintenance workers at the Whitney Museum to view their work as art in I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day, Ukeles precipitates the contemporary situation where workers are inclined to submit to difficult work conditions and often

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impose them on themselves, if they feel that the work is creative. This personal investment in work means that paradoxically, many workers now lack basic provisions such as sick leave, annual leave, workers compensation, health care and overtime, and also lack the recourse to address poor employment conditions because self-employment and contract work has taken over from organized labour.102 Furthermore, the choice that Ukeles offered to the museum staff, ‘is it work?’ or ‘is it art?’ was a choice of perception, not of circumstance. The workers had no real choice but to continue their maintenance work during their usual shift. Exposing the ‘hidden’ workers of the art institution therefore benefited the museum in a number of ways. The workplace did not change – the museum continued to employ their maintenance workers for the same tasks, at the same pay, and in the same conditions – and yet the institution appeared to transcend this by reconfiguring their work as art, and through the ameliorative process of giving the workers visibility. Ukeles therefore inhabits a problematic space between critique and instrumentalism, most evident in the artist’s long-term residency with the New York Sanitation Department. The residency was sparked by a review of I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day in Flash Art. The reviewer, David Bourdon, made a wry statement that if maintenance work could be considered performance art, then perhaps the Sanitation Department could seek funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.103 Ukeles sent a copy of the review to the commissioner of the New York Sanitation Department, propositioning them to collaborate with her. The commissioner at the time, Anthony Vaccarello, responded positively, starting a collaboration that has spanned four decades and includes various projects from documenting the daily activities of sanitation workers to large-scale performances using trucks to create theatrical ‘ballets’.104 Ukeles’ first work as part of the residency, Touch Sanitation (1977– 80), involved the artist shaking hands with every worker in the Sanitation Department and thanking them for their work (Figure 8). It took her 11 months to go to every site and meet the more than 8,600 people who made up the workforce. Each time she shook hands, she said ‘Thank you for keeping New York City alive.’105 Ukeles spent 18 months getting to know the processes and people in the Sanitation Department before she started the project, which had a particular focus on the vilification experienced by garbage handlers. She re-tells the

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Figure 8. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance: Freshkills Landfill, 1977–80 (Talking with worker of the New York City Department of Sanitation), colour photograph.

story of one worker, for example, who sat down to rest on a woman’s front steps: The sanitation worker told me: ‘We were in Brooklyn. It was over 90 degrees, humid; we were very tired. We loaded a lady’s garbage into the truck, and sat down on her porch steps for a minute. She opened the door, and she said to us: “Get away from here, you smelly garbagemen. I don’t want you stinking up my porch”’. This story, to me, crystallizes denial; it was garbage from her, not them.106

Touch Sanitation culminated in an exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in SoHo, New York, in 1984. The show opened with a performance called Cleansing the Bad Names, in which Ukeles presented a tribute to this particular worker. She recreated the front steps of the story in a recuperative gesture outside the gallery. In her words, ‘to play time over again and remake history better this time’.107 She then presented a list of ‘bad names’ that sanitation workers had been subjected to, written across 75 feet of plate glass including the gallery’s 116

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front windows and the buildings next door. With the help of 190 volunteers and two-storey scaffolding, Ukeles then ‘washed away all the bad names’.108 The artist’s engagement with the context of the Sanitation Department in this long term project has been more intensive, complex and nuanced than in the earlier project at the museum. In the case of Touch Sanitation, the work spanned years and involved developing relationships with many of the workers. Ukeles was also able to appropriate and redirect significant resources at the Sanitation Department away from utilitarian activities and towards these performative, collaborative projects. The artist herself has occupied an unusual position as both worker and artist, contributing considerable amounts of her own labour in order to illustrate to the wider public that sanitation work forms a crucial part of their daily lives.109 In return for this investment of time and resources, the artist has received grants and commissions, along with teaching work, which financially supports her career.110 Moreover, the Sanitation Department has contributed large amounts of financial resources to the realization of her works, including the labour time of its paid workers. Ukeles describes: Sanitation never paid me, I mean they provide me with an office space in downtown Manhattan, phone, and when I have made certain projects they have provided in-kind labor, materials, and actually spent a shitload of money on a lot of my stuff.111

This raises the question of why the bureaucracy within the Sanitation Department – a highly utilitarian government service – have been prepared to contribute so much to Ukeles’ work, and over such a long period of time? There is a very strong alignment between the artists’ goals and vision, and the Sanitation Department’s own vision for public outreach. In 1994, the incumbent commissioner Emily Lloyd explained: Her philosophy is my own [. . .] She’s saying, ‘We have to understand that waste is an extension of ourselves and how we inhabit the planet, that sanitation workers are not untouchables that we don’t want to see.’ She advocates having our facilities be transparent and be visited as a way for people to be accountable for the waste they generate.112

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This statement captures the truly implicated nature of Ukeles’ artistic position – she is doing public service for the Sanitation Department in terms of communicating key messages, she is building a sense of benevolence and harmony among their workforce, and at the same time she aestheticizes the abject reality of rubbish removal, transforming it into a poetic expression of contemporary urban life. While in one sense she goes beyond the mimicry and re-presentation of social problems evident in Sierra’s practice, and starts to engage more directly with the social conditions of the workers that she represents, her practice nevertheless treads a similarly fine line between critique and complicity with the workers’ conditions. The gesture of reparation offered in Touch Sanitation, for example, which affirmed the value of each worker and symbolically washed away their experience of stigma, also has the potential to present a false image of transformation, disguising continuing inequalities and struggles that the workers might experience. A press release issued by the Sanitation Department in 2007 gives a sense of this cohesion between the artist’s aesthetic goals and the institution’s marketing objectives. Quoting the Sanitation Commissioner at the time, John J. Doherty, the release states: The Department’s gritty and essential day-to-day operations in keeping New York City clean and safe may not seem to be a muse for inspirational artwork, but Mierle Ukeles’ talents turned a collection truck into one of the Department’s crowning displays. The Department is truly proud of her work.113

Over the decades of the artist’s residency, the focus of Ukeles’ work has gradually shifted away from documenting the day-to-day conditions of sanitation workers, and towards large-scale public artworks that commemorate and express the important role that the sanitation system plays in public life. Some examples include Social Mirror (1983) a sanitation truck covered in mirrors; Marrying the Barges (1984) which involved choreographed performances where tugboats and barges in the Hudson River ‘danced’; Flow City (1983–1995) a public visitor centre inside one of the city’s transfer stations; and in 2001 the artist commenced the design process for a large public work at Fresh Kills, a new park formed on the site of an old landfill on Staten Island. Her 118

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proposal includes a viewing platform between two large mountainous forms that hold ‘150 million tons of decomposing garbage’.114 This affirmative relationship between Ukeles’ work and the Sanitation Department’s role in civic life has the potential to undermine her critique of the circumstances of maintenance workers employed in the Sanitation Department. In an interview with Tom Finkelpearl in 2000, Ukeles explains that the initial motivation for her residency was the workers’ poor conditions: It’s a very hard, ugly environment, very unforgiving [. . .] These facilities, in the seventies, were in abandoned jails, condemned firehouses. I mean, these were utterly disgusting places [. . .] If the city wanted to give a message to the workers that they are garbage, they couldn’t have designed a more efficient environment [. . .] It was so split, Tom, so alienated, so sick. [. . .] I mean, the disconnection between what is in front of your face, and what’s invisible, what’s culturally acceptable, thus formed and articulated, and what is outside culture, thus formless and unspeakable, was almost complete. It was so severely split.115

Here she describes the conditions of the workers in terms of fracture, conflict and injustice. The subsequent shift of her practice towards the creation of awe-inspiring public artwork that pays tribute to the Sanitation Department indicates a shift away from critique and towards recuperation. Washing away the written insults described by various workers in Cleansing the Bad Names, for example, was a symbolic gesture of amelioration. Indeed, when Ukeles describes the story of the sanitation worker that inspired the work, she refers to the collaboration as a process of healing: I realized he was saying to me, Listen, artist: This that I am giving you, this piece of my gut and my soul, isn’t personal for you, even though I trust you enough to enter into this healing with you. This isn’t your personal property; it’s your job. He was really giving me a job description: My job is to take this deep-inside 1:1 exchange and make it public.116

The result of this interest in healing and recuperation is a tone of benevolence that lends itself to heroism, attributed to both the artist and the Sanitation Department. As Mark Feldman describes, ‘Her sanitation 119

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art projects seek to bestow dignity on a typically undervalorized sector of the economic labor market [. . .] Ukeles’ sanitation art is her attempt to be a “sharer” in an ecological vision of the operating wholeness of urban society.’117 Ukeles perceives a direct link between her artistic practice and improvements in the operations of the Sanitation Department. This is evident, for example, when she describes an installation in the Touch Sanitation exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery. The installation was called Sanman’s Place and re-created the interior of one of the existing site offices used by sanitation workers as a pit-stop between shifts. It featured poor furniture and broken down bathroom facilities that reflected a lack of interest in the welfare of the workers. The exhibition coincided with a refurbishment initiative of the Sanitation Department, and included a display of new furnishings that were going into various offices around the city. Ukeles attributes the refurbishment, in part, to the increased exposure her work had created for the Sanitation Department, and she also attributes the high quality of the new fittings to her exhibition. She explains: They began to get new furniture during the time I was creating Touch Sanitation Performance. Many told me this policy shift had a lot to do with the attention I was getting for the workers from my artwork [. . .] Juxtaposed with the old section was a spanking new section, the first new furnishings. Well, the new furniture was ugly as sin, brown, fake-wood tables, and still reflected old rigid values: backless benches. ‘How about a back to lean on for a tired sanitation worker on lunch?’ I asked an officer. ‘I lean,’ he replied, ‘the worker gets a bench.’ So even though there was a long way to go, they were first-time use just for sanitation workers. It meant real change was possible, and that overturned the old received wisdom that weighed down the whole department. My art had a lot to do with it.

This sense of the artist as change-maker, lifting the conditions of the workers by making their struggle visible, is also echoed in critical responses to her work. Chris Sharp, in an article for Artforum, describes: This heroism becomes all the more clear when you read the correspondence with pleasantly stunned sanitation officials and the grateful accounts of individual workers, which ultimately invest the entire project with a pathos that is as heartbreaking as it is illuminating.118

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But what of the workers who were not grateful for the artist’s presence? What of the workers that continue to struggle with the conditions of their work, their symbolic isolation, the abjectness of their day to day work? New furniture is one thing, but how does this impact on the fundamentally fractured and alienated environment in which they work? While Ukeles resists the reading of her collaboration as simple charity, her response is to emphasize the aesthetic value of the work. She explains: What I’ve been trying to do all these years is to take all those things that have been behind the scenes, downstairs, things no one will talk about it, and pull them into the zone of things to look at. I’m not just saying, ‘oh you poor things, you’re having such a hard time, here’s a chance to let it all hang out.’ I’m saying these are important subjects.119

Here we see the crux of Ukeles’ position – the workers are brought into ‘the zone of things to look at’, their labour transformed into aesthetic form, their experiences mediated by the artist. This is epitomized by Ukeles’ ballets of trucks and boats, in which the individual labour of the worker is transformed into a stunning visual performance that evacuates their human differences; the worker literally becomes machine. While the effect may be aesthetically powerful, the process disenables the individual’s capacity for both expression and resistance. This problem also arises when Ukeles attempts to give maintenance workers a “voice” that is nevertheless directed and contained by the artist’s form. This problem was evident in a performance at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013 in which Ukeles interviewed one of the museum’s maintenance workers. The worker, Margaret Johnson, took a 15minute break from washing the museum windows to sit at a table with the artist, in front of a small audience. Ukeles asked her, ‘What do you do to survive?’120 The use of such a personal and probing question, highly charged, in the context of paid time at work, and in front of an audience of strangers, raises questions of choice in the transaction. What opportunity did Johnson have to refuse to answer such a question, in such a context? What if the cleaner was content with her work and situation, and didn’t want to be represented as a victim of social inequality, struggling to ‘survive’? These issues were also evident in I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day, where all 300 workers 121

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agreed to be photographed despite their option to say no, and the resulting photographs were displayed in homogenous repetition. While Ukeles lacks the cynicism of Sierra, both artists transform wage labour into aesthetic form that generalizes the hardship, sorrow, difficulty and disadvantage of the workers involved. This has the potential to reinforce, rather than break down, the stigma that they may face. There are connections between this aestheticisation of working class life and ‘class tourism’, where people experiencing poverty become objects of attention, subject to empathetic viewing that may reinforce a narrow view of their experiences and capacity. In a study of the representation of working class communities in social history museums in Manchester and Edinburgh, for example, Elizabeth Carnegie observes this phenomenon as ‘dark tourism’, where visitors actively seek out ‘dark experiences’.121 This raises a number of questions about the agency of those depicted: Might a construction of the past and present of the higher socio-economic classes, which considered them victims of centuries of tragically, misguided capitalist views and visions be an acceptable reading for them? If not, is it any wonder that communities seek to protect themselves through trying to influence displays through the use of selective memory, or by actively not visiting? Is the social history museum in danger of replacing the monuments to the Empire through eroticising and exoticising the working classes under the guise of empowerment?122

Another example with parallels to Ukeles’ interest in maintenance workers is the phenomenon of ‘slum tourism’. In Urban Poverty, Spatial Representation and Mobility: Touring a Slum in Mexico, Evelyn D¨urr raises the example of church-led tours of a garbage dump in Mazatl´an, Mexico, where middle-class tourists meet local people who work in the dump. While the ambition of the church is to raise awareness of poverty, and potentially improve the circumstances of local workers, the touristic dimension has the potential to reinforce class divisions and negative stereotypes, and in fact depends on the continuing poverty of the garbage dump workers. D¨urr explains: Slum tours rely on the urban experience of marginalization, spatial segregation and social deprivation. This also bears the risk of perpetuating stereotypes and preserving the slum as a themed space, displaying scenes and

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Even if Ukeles does elevate the status of the maintenance worker to that of ‘art’, bringing a sense of visibility and dignity to their work, this may only make them more inclined to endure arduous, difficult and unpleasant work conditions. The issue is not the artist’s motivation to create beneficial outcomes for the workers engaged in collaboration, but rather that the resulting artwork reinforces the structure that it appears to challenge. The class difference between those with privilege, who pay others to do their menial work, and those who do the work, remains. And the structural division between the artist who communicates, and the workers who are voiceless, also remains. This points to a particularly fierce criticism ˇ zek: of charity presented by Ziˇ

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images in order to match the tourists’ expectations. More often than not, vulnerable poor have few options and hardly any voice in these processes.123

The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the core of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it. Charity degrades and demoralises.124

In terms of Ukeles’ practice, the force of this argument may apply more to the institutional motivations of the Sanitation Department than the artist’s work itself. What would the collaboration look like if the Sanitation Department had paid artists to remove rubbish for a day, relieving the maintenance workers from their duties so that they might instead create art? Or in the more ambitious realms of speculation, if the system of sanitation changed entirely so that the work was shared by everyone, rich and poor, cultural elite and everyday worker, artist and viewer? In Ukeles’ residency with the Sanitation Department, paid workers were allocated time to work with the artist, under direction from their employers, as part of their usual employment. In the spirit of the new economy, this labour was reconfigured as enlightened work, presumed to be for the benefit of the sanitation worker. However those involved in both Touch Sanitation and I Make Maintenance Art 1 Hour Every Day were not given artistic freedom or an opportunity for self-representation, thus limiting their agency. In this sense, their labour was material, content, and mechanism for the production of art, 123

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Figure 9. Harrell Fletcher, Blot Out The Sun, video still, 2002.

while the structure of their work remained the same. How much are sanitation workers paid, how many hours of paid or unpaid work have they contributed to Ukeles’ project, are they acknowledged directly as co-creators of the work, have they received any financial benefit from the artist’s commissions and grants? The lack of transparency in the economic structure of art production thereby persists, in spite of the apparently explicit focus on wage labour.

Mutual Exploitation: Harrell Fletcher The final project to be considered in this chapter presents another approach to the use and creative mis-use of wage labour. Blot Out The Sun (2002) is a 22 minute film produced by artist Harrell Fletcher in collaboration with artist and filmmaker Steve MacDougall and Jay Dykeman, the owner of Jay’s Garage, a gas station in Portland, Oregon (Figure 9).125 While the project demonstrates a great deal of transparency in terms of the negotiation of authorship, along with the social context of the work and the motivations of both artist and workplace, questions remain about the performative use of Dykeman’s 124

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mechanics, their agency and the line between representation and selfrepresentation. Moreover, the extent of the collaboration and agency of Dykeman is so integral to the film that it raises questions about Fletcher’s own authorship. Blot Out the Sun opens with a close-up shot of a middle-aged man, who wears a blue cap and top. He is standing outside and a number of cars can be seen in the background. He says, ‘Hi, I’m Jay, and this is my garage’, before introducing a group of five mechanics that work for him. Jay speaks directly to the camera, explaining that he thinks the garage is an interesting place, with lots of different people passing through. He says, ‘I like to think of this as the centre of our universe.’ The film cuts to a shot of the garage from across the street, capturing a large sign that reads, ‘Jay’s Garage’. He then provides an introduction to the film, while walking around the workplace. He explains that he has always wanted to shoot a film there, and have it screened on the large white wall next to the garage. He says that somehow Fletcher and MacDougall found out about his idea for the film, and goes on to say, ‘I told them it would be a lot like Ulysses, by James Joyce, a book that I read and enjoyed.’ The epic novel, he explains, was adapted by Fletcher and MacDougall by having people in the garage read lines from the novel, written on cue cards. He then finishes the introduction by saying, ‘So that’s what this film is going to be, and I hope you enjoy it.’ In Blot Out the Sun, shots of the garage’s day to day activities are interspersed with mechanics and customers reading lines from Ulysses, often while going about their usual business of servicing cars. At times they stop what they are doing to read directly to camera, and at other times they speak while they are in the middle of activity. The first line is read by one of the mechanics from under the hood of a car, who says, ‘You’re not a believer, are you? I mean a believer, in the narrowest sense of the word.’ It then cuts to a close up of one of the other mechanics, with a handlebar moustache and a thick local accent, who says, with slow determination, ‘Yes, of course. Either you believe, or you don’t, isn’t it?’ The film cuts back to the first mechanic, now standing away from the car, with hands on hips, who says, ‘Personally, I couldn’t stomach that idea, of a personal God.’ It then returns to the second mechanic, who says, ‘You don’t stand for that, I suppose.’ And so the film goes, with a complex interplay of narrative and ideas, presented in simple exchanges between people at

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Jay’s Garage. The sound of people talking, radio music, the tinkering of tools and equipment, and cars passing on the street infuse the passages of text and sequences of images, linking to the very heart of Ulysses, a famously indecipherable portrait of the minutiae of modern life. The title for the novel Ulysses links to Homer’s epic poem Odyssey. Joyce’s novel was set in Dublin, Ireland in 1904 and tells the tale of an ordinary man over the course of one day, broken into 18 episodes. The novel is considered a modern masterpiece, and is famous for being difficult to read, full of puzzles, jokes and is very long with a word count in excess of 265,000.126 The unusual juxtaposition of the literary text and philosophical references in the context of a gas station lends dignity to the workers, transforming audience expectations of the cultural literacy of ordinary labourers. In this sense it recalls a discovery by Ranci`ere, who in the course of investigating the daily lives of workers in 1830s France found that contrary to expectation, they used their leisure time appreciating the aesthetic form of the landscape and discussing philosophy, demonstrating that higher cultural pursuits and manual work were not mutually exclusive.127 Another, less empowering effect is a potential tone of absurdity which reads as condescension. Audiences have tended to respond to the film with laughter, for example, which complicates a reading of the work as simply dignifying for the workers involved. Fletcher describes this as ‘delightful humour’ that results from the seriousness of the undertaking, rather than from a point of sarcasm or cynicism.128 Nevertheless, it is evident that the performers in Blot Out the Sun have various levels of literacy, some reading their lines with eloquence, and others with obvious difficulty. Indeed an important element of the aesthetic impact of the work is its site; a working class business, connecting to the narrative focus of Ulysses, or what Fletcher terms ‘common people’.129 In Blot Out the Sun we see a use, and mis-use, of the wage labour of the mechanics at Jay’s Garage. We also see a use, and mis-use, of the time of customers passing through to get petrol or pick up their cars. This is unusual in the context of a gas station, which is an industrial space associated with values of speed and efficiency; the greater the productivity, the greater the profit for the business. However Dykeman willingly gave over his workers’ time during usual business hours, and invited his customers to participate in the creation of the artwork. So, what were Dykeman’s motivations for doing so? Was it an elaborate

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marketing exercise for his small business, a tribute to the diversity and complexity of the local community that traverses the space of Jay’s Garage, or a singular artistic gesture by Dykeman himself? The project came about as a result of a $10,000 USD grant that Fletcher received from the city council to help realize unfulfilled ideas by local people. Fletcher had heard of Jay’s idea for the film, and this was how the collaboration began. He explains: I had heard of this guy, Jay, who wanted a movie made at his gas station but I hadn’t tracked him down yet. That was started me thinking about setting up a grant like that. [. . .] I got the grant and then I went and talked to him. He said he has been waiting for me to show up for the last ten years. He wanted it to be filmed there, and screened on this big white wall that’s attached to the gas station. [. . .] And it was just so interesting to me, he’s not an artist, he’s not a filmmaker, but how many people are there that don’t fit into a category?130

The fact that the project was funded by local council points to its alliance with institutional agendas. Although the exact details of the grant are unknown, the project is a good example of benevolent social practice – art is used to enhance the cultural experience of a local community, to give voice to those who might be considered marginal to the mainstream art world, to widen the audience and participation for contemporary art. Dykeman explains: You know, it’s a melting pot down here. We are in the middle of this industrial area, just on the approach to the bridge going into downtown. One day at the service counter had five different languages going on. It’s just a wonderful, interesting place to be.131

At the time of meeting Dykeman, Fletcher had not read Ulysses, and neither had many of the staff working at the garage. The first step in the process was for all those involved to become familiar with the text. This included, for example, Dykeman bringing in a recorded version to play in the garage, and discussions among the staff of the themes, symbolism, and style of the novel.132 The difficulty of the text became a means for greater engagement between the artist, Dykeman and the staff, and also inverted the hierarchical relationship between the artist, 127

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presumed to be the source of cultural knowledge, and the ordinary worker. Fletcher explains: So I read the whole book and spent a lot of the time being really confused by it, as I think most people are when they first attempt it. I was consulting with Jay periodically on what his thoughts were about it.133

After struggling with how best to translate the novel into the context of the gas station, Fletcher decided to use direct passages of text from episodes from the novel, in chronological sequence. The artistic direction of the film, in this sense, was Fletcher’s, with minimal creative input or collaboration from Dykeman and his mechanics. Before commencing filming, Fletcher printed a postcard with details of the final screening in advance, so that people who became involved incidentally in the film would be able to see the finished result. He and MacDougall then embarked on the process of filming, editing and producing the final cut. When the film was ready, a night time screening was held at the garage. The film was projected onto the large brick wall next door to an audience of over 200 people including the mechanics, customers, locals, friends and people passing by. Following the screening, Dykeman continued to play the film in the gas station’s waiting room, and regularly gifted VHS copies to customers and visitors.134 This ongoing presentation and distribution of the film suggests that the aims of the project were realized – Dykeman was happy with the finished result, which represented his garage in a way that he was prepared to share with customers, workers and local community; and the art work was disseminated to a wide and diverse audience. One of the complexities of the collaboration lies in the question of authorship. Tom Finkelpearl observes, ‘On the one hand, it is unusual that the initial idea wasn’t yours, Harrell. It was the brainchild of Jay, your community participant partner. Often an artist has the initial idea, and the details are created in concert with a group. This was the opposite.’135 This reversal of artistic authorship demonstrates an acknowledgement of the aesthetic and conceptual vision of Dykeman. Fletcher explains the importance of Jay’s artistic ownership, saying, ‘He bought into the whole thing, really, because it was his idea that I was facilitating and augmenting.’136 It also indicates an understanding of the benefits that would follow from Dykeman ‘buying in’ to the project’s 128

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When I would approach customers who had just driven up to get gas and ask them to read some lines, they would oftentimes look to Jay to see if it was all right, because they know him. He would say, ‘Yeah, do it. This is a filmmaker guy. He got my approval.’ That made a lot of people more

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development, which included the recruitment of the mechanics and customers as performers. As Fletcher explains:

comfortable.

Here Fletcher raises issues of trust when artists approach people for collaboration. This links to a legitimate fear of mis-representation. Dykeman’s consent to the project, therefore, implicitly applied to his workers and customers. While this suggests a more productive tension in terms of the artist negotiation of power with Dykeman, it also demonstrates complicity with the hierarchical relationships internal to commercial business, where the owner influences the terms and conditions of the experience of the workers, and by extension the customers. The project is indicative of Fletcher’s ongoing interest in creating artworks that engage with people outside of the mainstream art system. Like many contemporary artists, his practice focuses on the creation of experiences, events and interventions that work against the logic of the commercial artwork-as-object. His work also undermines the presumed elitism of contemporary art. His website details a number of proposals, some realised and others unrealised, that include ideas such as, ‘Attach a piece of art to appliances and furniture so that when someone buys the piece of art they also get something functional with it.’137 Here the artist makes fun of the idea of the autonomous art object, which attains value by virtue of its uselessness in order to escape the logic of commercial utility, and then paradoxically becomes a luxury commodity of even higher value.138 Fletcher proposes to misuse exhibition budgets, along with his own labour, to improve people’s houses, create personalized artworks at people’s homes, and to provide public services such as child-care. He offers, ‘I use the production budget to do a repair to some local person’s house or to buy them a new appliance or to make some playground equipment’, and ‘We offer free day-care for babies in the gallery for a day.’139 Often these proposals result in an aesthetic outcome. Fletcher photographs and interviews the various people involved in his projects, for example, which are 129

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exhibited. His artistic gestures are not purely about goodwill, in this sense, and the artist treads a fine line between liberating art from elitism and aestheticizing, even exoticizing, daily life and so-called ‘everyday folks’.140 More nuanced projects include the People’s Biennial, a large curatorial project in which Fletcher and co-curator Jens Hoffmann scoured regional communities across America to show the work of artists who lacked recognition in the mainstream art world.141 If there is one area in which Fletcher is particularly effective, it lies in challenging presumptions and stereotypes about the artistic merits of people who create work outside of the mainstream gallery system. The dominant model of community art, as encapsulated for example by the Australia Council’s Community Partnerships Funding Guidelines, is based on a premise whereby professional and ‘highly skilled’ artists go out into a community to provide ‘artistic and cultural development’.142 What is overlooked in such a model, however, is the potential skill and artistic merit of people who are already working in these communities, along with practices that might subvert values around artistic skill, for example in the work of graffiti and street artists or ‘outsider’ and untrained artists.143 In projects such as Blot Out the Sun, Fletcher unhinges this dynamic, destabilizing the very notion of artistic skill and merit by privileging the artistic vision of Dykeman, who is not a professional artist. Nevertheless, Fletcher is aware of the pitfalls of engaging with social practice from a ‘doing good’ point of view. He explains: I fear that if people have an expectation that I’m someone who could make some sort of positive change, that kind of pressure is not actually good for me to be working under. Instantly I want to do something opposite to that. And there are people who do social work and I really admire. I just don’t think I am one of them.144

He is similarly frank in describing the ways in which social practice can reinforce his authorial position. He says, ‘It’s a funny balance. Even when working with all these people, giving them credit and trying to promote them, the work still falls under the heading of a Harrell Fletcher project. So there’s still a lot of ego in my work.’145 From this point of view, and despite Finkelpearl’s observations to the contrary, Blot Out the Sun’s apparent celebration of Dykeman’s artistic vision can actually be seen to reinforce and elevate Fletcher’s own artistic role. 130

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While Dykeman had film screenings at the garage, reaching a small and local audience, Fletcher exhibited the film in major art institutions including the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2004. Dykeman has no resentment for Fletcher’s artistic self-interest, however. When asked about the film being exhibited by Fletcher in galleries and museums, Dykeman says, ‘I think it’s wonderful. Everyone should see it. There’s a lot of energy in that film.’146 This relates to Dykeman’s own goals. A wide distribution of the film means that more people will be exposed to Jay’s Garage, and also to Dykeman’s artistic vision, which was built into the artwork itself, as evident in the film’s introduction, where Dykeman explains in his own terms the background and context for the film and the role of Fletcher and MacDougall in realising the vision. This sense of mutual self-interest is evident when Fletcher explains ‘There is at least a certain amount of mutual exploitation in the projects, or in other words, reciprocity.’147 The use of the term exploitation is pointed in the context of Blot Out the Sun, an artwork that involved the use of paid labourers on work time. The idea of reciprocity is interesting in this context – it suggests that the participants are in a position of power to exploit the artist, just as the artist has the power to exploit them. While this may be evident in the relationship between Fletcher and Dykeman, the relationship of the paid workers to the project is more ambiguous. What of the garage mechanics, who also collaborated in the production of the film, transformed from industrial workers into actors? It is difficult to ascertain the degree to which they participated freely, or as in the case of the maintenance workers at the New York Sanitation Department, participated as a result of the expectations of their employment. Were they happy to read lines from Ulysses while going about their daily work, or was it a frustrating distraction? How did they feel about the way they were presented in the film, the laughter that was generated from their performances? It is telling that Blot Out the Sun includes variation in terms of how much, or how little, pathos is expressed by each performer. Some of the scenes featured people speaking in an impassioned tone, others in a dry, impassive tone, some with a smile and others with blank expressions. Despite Fletcher’s acknowledgement of ‘mutual exploitation’, which implies agency among all participants in the project, similarities arise between Blot Out the Sun’s use of paid labourers at Jay’s Garage, which served ultimately to benefit the business owner and artist above and beyond

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those who participated in the project, and Ukeles’ affinities with the institutional goals of the Sanitation Department. In both practices, the artist’s affirmative relationship with the workplace affirmed business goals over the interests of the workers’ themselves. Meanwhile the workers’ conditions of employment remain opaque, including their rates of pay, the extent of paid and unpaid time contributed to the artworks, the ways in which they were acknowledged in the various collaborative projects, and whether they received any economic benefit from the creation and distribution of the finished art work. Fletcher and Ukeles’ interest in working-class sites also has affinities with the use of ‘cheap labour’ by Sierra, suggestive of a kind of class tourism, where the empathetic viewing of subjects may in fact reinforce their position of relative disadvantage. An important factor that would help to address this problem is the activation of the workers themselves; a shift away from being represented to self-presentation; an opportunity to contest or resist their conditions. This is indicative of widespread issues of labour relations in the production of art, first raised in the examples of Abramovi´c and Barney.

Chapter 4: Conclusion All of the artists considered in this chapter create works that have significant force in aesthetic terms. As the discussion has demonstrated, however, any artwork that refers to issues of class division, labour relations and social inequality cannot be understood in isolation from its own means of production, including the paid and unpaid labour involved, the specific social context of the work and its economic motivations. The intention of this chapter has therefore been to provide a practical and tangible analysis of labour conditions in the production of contemporary art, set against the backdrop of capitalism as creative industries, in which labour is infused with the worker’s creativity and desire. The first part of the chapter considered issues of exploitation and self-exploitation among emerging artists and art workers. This included the case of Sara Wookey, a performer who spoke out about unethical conditions of work in Marina Abramovi´c’s art direction at the LA MOCA 2011 Gala Dinner, along with the use of volunteer labour on Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament film set, and Santiago Sierra’s unapologetic exploitation of cheap labour for the purposes of aesthetic 132

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critique. In the cases of Abramovi´c, Barney and Sierra, a paradoxical situation emerged of artistic critique working against itself, where the aesthetic content of the artwork disguised inequalities of economic power and privilege in its production. This was emphasized in the cases of Abramovi´c and Barney by the lack of transparency about the conditions of employment for their workers, only exposed by individuals who have ‘spoken out’. Sierra maintains a greater degree of transparency in terms of the financial payment of his workers, and the entanglement of art in broader economic systems; however, his detached and decontextualized engagement denies the potential for agency, and therefore resistance, from both worker and viewer. In all three practices, the use of other people’s labour has generated profits for the artists, their dealers, investors and collectors, while the workers themselves were employed at very low rates of pay. Moreover, the performers and art workers lacked agency while being subjected to arduous and demeaning tasks – Abramovi´c’s performers with their rotating heads and naked bodies splayed across luxurious dinner tables, Barney’s pornography actors urinating on demand and Sierra’s silent performers participating in tattoos and sex acts. While The Social Turn has been criticized by Ranci`ere and Bishop for disguising class politics and eradicating the potential for real political action, to respond by privileging aesthetic autonomy over the conditions of production creates the same predicament. The second part of the chapter considered the mis-use of wage labour outside of the gallery system, in the examples of socially engaged artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher. Despite the more benevolent and recuperative approach to the issue of alienated labour in Ukeles’ collaboration with maintenance workers at the Sanitation Department in New York, and the active collaboration of the owner of Jay’s Garage in Fletcher’s Blot Out the Sun, similar issues arose in terms of the agency of paid workers, the aestheticization of human labour, the potential for resistance and the transparency of workers’ conditions. This chapter has therefore foregrounded practical issues of payment, working conditions, expectations of staff, the economic value of art works, and the distribution of profits, in order to demonstrate that contemporary art is enterprise. As a result, the art world needs to consider new structures for organizing labour, distributing economic value and negotiating class divisions before it can attempt to address broader issues of social,

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political and economic inequality. Chapter 5 builds on this to consider art as social enterprise, with examples of organizations that attempt to simultaneously pursue artistic, social and economic goals, while also foregrounding transparency in terms of working conditions and the agency of artists. It considers firstly whether this model might provide artists with greater artistic freedom and economic independence from both public and private funders and secondly how the pursuit of multiple goals might lead to compromise.

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5 Art as Social Enterprise Kensington Gardens, London, evening. It is autumn, 2011. A welldressed crowd has gathered inside. A band of drummers in black suits rove the room, kicking off the beat for the show. Strobe lights illuminate contemporary dancers performing on stage. Next, the main event. A catwalk show featuring textile prints from Mayamiko Designed, an enterprise that crosses the economic and cultural divide between rural Malawi, Africa, and the inner city of London, UK. A centrepiece on the catwalk appears; an asymmetrical layered dress, made from a vivid textile print on cotton, with white, emerald green and royal blue zigzagging lines. Offset squares set in a geometric pattern create a psychedelic impression of diamonds. The fabric has been hand-made by artists from the Mayamiko Cotton Project, a non-profit branch of the Mayamiko enterprise. For this showpiece garment, the Mayamiko fabric has been transformed by collaborating UK designer, Lauren Solomon, who has emphasized the diamond motif by cutting out triangular shapes and layering blocks of white fabric between layers of the print, all in precise angles.1 The aim of the Mayamiko Cotton Project is to create employment for women affected by the HIV pandemic in Africa. They produce and sell hand-dyed and hand-printed textiles and manufacture garments for sale independently, and for external designers. Alongside these business activities, they provide training in sewing and design, and support microfinance initiatives for graduates of the training programmes. The initiative has two branches; the Mayamiko Cotton Project represents the non-profit side, which focuses on training and social support projects 135

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Figure 10. Mayamiko Artists Preparing Textiles in Malawi, colour photograph, 2014.

in Malawi, and the commercial arm of the enterprise, Mayamiko Designed, which generates revenue to support the Cotton Project (Figure 10). Mayamiko Designed is based in the UK and targets this market for sales, artistic collaboration and philanthropic fundraising. Mayamiko thereby brings together the skills of local Malawi artists in the design and printing of textiles, with the manufacturing needs of UK designers, combining a complex set of social, artistic and economic goals along with a for-profit and non-profit legal structure. The complexity of this enterprise opens up a set of questions relating to the idea of art as a social enterprise that forms the basis for the following discussion. Is Mayamiko an example of an art-based social enterprise that addresses the needs of artists in a capitalist economy, transforming commercial interests into human ones? Or is it a business that capitalizes on the artistic talents and lower labour costs of a developing economy, perpetuating a pattern of economic neo-colonialism? At the heart of this question is the degree to which the artists, the drivers and beneficiaries of the enterprise, are actively involved in the various layers of the venture. Who sets the direction, makes the decisions, safeguards the artistic focus and ensures the equitable distribution of profits in such 136

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a venture? Indeed, what should we expect from an art-based social enterprise, and how do we measure its success? In a critique of the economic conditions of contemporary artists, Angela McRobbie asks the art community to consider ‘radical social enterprise’ as an alternative to the existing creative economy. She writes: I would like to propose a renewal of radical social enterprise and cooperatives. Such self-organised collectives would also be a way of providing comparable working structures across diverse occupations such as social workers/community workers and artists.2

The effectiveness of social enterprise as a model for organizing artistic practice, however, depends on the ability of such organizations to manage the conflicting demands of pursuing artistic, social and economic goals simultaneously. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is artists, artist-collectives and entrepreneurs that have attempted to bring the art world and the domain of social enterprise together. It looks at the potential, and also the difficulties, of managing artistic, social and economic goals in these organisations, and considers questions of compromise, responding to the issues raised in Chapter 4. Do these new models of organization maintain space for artistic freedom and social critique? Can they deal with the interests of the commercial market while also pursuing non-economic interests, and do they generate social benefit in a way that provides agency for all those involved? And finally, does a social purpose reduce art’s critical and creative potential, as evident in the case of the ‘benevolent’ social practices discussed in Chapter 3? These are questions that art already faces in the context of a reliance on government policy and private philanthropic funding agendas, and in the inextricable enmeshing of art with the art market. In social enterprise, these questions are front and centre. The starting point for considering art and social enterprise together is the idea that there is no ‘outside’ of the market from which artists can operate. As John Lloyd argues, ‘capitalism [. . .] is both outside of and within us, giving its present forms the aura of inevitability’.3 This does not mean that producers and consumers have no agency. What it does mean, however, is that if producers and consumers want to challenge the systems and structures of late capitalism, then this engagement needs 137

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to start from an acknowledgement of art’s embedded situation within its complex economic flows. This acknowledgement is central to the model of social enterprise, which tends to foreground transparency in terms of financial structure, conditions of employment and specific social outcomes. The projects to be discussed in this light include Andrea Zittel’s retailing of garments by contemporary artists in smockshop; the income-generating activities of artists in The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle in Australia; Ghanaian textile enterprise and cooperative Dzidefo; trans-national fashion label Osei-Duro, the Women of Kireka cooperative in Uganda; and youthfocused social business Appreciate Design in the USA. These various enterprises are not perfect models of artistic organization or social enterprise. Rather they attempt, somewhat problematically, to navigate the territory of art in today’s complex economic system in a way that privileges art’s agency and role in society. This builds the discussion in Chapter 1 of the links between art, sociology and economics along with the discussion of the historical entanglement of art in social and economic systems in Chapter 2. All of the ventures discussed in this chapter emerge at the intersection of art, craft and design. This focus is not intended to be prescriptive but rather reflects the current state of the field. Social enterprise in the arts has tended to emerge in the areas of textile art, craft, fashion and design as opposed to the areas of exhibitions, dealership and gallery sales. This is partly linked to accessibility, in terms of artists being able to source materials and produce items with minimal infrastructure and cost, while readily accessing markets independently of curators and dealers. It also relates to an emergence of such enterprises in developing rather than developed economies, linked with a broader global development agenda, and in a context where there is a greater reliance on self-generated income due to lack of government and philanthropic support. With a continuing decline of public funding for the arts internationally, this consideration of new models of practice that enable greater degrees of financial self-sufficiency is of increasing interest to artists in a range of geographic and economic contexts. The intention of this chapter is to open up a set of possibilities for artists, in this sense, who might have radically different practices, and yet who are interested in exploring the potential of the social enterprise model. The projects examined in this chapter already relate to a field of expanded practice in contemporary art, where art is increasingly

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positioned as post-media, relational, drawing upon a range of source materials and interested in process rather than outcome. In A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss describes contemporary art practice as ‘post-media’, stemming from the impact of the conceptual art of the 1960s, whereby the differences between traditional art media such as drawing and painting lost relevance. As a consequence, artists ‘have recourse to every material support one can imagine, from pictures to words to video to readymade objects to films’.4 This coincided with an increasing commodification of artistic experience where all materials, media, and even aspects of the art market itself become homogenized. In this context, she argues, ‘every material support, including the site itself – whether art magazine, dealer’s fair booth, or museum gallery – will now be leveled’.5 Perhaps as a result of this homogenization, the field of contemporary art practice now extends not only to material and processes, but also to economic form, with artists such as Takashi Murakami starting to use business as artistic media. In 2013 Murakami collaborated with the owners of a popular high-end caf´e in Tokyo to launch Bar Zingaro, a cocktail bar, caf´e and live artwork, where everything was for sale, from the elaborate cocktails to the ceramics on the shelves.6 Social enterprise has the potential to re-orient the focus of contemporary art away from such obviously commercial motives, by privileging artistic and social goals alongside the quest for economic independence. It is nevertheless important to be aware that in many examples of social enterprise, artists may not be active agents in managing and setting the direction of the organization. This is evident for example in social enterprises that manufacture in developing economies but where the artistic direction, retail and management of the business occurs in a way that is disconnected from the context of production, or NGOs focused on gap funding for their social welfare activities rather than income generation for the artists involved. Questions around the exploitation of labour, copyright of artist’s work and a condescending attitude to addressing poverty and disadvantage abound in this field, raising similar issues to those discussed in the context of social practice art in Chapter 3, as well as in the artistic labour exploitation analysed in Chapter 4.7 This chapter therefore focuses on examples of relatively smallscale, locally-focused ventures where artists have a driving role in the enterprise, considering the degree to which they have agency

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Figure 11. Andrea Zittel, smockshop London, installation view, Spr¨uth Magers, London, 19 September – 3 October 2009.

and freedom in what they make, their conditions of work, how and where they generate income, how profits are distributed and how their activities support artistic goals. For the purposes of this discussion, artistic freedom, participation, agency and economic transparency are privileged over ‘doing good’ in terms of how art might generate social benefits. There are many new start-up social enterprises, in every creative industry from the performing arts, music and radio to visual art, craft and design, yet there are few developed examples that can provide direction in terms of the difficulties involved in managing such ventures, along with a tangible understanding of their benefits. The following discussion provides insight into how these difficulties arise and are negotiated in case studies of organizations that have operated for a number of years. If we are currently on the brink of rapid growth in this field, what are the conditions for success, and failure, in these types of enterprises?

smockshop In 2006, US contemporary artist Andrea Zittel launched a project called smockshop, enlisting a group of contemporary artists to customize a simple smock dress of Zittel’s design (Figure 11). The resulting 140

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one-off pieces were then sold at a range of pop-up shops inside gallery spaces such as Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, Spr¨uth Magers, London and Berlin, and the Suburban at Oak Park, Illinois, until the conclusion of the smockshop project in 2010. The purpose of these gallery shows was to generate income for the individual artists involved, many of whom were struggling to support their emerging practices. The project is relevant because it starts to facilitate a form of social enterprise in the art world, and because this enterprising spirit was born from a direct concern with the conditions of artists in the prevailing art market system. As the media release explains, ‘The smockshop is an artist run enterprise that generates income for artists whose work is either non-commercial, or not yet self-sustaining.’8 Moreover, as a result of being involved in smockshop, one of the artists involved, Molly Keogh, went on to start up a different social enterprise called Osei-Duro, which will also be discussed later in the chapter. The smockshop project was born as a result of Zittel’s experience teaching emerging artists at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she was exposed to the financial struggle faced by artists in developing their practices. The smocks provided a vehicle for artists to collaborate, gain exposure in the contemporary art world and at the same time earn much needed money to support their independent practices. Key to the viability of the project was Zittel’s established reputation and status in the contemporary art world. This enabled the project to get off the ground in the first instance. However Zittel’s artistic shadow played a role in the subsequent breakdown of the venture, due in part to the difficulties of creating and sustaining a ‘collective’ identity from the foundation of a single artist’s reputation. Zittel emerged as a significant figure in the contemporary art scene of New York in the early 1990s, working at the intersection of art and design with her fictional design company, A-Z Administrative Services. Playing on the idea of the totality of the alphabet, and the artist’s initials A and Z, the design studio became a platform for Zittel to performatively question the processes of design in consumer culture. This questioning has operated with differing levels of effectiveness and compromise, from the design of impossible products such as A-Z Carpet Furniture, which playfully subvert the idealistic promises of modernist design and upset consumer expectations, to the more questionable A-Z Cellular Compartment Units which made for entertaining cubby-houses for wealthy art collectors.9 In all of her

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work, Zittel expresses the artist’s struggle to find freedom within the dictates of contemporary global capitalism, and smockshop extends this exploration to the struggles of fellow artists. Somewhat problematically, smockshop encapsulated the complex position of artists in the marketplace, where financial concerns motivate and complicate the creative freedom and autonomy of their practices. It also attempted to provide a new model of financial support privileging greater self-sufficiency and independence. In this way it signalled a move towards social enterprise. Speaking of both smockshop and another of her collective arts projects, High Desert Test Sites, Zittel explained: Much of the time I’m trying to come up with a solution that will sustain these platforms without the need to apply for grants. I have been avoiding non-profit status and funding because I want to see if I can create something that is fully self-sustaining in its own right. Though for now I have to admit that most of these alternative practices are funded by income that I make through my commercial practice.10

Here Zittel is articulating the challenge faced by many artists and arts organizations trying to develop sustainable income sources that are neither purely commercially focused, nor purely funding-reliant. A paradoxical facet of the project was its emphasis on supporting artists whose work was considered ‘non-commercial’, by enabling them to participate in a seemingly commercial art activity. This paradox was neither accidental nor cynical, and in fact exposed the very impasses that artists face when they produce work that challenges prevailing social systems, while being intricately connected to those very systems. A key focus of the smockshop venture, in this sense, was to foreground production. smockshop debuted in 2007 at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. A selection of smocks was included in Zittel’s solo exhibition Critical Space, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, in 2007. There were many new incarnations and workshops from 2007 to 2009, including shows at Art LA, The Suburban in Chicago, and a temporary storefront in Chinatown, Los Angeles that also showcased events and screenings. The final exhibitions of the smockshop were in Munich and Berlin and then London, in October 2009. The group of artists involved, also known as ‘smockers’, include Lisa Anne Auerbach, 142

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Maude Benson, Daphne Boggeri, Michelle Brunnick, Emily Bult, Sonja Cvitkovic, Kenturah Davis, Tiprin Follett, Claire Fong, Karen Gelardi, Hadasa Goldvicht, Kate Hillseth, Donna Huanca, Molly Keogh, Tony Koerner, Carole Frances Lung (aka Frau Fiber), Peggy Pabustan, Mark A. Rodriguez, Mariana Saldana, Ashira Siegel, V. Smiley, Sophie Tusler, and Jason Villegas. A typical display for the project, exemplified in the debut show at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York in 2007, featured racks of garments, a dressing room where viewers were able to try on the clothing and large-scale photographs of the artists making the garments. The smocks had swing tags attached with prices averaging from $300–$350 each. In other shows such as the exhibition at Spr¨uth Magers in London in 2009, artists occupied the gallery space and made garments on-site with sewing machines and worktables in the space. This also introduced a performative element, emphasizing the artists’ work processes to the audience. smockshop thereby transformed the gallery into an unusual retail space where the products were highly individualized and at times bizarre, and in so doing exposed the gallery as a commercial space of exchange dependent on artistic labour. The distinction between what has traditionally been considered the work of art and the broader processes of everyday life, for example clothing, has been in the process of dissolving for many decades.11 A more traditional view of art that privileges total autonomy, for example the position of art historian Hal Faster, looks with suspicion upon the combination of art and fashion as symptomatic of the end of creative freedom in a consumer world. Artists such as Zittel, however, occupy this space as a site for potential resistance.12 This reflects the context of a rampantly commercial art market, where such distinctions between art and commercial industry are hard to maintain. smockshop forced its gallery audience to confront the artwork as literal commodity, a product in a retail space. The value placed on the smocks was both logical – in line with commercial clothing, for example – and seemingly random. Could all the smocks have a similar value, if the artists were all at different points in their career trajectory, the materials and processes were different, the results so varied? Were they artworks or products? Was there a difference any more? The finished smocks were incredibly diverse, ranging from playful to fashion-forward to outright dysfunctional. The quality of production

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also varied, with some items barely stitched together and others impeccably finished. This variety reflected the eclectic interests and sewing experience of the artists, along with their differently sceptical and affirmative approaches to the project itself. Molly Keogh, for example, was also working as a stylist and fashion designer at the time. Her pieces, which included a linen jumpsuit with harem pant-legs and a ’60s inspired white sundress with a fluorescent yellow zip down the front and ruffled sleeves, would not have looked out of place in an upscale boutique or fashion runway. By contrast, Peggy Pabustan’s contribution was dubious both in its wearability and its production. Evocatively titled ‘Kinky unisex olive corduroy tie smock’, the geometric dress featured a narrow panel down the middle, hastily attached straps that crossed at the back and fraying edges that suggested the fabric had been torn or roughly cut. If the garment were worn on its own, it would have exposed both breasts of the wearer. It also looked incredibly fragile, as though it might fall apart if touched, thereby undermining its supposed functionality. It was precarious rather than durable, it didn’t actually cover the body and the item might not survive the process of dressing. A couple of the artists also collaborated with a drawing group known as the Sumi Ink Club, who added a playful and absurd element to the finished smocks. Kate Hill Seth’s simple grey smock, for example, was illustrated with the shape of a face in profile, with spit erupting from its lips into the air. The focus on production rather than product, in this sense, enabled a greater opportunity for the project to allow for differentiation and commercial dysfunction. smockshop also foregrounded the production processes of commercial fashion. Each garment was unique and hand-made by the artist, rather than mass-produced in a factory environment. Audiences were invited to consider the process of making, either by witnessing the artists creating garments inside the gallery space, or through the curatorial devices of displaying patterns, sewing machines and dressmaking forms alongside the smocks. This presented traces of the human labour involved in garment manufacturing, which is usually purposely disguised from commercial retail spaces. One reviewer, Francesca Granata, described: the smockshop fully explores fashion as a ‘cultural phenomenon’ and engages its performative quality. It does so in the production process, which Zittel

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This focus on production while foregrounding the issue of the artists’ own low income brought into question the labour conditions of artists themselves. The very concept of the ‘smock’ has connotations of the artist’s studio. The smock is an essential yet often forgotten garment worn to catch splatters of paint, ink and charcoal and also relates to a spirit of childhood play. The process of making, exhibiting and selling the finished pieces as a group resisted the individualized and competitive nature of much mainstream artistic practice, emphasizing collectivity over artistic stardom.14 However the commodification of the end result – the smocks in the shop – prevented the project from offering an entirely utopian alternative model. On the one hand, smockshop aimed to generate economic and social benefits for contemporary artists struggling with the commercial demands of contemporary life. On the other hand, it symbolized the demise of individual creative freedom within a consumer world, where artistic expression is absorbed into reproducible products that feed the consumer market. It was the complexity of this juxtaposition that made the project a timely provocation; exposing the issues faced by artists in the contemporary art market, to the audience of the contemporary art market. It also presented an alternative to the mass production of consumer culture by emphasizing hand-made, individualized and sustainable production, while simultaneously exposing the desire for artists to create, make and work in spite of all social and economic constraints. In this way the smockshop realized what Deleuze and Guattari see as the radical potential of art in the context of late capitalism: its fundamentally creative and productive process, as opposed to its final message or meaning. As they argue in Anti-Oedipus, art is ‘a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression’.15 One important factor, however, compromised the seemingly collective spirit of smockshop: the role of Zittel as ‘celebrity artist’. The collection of diverse items from multiple emerging artists was packaged and subsumed within the brand of Zittel, who was quite aware of the problematic tension between her own status, and that of the artists involved in smockshop. Speaking in an interview with Alex Coles about

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and her collaborators are trying to reclaim as a tight network and a moment of community building.13

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the Spr¨uth Magers London show, Zittel shows a noticeable discomfort in claiming ownership of the project. She states: That was a really exciting project, but I have to admit that I feel uncomfortable claiming the smockers’ energy as my own. Although I’m flattered you liked the project, unfortunately I don’t think that smockshop was really a show by me.16

While she carefully attempts to evade taking credit in this exchange, the success of smockshop hinged precisely on her existing reputation and access to curators and galleries. smockshop developed as a series of exhibitions, presented by Zittel, rather than an independently functioning enterprise driven by the collective interests of the artists involved. The format enabled a complex critique of the art system from within the art system, but it did not go so far as break away from this system and develop an alternative model of practice. The smockshop artists attempted to address this by initiating a new version of the enterprise called, The Group Formerly Known as smockshop; however the project gradually dissolved in 2010. smockshop can be seen as a gesture towards social enterprise without realising the full potential of that form of organization. Staged within the conventional gallery structure of the art world, it was more a project or exhibition than an ongoing venture, and it was defined by the vision of one artist; Zittel. What it did provide, however, was a provocation and premonition of what collective social enterprise might be in the field of art. The social objective, in this case, was to support struggling artists with non-commercial artistic practices.

Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle A more developed venture, with a similar vision to smockshop, emerged in 2010 in Australia. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle is an initiative of artists living in Melbourne who originally hail from Pacific Island nations, with the aim of generating artistic and economic opportunities for the artists involved, along with a space for social connection. The non-economic values of the group included artistic collaboration and skill sharing, the creation of a space in which to address experiences of social exclusion, and the opportunity for artists to reconnect with traditional arts and crafts. They describe: 146

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beloved Pacific Islands are maintained and cherished. By investing in local knowledge, we are able to connect with Islander life and culture in our urban realities.17

Their economic focus included the generation of income for artists through the making and selling of works, while at the same time encouraging a spirit of reciprocity. Maryann Talia Pau, one of the founders of the group, describes ‘Our vision for the circle has always been to grow it and support women to create their own social enterprises based on crafts they love and that have meaning for them.’18 The group therefore embraced elements of commercial enterprise as a way of generating income for artists and to support their activities. At the same time they retained an element of resistance to the purely economic, linking to a history of artistic practice that has challenged the capitalist market by promoting alternative forms of trade. An interest in gifting and sharing, for example, is expressed in many of the group’s communications. In a description for one of their exhibitions, for example, the artists explain, ‘Hand-made, hand-woven and hand-gifted treasures will be exchanged during the installation, foregrounding community, tradition, and history.’19 In this sense the artists’ conception of how their art might change hands conforms more to the values associated with certain cultures in which, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss explained, exchange takes the form of gift-giving that embraces a much wider scope of human experience than the purely economic, that implies an entire network of social, cultural and historical associations between people and is embedded in a network of intense reciprocity and personal interconnection.20 The term social enterprise is useful here, as it speaks to the possibility of generating income while also privileging non-economic goals. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle describe process as taking priority over outcomes in their activities: ‘Through The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, we remind each other that the “making” process is just as valuable as a finished basket or necklace.’1 Making, trading, facilitating workshops and exhibiting their work are means for the artists to engage with a variety of audiences, including the contemporary art world. This reflects the interests and practices of the group’s founders, artists Lisa Hilli and Maryann Talia Pau.

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We realise more and more, that by being part of something like this, we ensure that these exquisite skills of craft and design unique to our

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Lisa Hilli’s practice engages a range of contemporary media including video, sculpture and installation, while maintaining a dialogue with traditional art forms relating to her Papua New Guinean cultural background. In her video and performance work Just Like Home (2008– 2010), she documented the ways in which her mother had adapted traditional Papua New Guinean cooking techniques in Australia. She filmed her mother preparing a meal of Ai gir, a vegetable and chicken dish traditionally cooked in banana leaves. In Australia, her mother prepares the dish using tin foil, creating a disjuncture between indigenous life and industrial modernity. For the exhibition of the video work, Hilli constructed large banana trees from tin foil, under which the video was screened. Alongside the exhibition, Hilli and her mother prepared and shared the traditional meal of Ai gir with audience members. The exhibition travelled to a variety of galleries in urban and regional venues across Australia including the Brisbane Powerhouse, Nexus Multicultural Arts in Adelaide, Colac Otways Performing Arts and Cultural Centre, Elcho Island, Footscray Community Arts Centre and Darwin Community Arts Centre. In projects such as Just Like Home, Hilli explores the ways in which social and geographic conditions influence identity, while also conscientiously traversing the boundaries of what is seen to be contemporary and traditional cultural practice. Similarities can be drawn between Hilli’s work and Rirkrit Tirivanija’s acts of hospitality, as championed by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics. An important difference, however, is the way in which Hilli’s work explicitly foregrounds the loss of cultural identity in Western society, and the conflict between modern industrial processes and indigenous culture. Maryann Talia Pau similarly confounds the distinction between contemporary and traditional in her practice, where the artist handcrafts elaborate body adornments using traditional techniques from Samoa and across the Pacific. In her installation work Find your memories, Find your stars, Pau engaged with both pop culture and cultural tradition. The work was exhibited as part of the exhibition Meleponi Pasifika at the Footscray Community Arts Centre, part of the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival, Melbourne in 2013. The focal point of the installation was a simple white dress-form mannequin sitting on the floor of a small gallery, near the wall. This kind of mannequin is usually used by dressmakers to pin and shape work in progress, rather than in the display of clothing in retail stores and evokes

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the process of making. Pinned to the mannequin was an elaborate chain of crisp white ribbon, tightly woven into geometric shapes. Each shape was the size of a human face, evoking the form of a flower and was woven to connect to the next piece in the chain. The negative space at the heart of each shape was that of a star. Strung across the mannequin like an elaborate couture dress in the making, the chain then spread out across the floor and crept up along the wall to create an intricate web of white shapes against the white walls, barely discernible yet striking in its subtle texture. Catching the light, the network of shapes, with their interplay of frame and space, star and shadow, alluded to the natural formations of wildlife and stars, while also connecting to the seemingly random nature of the creative process. In such works Pau draws upon traditional form, with its links to ceremony, place and identity, and brings this into dialogue with the aesthetics of contemporary fashion, drawing attention to the process of making rather than the end product. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle was less about the individual artistic goals of Hilli and Pau, however, than about forming a space for emerging artists and makers, with a goal to increase opportunities for income generation for women in their communities. The origins of the group were somewhat organic, beginning with the foundation of fortnightly and monthly gatherings which included anywhere between a handful and a dozen women. As people became aware of the group, the numbers increased and additional weaving circles were formed in different geographic regions. The group also shifted to a more enterprising model as their work attained interest and attention from the general public and art world. They began selling items and running public workshops to fund the growth and development of the group. From here, they rented a studio and started employing project and administration staff to support the development of mainstream exhibitions and public projects. A key project that accelerated this growth was the exhibition Pacific Trade: Occupation & Exchange, which involved collaboration with independent fashion label Alpha 60 as part of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week in 2011. In Pacific Trade: Occupation & Exchange, the artists inhabited one of Alpha 60’s high-end fashion retail stores, repurposing it for public weaving workshops, activities that promoted an economy of gifting and an art installation featuring a range of hand-woven objects displayed throughout the store (Figure 12). The artists made stars from woven

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Figure 12. Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, Pacific Trade: Occupation & Exchange, installation view of exhibition, 2011.

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ribbon, for example, which were gifted to customers who entered the store, transforming the usual economic exchanges of a commercial shop. They also gifted knowledge and skills by providing free workshops for members of the public to learn how to weave the stars, which also provided an opportunity to experience the social and relational qualities of the weaving circle. Their installation in the store referred to Pacific trade routes and migration. This included traditionally woven mats, a hand-made woven canoe, and an array of baskets, interior furnishings and adornments. Woven stars were suspended from the ceiling to hang over the canoe, referring to navigation by night. The front window of the store was transformed with a hand-woven dress made of brightly wrapped sweets, a play on the ideas of consumption, consumer desire, value and the superficial aspects of fashion. It was also referring to a traditional Samoan gift of sweets woven together. The Alpha60 retail store is known for a minimalist, slightly gothic aesthetic. The interior design of this store, for example, included a large reproduction of the dead face of Laura Palmer from David Lynch’s 1990s television series Twin Peaks. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle installations and activities were a strange juxtaposition in this context. Their living presence and vibrant objects, along with their focus on processes that subvert the usual economic exchanges of clothing retail, drew attention to the lifelessness of retail stores, spaces in which the end product is elevated and production is usually disguised. The incongruity highlighted the ways in which the contemporary consumer landscape alienates human interaction. Karl Marx described this commercial landscape as a world that becomes strange and dehumanized for the ordinary worker, where the commodity becomes ‘an alien object exercising power over him’, extending to the whole word which becomes ‘an alien world inimically opposed to him’.21 The artists physically occupied this de-humanised and transactional space, carving out a territory from which to raise questions of cultural exclusion and class divisions in fashion. The use of the term ‘occupation’ pointed to histories of colonization in the Asia-Pacific region that continue to be played out in both political and cultural terms. Here the power-dynamic was reversed, with Pacific artists becoming the occupiers, teachers and traders, while privileging alternative forms of commerce such as gifting and exchange. They did not simply create an image of social harmony, however, instead providing a space in which to attend to political and social differences. Tensions arose for

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example in the process of imparting traditional knowledge to members of the public, where the artists had to negotiate the boundaries between what they considered to be sacred knowledge and the information that they wanted to openly share, addressing issues of cultural appropriation and emphasizing cultural difference rather than homogeneity.22 After a period of rapid growth in 2011–12, the collective scaled back their operations to reconsider their original purposes, pointing to the difficulty of negotiating the competing goals of social enterprise. Pau describes this questioning process, stating ‘As a collective, it is good; it is the whole dealing with complexity and acknowledging it. What is this space for, who is it for?’23 In 2013 they returned to the simple original premise of meeting on a monthly or fortnightly basis in an informal way, without the pressure to exhibit and pay rent and overheads that had emerged through their expansion. This was a purposeful decision to prioritize artistic and social goals. The group describes, ‘Some things though are absolute and consistent each time we meet: we share a great feed, we enjoy hearty laughter and we grow a deeper appreciation for the skill and ingenuity of our ancestors and peoples around us.’24 Somewhat unexpectedly, this shift away from mainstream art world exhibition and profiling enabled the artists to have more time to make artwork. They were able to return to a process of making what they liked, as they liked, and according to each artist’s individual interests, as opposed to collective exhibition making. Similarly, a reduced focus on economic goals also unexpectedly enhanced the economic potential and benefits to the artists, by reducing overheads and expenses. Artists were able to sell their wares independently and as a group at markets and through their own networks, while the costs of regular workshops were funded by the artists themselves contributing materials.25 The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle is an example of the possibility for art and social enterprise to come together without compromising the qualities of artistic independence and critical engagement with social context. However this has relied upon an ability to navigate complex terrain, including adapting and scaling back the model over time when economic and artistic motivations started to compete. Staying small and focusing on opportunities for artists to earn income without huge financial risk has led to a more sustainable model; the group is financially sustainable without the need for, or dependence upon, external funding. However a tense relationship with commercial

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Getting my work acquired by NGV really set the bar for me. That got me thinking, ‘Wow, if I can make a breastplate and sell it for this much, then maybe that is how I could make some money for me and my family’. But it is deeper than that; it is more complex than that. It is so much about the

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economic value remains. Pau describes the ways in which artistic, social and economic values coincide in her individual artistic practice:

process and about community and culture and identity and my worth as a woman, my work and how I use these hands.26

Pau’s description of the cultural and social facets of her artistic practice, along with the economic benefits that are simultaneously intertwined within this practice, point to the role that art is playing in international community development.

Art and Development The impact and social benefits of creative activity, in and of itself, have been recognized internationally and now form part of a global development agenda. This was evident, for example, in a submission for the Economic Cooperation and Development Review in 2013 made by Irena Bokova, the Director-General of the UNESCO. Titled The Power of Culture for Development, the submission made a number of key recommendations focused on the importance of culture in promoting sustainable development, including the following: As a source of identity and strength, culture is a vital resource for empowering communities to participate fully in social and cultural life [. . .] Culture is a force for inclusion that is important for communities and individuals aspiring for more effective governance and increased cultural choices [. . .] The impact is especially important at the community level, where it can help empower individuals, improve living conditions and foster communitybased economic growth.27

This interest in cultural practice as a form of economic and social development was echoed in a report for the UNESCO Institute of Statistics by Hendrik van der Pol, who argued for the social benefits of embracing economic activity ‘at the crossroads of the arts, business 153

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and technology’.28 Practices such as art, craft and design, have a unique ability to combine market participation with social inclusion, as evident in The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, which brought together individuals in a way that was engaged with cultural context while also providing links to economic participation. While money-making may seem anathema to cultural activities, van der Pol argues, ‘Culture should not only be considered as a means (or a barrier) to achieve economic growth but also as a factor of social cohesion and human development.’29 This is not to say that art and culture should be monetized or commodified. Rather it recognizes that art and culture are already intertwined within broader economic and social systems, and indeed culture has become an important factor in worldwide economic growth. As evident in the cases of smockshop and The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, social enterprise is a model for organizing artistic production that can prioritize social and economic alternatives to the existing social and economic arrangements at the same time as enabling revenue streams for artists. Social enterprise has developed with precisely this intention of attaining a greater independence from both market demands and government support and this is where it is of interest to the arts. While the term ‘social enterprise’ only started to be widely used from the mid-1990s, its origins can be traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s cooperative movements in the UK and Europe, along with a different but parallel development in microfinance among developing economies.30 Cooperatives have ranged from entirely non-profit, non-trading entities to for-profit workers’ associations and banks and have been in existence for centuries. As the role of global markets expanded in the latter part of the twentieth century, along with the collapse of Communism in many states, cooperative models and associations declined.31 Meanwhile microfinance grew rapidly from a few small initiatives including Accion, a global fund that started in the US in 1961, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) bank in India in 1972, and the Grameen Bank that was founded by prominent economist Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976. The area of microfinance grew over the following decades into a large area of economic activity, funding the start-up of many social and private ventures in the developing world, though not without controversy. The collapse of many microfinance markets around the time of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been attributed to rapid

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and unregulated growth of the sector as a result of rampant profitmotives, rather than aims to alleviate poverty.32 The emergence of social enterprise as a force links to this history of cooperatives and microfinance, while also responding to widespread cutbacks in government funding across Europe, the USA and Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. Social enterprise developed from an interest in how the market might be used to address gaps in funding for social welfare and community services.33 With its strong basis in the nonprofit sector, it tends to prioritize social and community goals over profit-motives and in this way is connected to, but different from the microfinance industries. Indeed many social enterprises are not profitmaking at all, combining multiple revenue streams to pursue their social objectives which include grants and donations. In a field review by New York’s Seedco Policy, it was reported that of a random study of social enterprises conducted in 2001, the vast majority had lost money rather than making a profit. The report notes, ‘71% lost money, 5 percent broke even, and 24 percent turned a profit.’34 While such information might sound alarming, this is not necessarily a sign of flaws in the model. Instead, it demonstrates that most social enterprises focus on their social goals over financial returns, just as more conventional non-profits regularly post losses in their balance sheets. By bringing together income from many and various sources including trading activities, they have the potential to extend the potential survival of the traditional non-profit in a climate of low philanthropic and state giving. The advantage of art, craft and design based social enterprises is that they are often based on the existing skills, creativity and resources of artists and therefore don’t require significant start-up capital. This provides an important advantage in a developing-world context, where recycled materials can be sourced for production of goods and works can be created from almost anything and everything at hand. In terms of social enterprise, this also means that running costs and overheads can be adjusted according to the local context. Perhaps more important than cost efficiency is the fact that these types of enterprises provide other, non-monetary benefits for the artists involved, including space and resources to make art, the opportunity to explore and address issues of cultural identity in a changing global context, as well as skills development and participation in civic life. Nevertheless, problems of the artists’ agency and the division between material and immaterial labour in creative industries persist, as evident

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in the following discussion of the Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative in Ghana, Osei-Duro located in the USA and Ghana, and the Women of Kireka in Uganda.

Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative, Osei-Duro, Women of Kireka The Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative is an example of a small scale, local, art based social enterprise with a more explicit focus on economic goals. Dzidefo operates from an orphanage in the Volta region of Ghana, Africa. Along with producing textiles and garments for the local markets, they also manufacture for a number of international designers. Due to their small scale and remote location, they tend to produce quantities of items for customers on an ad hoc basis, rather than larger manufacturing orders which are sent to bigger factories or larger scale workshops in more accessible regions of the country. The Dzidefo group was established in January 2008 by a local Ghanaian woman, known as ‘Mama Esi’, who also runs the affiliated RyvanzMia Orphanage. Esi was assisted by Peta Hall, a volunteer who worked with the international aid organization Village Volunteers. This link to Village Volunteers has provided an ongoing source of skilled volunteers for the group, a strategy that has increased international links and opportunities for manufacturing and sales beyond the local market, which is limited. Their studio is located in the regional town Kpando, located about four hours out of the capital city Accra. This means that sale and distribution of work to markets and shops has been difficult, particularly as transportation by road is difficult and the costs of shipping and postage are high in Ghana. Dzidefo began with ten local women designing and printing artwork onto cotton fabrics, employing a range of dying methods that include batik, wax and woodblock printing. African textiles are popular in the local markets, especially in the tourist market, while also supporting a vibrant fashion scene in Ghana. The production and sale of fabrics has been a good income source for the cooperative while also enabling a greater degree of artistic freedom for the artists; rather than being commissioned to produce particular work, for example, the artists are able to experiment with materials and ideas. Due to the economic and social conditions of rural Ghana, economic goals are a priority for the group, and as a result their practice has a more obviously utilitarian and economically oriented focus, than might be expected from a

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similar cooperative of artists in a more developed context. While it is easy to sideline these types of marginal artistic practices in developing countries, due to their absence in the context of mainstream art spaces, private galleries and museums, such blind-spots are conspicuous in the context of the expanded field of contemporary art, where it is understood that artists engage with a vast array of materials and contexts both inside and outside of the gallery system and across geographic borders.35 Moreover, art collectors are taking an increasing interest in art work from developing contexts, because of (and not in spite of ) its differences to mainstream contemporary art. In an article for Business Week, Thane Peterson advises art collectors to look at the work of emerging artists in India, Russia, Poland, Cuba and China.36 Despite this increasing trans-nationalism, however, artistic practices remain deeply influenced by the local context in which they work, including state and market forces. As Victoria Alexander and Marilyn Rueschemeyer describe: Through its policies and actions, a state affects the production, distribution, and reception of artworks, and it can have a profound impact on individual artists as they pursue their vocation [. . .] ‘The state’ is often contrasted with ‘the market’. We argue that this simple dichotomy may lead us to miss seeing how the state enacts the market and how the market, along with the state, both supports and controls artists.37

This helps to account for why independent artistic practice in Ghana might emerge in the form of textile arts, where in London it may emerge in the form of video and performance. The influence of the state and the market in a particular context like Ghana impacts not only on the economic support available for artists, but also on the way artistic freedom and critique might be understood and expressed. As Alexander and Rueschemeyer describe, ‘issues of freedom and repression are complex in ways that render simplistic comparisons among states problematic’.38 An example that helps to illustrate this point is the case of internationally acclaimed Kenyan photographer Boniface Mwangi, who renounced the medium of photography in protest at government corruption, and instead took up collective political street art in the streets of Nairobi, entirely outside of the mainstream art system, both internationally and locally. In ‘Africa Rising’, an article published in Time magazine, Alex Perry describes: 157

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Aerosol stencils of vultures began to appear on sidewalks and road crossings. Then more-elaborate murals appeared – of vultures urinating and wiping their backsides on the Kenyan flag. One February night, Mwangi’s group painted a 40-ft. tableau on a downtown wall, depicting a smirking, suited vulture sitting next to a list of what the artists saw as Kenyan politicians’ crimes since independence. ‘MPs–screwing Kenyans since 1963’, read the caption.39

The context of Ghana is very different to that of Kenya, and the point of this example is not to create comparisons but to illustrate the importance of differences in social and political context. The village of Kpando, where Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative resides, is one of extreme poverty, which helps to account for the artists’ focus on income-generation and the creation of more utilitarian products. Economic limitations also have an impact upon what the artists can afford to produce. As raw cotton is quite expensive, when it comes to producing items for the local market, the artists prefer to make smaller works that use less fabric, which also reduces production time. Along with sales of fabric by the yard, items such as children’s clothing, toys, bags and accessories have been the most practical to produce from this point of view. While the economic goals of the enterprise are clearly an important driver in the artists’ practices, money represents only one part of their story. The walls of the studio and orphanage are covered in mural paintings, and nearly every surface is abundantly covered with brightly dyed fabrics and works in progress. Textile printing attracts a range of artists and makers, both from within the cooperative and from the broader community, including the children living in the Ryvanz-Mia Orphanage. Artists continue to participate and create work during quiet times when production and sales are low pointing to the fact that income-generation is not their sole motivation. The strong engagement and agency of the artists means that the sustainability of the cooperative can’t be measured along purely economic lines. The artwork itself tells an important story. In one abstract geometric print, for example, bright orange squares are interposed with white space to create a rippling optical effect. White cotton is first printed with a grid in orange. Squares of orange paint are then placed between the orange lines with varying sizes and shapes, creating an effect of constant variation within the same. Sections of the fabric are cut 158

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and sewn together to change the direction of the geometric print, creating an architectural sense of three-dimensional space. Each shape and line has been printed separately, so that the resulting pattern is utterly unique and non-reproducible. In another print, this time vivid yellow, a similar grid and block technique is used but the square format is transformed with more complex multi-angled pyramid shapes and diagonal lines. Larger areas of negative space in yellow bring the white lines to the front of view, appearing to float across the surface, thus inverting the relationship between foreground and background. In another work, intricate layers of varying colour overlap to create a vibrant spider-web effect. Yellow, green, brown, and orange play off each other while retaining their differences. Techniques of tie-dyeing, wax and block printing have all combined in the resulting network that has an incredible textural depth. The seeming randomness of the finished design belies the careful layering and time-involved processes of the work. One of Dzidefo’s previous international clients was the US fashion label Osei-Duro, established by US designers Maryanne Mathias and Molly Keogh in 2009. Keogh had been involved in Andrea Zittel’s smockshop enterprise. The start-up of Osei-Duro coincided with the peak, and subsequent dissipation, of the smockshop exhibitions in 2009. The label sells to the US market, but produce in collaboration with local artisans in Ghana. They describe their business in terms of social goals: We produce our textiles and garments in Ghana, applying traditional techniques such as hand dyeing and weaving. We aim to support the local apparel industry – on both a large and small scale – in becoming sustainable. We work towards a vibrant fashion industry, one that exceeds international production standards while respecting the rights and aesthetics of local makers.40

Despite this social focus, Osei-Duro has a private and for-profit governance structure, and in this sense is positioned more on the business end of the social enterprise spectrum. Nevertheless, the designers prioritize the environmental and social lens through which they work, along with the aesthetic value of their work and collaboration. With a model that combines local artisans with international trade, a for-profit 159

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Figure 13. (Left) Osei-Duro and Dzidefo Collaboration, 2010. (Right) Exterior view of Dzidefo workshop in Kpando, Ghana, 2012.

structure with socially engaged motivations, Osei-Duro provides a more problematic example of an art-based social enterprise. The following discussion explores the lack of ownership and participation of collaborating artists in this model, along with the dangers and potential benefits of trying to ‘do good’ through social enterprise. If social enterprise is to be a model that enables independent artistic practice with flow-on economic and social benefits, then the agency and active participation of artists is a key consideration, and is equally relevant across different geographic and economic contexts. The Osei-Duro designers collaborate with approximately 20 local makers, from textile design to embroidery and crochet, and at one point this included Dzidefo (Figure 13). The relationship of Osei-Duro to Dzidefo was short-lived, however, pointing to the difficulties of bringing together a community-driven and grass roots artistic practice, as is the case in Dzidefo, with the commercial demands of a forprofit enterprise in a fast and furious marketplace like the USA. The cooperative were contracted for manufacturing work. After a few small production runs, the variation in quality and efficiency was too unpredictable for the commercial requirements of Osei-Duro’s 160

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model, leading to the end of their collaboration. In the realm of art, variation and difference are highly valued qualities. However in the realm of commercial fashion production, sameness and consistency are qualities that trump individuation. This raises the question of whether an art enterprise can translate, and indeed whether it should translate, directly into a commercial market such as fashion. In the example of Dzidefo, the group lost potential revenue by not meeting Osei-Duro’s expectations; however, this might have been for the benefit of their ongoing artistic and creative goals. Dzidefo don’t push their artists to focus on speed, efficiency and repetition at the cost of time for experimentation, individuation and process. This approach to production is indicative of the nonindustrial, or rather human-focused, approach of the artists. Where mainstream industry operates by minimizing inefficiencies, labour time and regulation, in order to maximize profit, or what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe as ‘streamlining’, the artists instead prioritize the creative process of making. In the context of a developed art market, this extra time might nevertheless translate into surplus value, connected to the commodification of knowledge and creativity.41 However in the context of the local Ghanaian market, and the commercial fashion market targeted by Osei-Duro, where profits rise as labour costs fall, Dzidefo’s ‘slow’ practice is counter-intuitive to the local economic system. As Keti Chukhrov argues, it is precisely this presumed separation between ‘immaterial’ labour in developed countries and ‘material labour’ in developing countries that reveals the continuing prevalence of class divisions and economic inequality in the creative industries.42 As for Osei-Duro, the enterprise continues to work with many other cooperatives and individual artists in Ghana along more conventional and economically rational lines. This benefits their fashion label in a number of ways. They have access to highly skilled and creative textile artists and craftspeople, which brings a strong aesthetic pointof-difference to their finished work. It also means that the business can produce ethically in a lower-cost economy, while creating indirect social benefits to the Ghanaian community. Many advocates working in the space of development in Africa are pushing for exactly these kinds of opportunities to collaborate with international industry. Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon argues:

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Africa does not need charity – Africa needs investment and partnership [. . .] Joining forces with civil society and private sector, including non-traditional players like the fashion industry, has become indispensable.43

One of the complexities of this business model, however, is the integration of traditional Ghanaian aesthetics into a non-Ghanaian product, which draws upon the talents of local artists to create work for a US-owned and managed business. Contributing artists certainly benefit financially from the opportunity to collaborate; however, they are not necessarily credited or acknowledged for their creative input. What role do the local artists play in managing the distribution and reception of their creative work, and influencing the ways in which they are represented by the marketing and communications of the fashion label? Such questions about cultural appropriation abound in the field of fashion, and have come to the fore internationally in recent times. A number of high-profile cases have emerged in the USA in relation to the appropriation of Native American design and language. In 2011, the large commercial brand Urban Outfitters released a line of products labelled ‘Navajo’, directly referencing the largest tribal group of the United States. The Navajo community has an independently recognized government, the Navajo Nation, which presides over a large territory including parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The fashion label Urban Outfitters used the trade-marked name without consulting with the Navajo community, and attached it to a range of products that included jewellery, underwear, accessories and clothing, all with various references to the community’s art and culture. The issue gained media attention after a customer wrote an open letter to the CEO of the brand describing the ways in which the appropriation of Navajo language and culture was offensive. She wrote, ‘It’s an example of the passive, subtle racism and cultural appropriation that is ongoing.’44 In a similar situation in 2013, H&M pulled a feathered headdress from their shelves in Canada due to backlash about cultural appropriation.45 Other examples include Victoria’s Secret and Karl Lagerfeld, who have also appropriated references to Navajo culture.46 African textiles have been on the rise in international fashion, creating debate about the trade-off between potential economic and social benefits that might accrue for various textile producers and manufacturers, on the one hand, and potential exploitation on the

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other. Jasmin Malik Chua describes this situation for Ecouterre, an international fashion industry journal, where she writes, ‘With Africa’s sartorial influence on the ascent, one question begs to be asked: Should the practice be lauded as diversifying fashion or is it just a different form of post-colonial exploitation?’47 It is certainly arguable that this increasing interest in African design has led to economic and social opportunities for local artists and communities; by stimulating the growth of manufacturing in Africa and creating a market demand for textile exports, as articulated by Ban Ki-moon.48 In the case of Osei-Duro, the branding of the label makes an explicit acknowledgement of their link to Ghanaian producers, and their collaborators stand to benefit greatly from the opportunity to get their products to an international market. However the business model, with two North American designers building a label based on African aesthetics and distributing this in an increasingly homogenous fashion landscape, is representative of a much larger and more complex problem; the problem of power differentials and profit-motives in a global economy. For every socially engaged and conscientious business like Osei-Duro, there are many more purely commercial ventures that source culturally-specific artworks for textile designs and have them mass-produced, without any engagement with the original artisans. The issue of attribution and ownership is of particular issue in the arts, where creative freedom often involves a deliberate disregard for the concepts of ownership and originality in sourcing material for mixed-media artworks, and yet paradoxically, the identity of the artist is paramount in the exhibition and sale of the finished work. As Isabel Graw argues, ‘Parallel to developments in the music and film industries, the art industry now obeys the logic of celebrity.’49 Australian fashion label PAM came under attack for precisely these issues of cultural appropriation in their exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014. As part of a larger survey of contemporary art, design and culture called Melbourne Now, the designers presented life-size cardboard cutouts of white models wearing a mix of traditional African clothing and accessories. Artist Nathan Gray defended their work in the name of artistic freedom. He argued, ‘The practice is irreverent, i.e. it lacks a reverence for any culture.’50 He also suggested that these kinds of practices, where artists traverse cultural differences, could be productive. In his words, ‘Cultural cross-fertilisation can be mind-blowing.’51 While many artists defend their free use of cultural references in a spirit of

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artistic freedom, the counter-argument is that in the context of global capitalism, with a large differential of power between developed and developing countries, such creative licence masks the damaging impact of economic colonization. As Andrew Self argues: High fashion and art are always looking for the artistic camouflages that capture the essence of innocence and design. Of course, fashion as design is a worthy pursuit. But when it is motivated purely for profit, it can only follow the colonial logic of late capitalism.52

Those with power and money have freedom to sample from global cultural references to appeal to a broad marketplace, while local communities are faced with the potential loss of their cultural autonomy and agency. This is an issue of particular relevance for social enterprises in developing economies, where businesses may be started by aid organizations or ambitious social entrepreneurs who come and go without a deep engagement with local context. This was the situation, for example, in the art-based social enterprise Women of Kireka. The organization was started in 2004 and based in the Wakiso District in Kampala, Uganda – an area of extreme poverty, high rates of infectious disease and poor access to social services. The cooperative started with 14 women, who produced jewellery and accessories using recycled materials such as food packaging and paper. The group started up as a non-profit model, with the assistance and direction of two expatriate development workers who sold the products through their social and professional networks to an international market, before transitioning out of the enterprise in 2009. A local NGO called Project Diaspora then assisted the group to re-develop the model and in 2011 the business was handed over to the women to manage independently. Initially, most of the group’s sales had been facilitated by their foreign national founders, who transported the goods overseas and sold them online and through their professional and personal networks. With the transition of the founders out of the enterprise, the women were left with no market to sell to, no space to work from and few resources to access a new customer base. Their engagement in the artistic practice meant that despite these financial and logistical issues, the artists continued to meet and pursue their activities. In this way their cooperative was similar to Dzidefo, where sustainability related 164

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to human investment rather than financial capital. The Women of Kireka, however, had less agency and ownership of the enterprise in its early development, particularly in terms of developing products and identifying appropriate markets for the sale of their wares. As a result, the artists had become dependent on external agents to provide direction and facilitate sales. This made it difficult to respond to changing market conditions and the withdrawal of external support. As a result of these complexities, in 2012 the group started working with a local Ugandan small business incubator, the Community Women’s Enterprise Network (CWEN). This support enabled the start-up of alternative, more viable economic projects for the women, including, for example, a small restaurant at a nearby quarry, and a mushroom farm. While the women in the cooperative continued their artistic practice, this was no longer the focus of their economic development goals. The local market for art in Uganda is limited, and tourists tend to shop in precincts close to their hotels and with high levels of security. The women had almost no avenue to sell to overseas markets. Their experience therefore provides a cautionary tale for ambitious social entrepreneurs. Jon Hugget, an advisor in the field of social enterprise, warns against the tendency to celebrate the heroic individual in philanthropy and social enterprise, which often inflates the perceived importance of highly educated, articulate, networked individuals. As he argues, this focus on the ‘meritorious’ individual is often at the expense of valuing the collaborative work and efforts of the communities who are intended to benefit. He describes this in terms of a ‘meritocracy’, arguing: Meritocrats in government and philanthropy give support, contracts and capital to those they trust. Trustees are usually well-spoken and well-heeled. Awards ceremonies can show a hierarchy, with the great and the good at the top, the entrepreneur in the middle, and the ‘beneficiaries’ at the bottom.53

Instead, he suggests that social enterprise should embrace more of a ground-up approach, providing tools and opportunities to those who seek to benefit, rather than those who seek to help. In his words, ‘the best way to solve social problems was to give power to those with the problem, who are rarely meritocrats themselves’.54 While this was evident in the example of Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative, which 165

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privileged the artists’ involvement and ownership, the lack of artist participation in the management and creative direction of Osei-Duro raises questions about cultural appropriation. The Women of Kireka’s journey, meanwhile, involved a number of development hurdles that eventually resulted in the artists having a greater sense of ownership. This question of power in social enterprise points to an issue that is relevant for all arts-based social enterprises – the degree to which artists and art workers can also respond to problems in the enterprise structure.

Failure When art and social enterprise come together, artists need to recognize when the interplay of artistic, social and economic dimensions leads to compromise. This is no easy task, particularly if an enterprise is already established, has received funding with expectations of economic performance, and has stakeholders with an interest in its continuing success. A relevant example to consider in this context is the New York arts organization The Reciprocity Foundation, which started in 2004 with a split model composed of a non-profit arm and a social enterprise arm called Appreciate Design. The organization experienced significant challenges in its early development, particularly with the advent of the global financial crisis, which hit the USA with full force in 2008. It was wound-up in 2010, partly due to these external economic circumstances and partly because the organization recognized a conflict between its economic structure and artistic and social goals. Reciprocity Foundation use media arts and graphic design as a vehicle for professional and personal development for young people aged 15–23 years. They have a particular focus on those who identify as youth of colour and youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBTI). They focus on providing opportunities to those who are at high risk of dropping out of school, have difficulty obtaining employment or are at-risk of homelessness. In this way they have explicit socially motivated artistic goals. Their programmes operate through youth homeless shelters and foster care agencies and their main success has been in engaging youth through arts projects, which is integrated with counselling and holistic health programmes to develop resilience and capacity. The social venture, Appreciate Design, created employment for some of the youth involved in their programmes by providing commercial design services along with the 166

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Appreciate’s vision is to become America’s first youth-led design firm [. . .] Our contributions to the nonprofit support high-skill, high-wage opportunities for youth interested in jobs in the creative economy.55

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sale of products online and in retail stores. The business also aimed to generate income for the Foundation’s youth programmes. Products included screen-printed tote bags, t-shirts, various merchandise and fashion items. Founder Taz Tagore explained:

Targeting particularly complex social issues, Reciprocity Foundation’s social enterprise had a difficult balancing act to achieve commercial sales while supporting the employment, education and wellbeing of the young artists involved. This balancing act proved to be unworkable in the long term, as Appreciate Design was wound-up after about six years of operation. Following this decision, Reciprocity Foundation has focused entirely on social and artistic goals rather than economic ones. While there is much interest in the potential of social enterprise to successfully address community needs such as employment and vocational training, there is an equal amount of concern about the risk of failure, both in terms of the failure of social ventures to achieve social goals, and financial failure. It is therefore surprisingly difficult to find data relating to the failure rates of social enterprises. One study that looked at this issue was conducted in Sweden in 2013. Comparing the entry and exit rates of social enterprises with mainstream business in Sweden and also Spain, the researchers found that while there is great uncertainty about the field due to the newness of many ventures, there was clearly a greater movement of start-ups and exits in the field compared to mainstream business: Death rate statistics are worse for SEs but simultaneously birth rates tend to be even higher for social ventures. Thus, exit and entry rates showed that still there is no maturity in the field.56

Most social enterprise literature avoids the topic of failure rates completely, referring only to general failure rates for business start-ups, and there is virtually no international empirical data to draw from. The most comprehensive data set on enterprise activity is compiled by the Global Enterprise Monitor (GEM), which records a variety of statistics on 167

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entrepreneurship, including social entrepreneurship, around the world. The closest the GEM comes to recording failure rates is measuring individual entrepreneurs’ perceived ‘fear of failure’, along with factors for individual discontinuation from social enterprise, however there is no aggregate data to show the percentage of social enterprises that are closing or exiting the market.57 As Jonathon Lewis laments in an article in The Huffington Post titled ‘Are Social Entrepreneurs Failing to Fail?’ this is a significant blind-spot in the sector. He writes: Organisational failures are mostly unwelcome at social change conferences [. . .] Social sector transparency is extolled, expected and even applauded, but rarely rewarded. Few funders will fund failure the second time.58

The decision by Reciprocity Foundation to close its social venture, in this light, was quite bold, although probably not unique. The task of closing Appreciate Design was helped by the split-model; the hybridity of the model in its inception, with both non-profit and forprofit elements, enabled room for adaptation and change later on. Reciprocity Foundation’s youth programs and public profile continued to grow after winding up Appreciate Design, pointing to the fact that perceived economic failure of one aspect of the enterprise did not equate to failure in artistic and social terms. From another point of view, however, the failure of Appreciate Design might not have been a result of the trading social enterprise per se, but rather the separation of its art and economic activities. Resourcing commercial production is vastly different to the stated purpose of the organization; the creation and communication of art made by young people. It is at this point that we return to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter. To what extent were the artists who stood to benefit from Appreciate Design enabled as active participants in its management, creative direction and business strategies? How did the business link to their own artistic practice, and did they have a voice in how the business showcased their work to a broad audience base? An enterprise attached to an arts practice is quite different to an art focused social enterprise – wherein the three dimensions of artistic practice, social context and economic activity are intertwined. The tensions therein become part of an ongoing, complex and necessary process of negotiation. 168

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This was evident in the journey of The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, which changed and adapted its model, scaling back its engagement with both mainstream exhibiting practices and commercial activity, in order to achieve a workable balance between the group’s social, artistic and economic goals. While the results may not be ambitious, meritorious or profitable, the group has addressed significant tensions and found a degree of sustainability in a precarious and complex economic landscape. This involved striking a balance between their need for money to support the costs of their organization, their aim to generate income for their artists and their social goals in terms of providing a space to address issues of social exclusion and to preserve cultural knowledge, all while enabling a degree of artistic freedom. This balance may last only temporarily, for the pragmatic reality of organizing artistic practice amid social and economic pressures is one of constant negotiation, assessment and re-assessment. It requires a clear understanding of intended purposes, continual reflection upon, and acknowledgement of, failure and compromise, and a willingness to change and adapt as circumstances shift.

Chapter 5: Conclusion The messy undertaking of art as a social enterprise has been the focus of attention in this chapter, starting with questions raised by Mayamiko’s runway show in London, 2011. The various initiatives discussed have arisen from a ground of complexity; both internally in their management of competing goals, and in their relationship to local and international economic and social conditions. This complexity is also reflected in the inter-connectedness of the projects discussed. The evolution and winding up of smockshop signalled the potential of social enterprise as a way of addressing emerging artists’ precarious economic conditions,which was linked to the formation of Osei-Duro by Molly Keogh, one of the smockshop artists. Osei-Duro had a more direct community development focus,working with cooperatives and individual artisans in Ghana. Among these was the textile art cooperative Dzidefo, which failed to meet the commercial demands of OseiDuro’s US fashion market, but in so doing privileged artistic freedom, human interests and the workers’ agency. In this way, Dzidefo’s model of local ownership and artist-led practice sets an example that differs 169

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from other community development models such as the Ugandan cooperative, Women of Kireka, which struggled because its artists were not actively involved in the early development and management of the venture. When the artists of Women of Kireka did take a leading role, they developed alternative forms of income distinct from their artwork, which nevertheless contributed to supporting their ongoing artistic practice. This shift in direction links to the commercial failure of Appreciate Design, which resulted from a conflict in the model between its art activity and business structure. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle similarly scaled back its commercial ambitions to focus on its core purpose of providing a space for artists to meet and make work together. These examples demonstrate that art as a social enterprise treads a fine line between privileging economic independence for artists and collapsing back into the logic of commercial business. Their ability to navigate this territory depends, in great part, on the agency and active participation of artists. Beyond the question of ‘why’ in the field of art as social enterprise, this chapter has engaged with the much more difficult question of ‘how’, a questioning process that is only at its beginning point. In a climate of decreasing funding and an increasingly commercial art system, it is time to consider new models of organization for artists and art practice that might account for the rights and conditions of art workers, while also privileging an independence of artistic practice in a world that justifies all activity along economic lines.

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Conclusion Creating isn’t communicating but resisting.1 Gilles Deleuze

Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art has ventured into the complex and murky territory of art in the economic landscape of the twenty-first century, a place in which workers have come to embrace their own self-exploitation in the name of creative industry. The art world tends to sidestep complicity with economic interests in a number of ways, both in its claims to social engagement, and in its claims to aesthetic autonomy. In this book we have responded by foregrounding the processes of production, the ground from which social inequalities emerge, and also the space in which resistance might be found. The relationship between art and commerce, which at times is conflicted, and at other times complicit, has been considered in relation to examples of artists and artistic enterprises that bring together art, labour and the market. In Chapter 1 a discussion of art, the global economy and sociology documented an international decline in public funding for the arts that has subjected artists and artistic practice to an increasing dependence on market forces. This development has raised concerns about the evacuation of dimensions of art beyond the purely economic, including its capacity to incite disagreement and critical thinking. Art has been an important force in society because of these dimensions; art involves risk-taking, exploring ideas without determining an outcome, personal and social reflection, delving into and revealing social problems, 171

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encouraging changes in perspective and mediating the experience of the individual with that of the collective. The model of social enterprise takes on board the economic realities of the contemporary world, but also privileges non-economic outcomes and activities, is prepared to challenge social conventions, and cherishes independence from both private and public funding agendas. Accordingly artists and arts organizations have started exploring the model in recent years, while others might be considered ‘social enterprise’ for the way that they have brought together art, labour and the market. This was the focus of Chapter 2, which presented a historical review of artistic practices that have aimed to subvert or critique the economic complicity of art. Over the course of the twentieth century, artists have come to increasingly resemble commercial brands, creating value through the celebrity of the artist and the marketing spectacle of the artwork itself. The more an artist asserts their autonomy from commerce, paradoxically, the greater the economic value of their work; not only does the aura increase, but this apparent transcendence of commercial value serves to disguise the real and ongoing connection between art and commercial finance. Some artists such as Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons responded with an unapologetic affirmation of market forces, while others such as Claes Oldenburg and Hans Haacke continued to tackle the commodification of their own art; Oldenburg by provoking reflection upon the nature of the commodity form, and Haacke by making transparent the economic entanglement of art with commercial interests. There has been an increasing acceptance by artists that there is no possibility of critique from the ‘outside’ of contemporary capitalism. Instead, critique is embedded within the economic bases of artistic production and reception. The prevalence of social practice in contemporary art speaks to these concerns; however, the discourse that surrounds socially engaged artistic practice has tended to side-step the issue of economic complicity by focusing on either social impact, on the one hand, or aesthetic value, on the other. Chapter 3 therefore re-oriented this discussion to consider the economic drivers of social practice, including the motivations of private and public sector funders; the alliance of the idea of charity with corporate objectives; the potential instrumentalization of art; and the way that the ‘social turn’ has diverted attention from issues of equity and social justice occurring within the art world. It

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also considered the social impact of artists who might be considered ‘bad’ rather than ‘good’ – in both aesthetic and behavioural terms – including Asger Jorn, the Guerrilla Girls, the Chapman Brothers, Pussy Riot, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Bell. Many of these artists have also highlighted the inequalities of the art system itself, pointing to the fact that the social dimension of art does not begin and end in its reception. An explicit focus on problems that arise in art’s production, including labour conditions and economic transparency, was the focus of Chapter 4. Marina Abramovi´c’s art direction at the LA MOCA 2011 gala dinner raised a number of issues in the employment of artists and art workers in the production of art, including a spirit of willing self-exploitation embedded in the creative industries. This led to a consideration of the ways in which aesthetic critique can, somewhat paradoxically, align with the ideology of contemporary capitalism. This was explored in the aesthetic function of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and in the production of River of Fundament. An apparently critical engagement with class politics and artistic labour in the content of Barney’s work does not extend to the economic and social conditions of his practice. In Santiago Sierra’s work, these entanglements are exposed via an unapologetic exploitation of cheap labour that mimics capitalism at its worst. Despite his explicit focus on the political and economic dimension of labour, however, Sierra’s practice similarly aestheticizes the labour of his performers, who are denied an opportunity to both communicate, and resist, their experience of exploitation. Privileging artistic content over the conditions of production therefore disguises the art world’s own complicity with issues of class division and social inequality. The analysis of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher demonstrated that these issues also occur in socially engaged practice. Benevolence and collaboration did not address the lack of agency among the paid workers involved in producing the artists’ works, with a continuing lack of transparency in relation to rates of pay and working conditions, the expectations and acknowledgement of workers, and the institutional motivations that supported the artists’ practices. The problems raised in this chapter demonstrate that art is enterprise, and if art is to engage with broader issues of social justice and economic inequality, then the art world also needs to develop strategies to improve the working conditions of artists and art workers, along

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with the distribution of economic and social capital among its diverse participants. Social enterprise provides a model for organizing artistic practice that may address some of these issues; it foregrounds transparency in terms of economic motives, social engagement, and the structure and conditions of artists making work. It also has the potential to provide an alternative to the mainstream art market system. Like any form of organization or collective practice entangled within the machinery of late capitalism, however, it is also rife with the potential for exploitation, and this is a reality that all artists and social enterprises must grapple with at every stage of developing, managing and winding-up such ventures. Chapter 5 considered the practical issues faced by artists and art organizations working in this precarious and emergent field. smockshop indicated the potential of social enterprise to address the economic predicament of emerging artists. The project was limited by its reliance on the conventions of the gallery system, along with the influence of Andrea Zittel’s artistic profile and direction, which overshadowed the role of the collaborating artists and intended beneficiaries of the venture. Those organizations that prioritized the agency of artists were therefore better placed to negotiate the tensions inherent to social enterprise. This was evident in the examples of The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle and Dzidefo Women’s Cooperative, who privileged the artists’ individual experimentation and practice over purely economic motivations, while also creating income streams for the artists involved. The difficulties faced by the Women of Kireka and Reciprocity Foundation indicate that social enterprise also needs to be able to recognize when it is compromising, or indeed failing, to achieve its goals. Perhaps most importantly, art and artists need to be at the core of organizational development and management. If art as social enterprise is to champion art’s role in society, this also means prioritizing the non-economic dimensions of artistic practice. Art as social enterprise is certainly not a perfect solution for an imperfect set of conditions. What it does present, however, is an alternative to the current impasses of artists being subject to the economic hierarchies of the art market, on the one hand, or conforming to the institutional demands of government and private sponsors, on the other. There may also be other models of organization emerging that have the potential to empower artists and address the issues of art’s economic dependence and conditions of production. We hope

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that this book opens up more possibilities than it determines. Artists have an important history of deploying entrepreneurial strategies to reposition art as a critical force in society, and in the present moment, social enterprise holds promise in this ongoing pursuit of artistic independence.

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Notes Introduction 1. As John Lloyd argues, ‘capitalism [. . . ] is both outside of and within us, giving its present forms the aura of inevitability’. In ‘Human Capital’, Financial Times, 23–24 February 2013, p. 11. 2. See Ben Davis, ‘A critique of social practice art: What does it mean to be a political artist?’ International Socialist Review, Issue no. 90 ( July 2013). 3. See for example Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2012).

1 Why Art as Social Enterprise? 1. See Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London, UK; New York, USA: Continuum, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire (Cambridge, MA, USA; London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2000), Paolo Virno, Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, trans. James Cascaito (Cambridge, USA; London, UK: Semiotext (e), 2007); Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism – Fascism – Populism (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2011) and Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, Rethinking the World Politically, (Verso: London, New York, 2013). 2. Mouffe, Agonistics, Rethinking the World Politically, op. cit., p. xvi. 3. See ‘No More Business as Usual’, (London, UK: Social Enterprise Coalition, 2010). 4. As Wolfgang Bielefeld argues, ‘If researchers and practitioners can discover how nonprofits can promote and harness innovation and creativity, and bring these more effectively to bear on social problems, then nonprofits, their constituencies, and society will benefit greatly.’ Wolfgang

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Bielefeld, ‘Issues in Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship’, Journal of Public Affairs Education, vol. 15, no. 1 (2009), p. 84. As a UNESCO report on global development in 2012 argued ‘culture and creativity also have a tremendous impact on social cohesion and development’. In Hendrik van der Pol, ‘Key role of cultural and creative industries in the economy’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – Institute for Statistics Report (Canada: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2007), accessed at http://www.oecd .org/site/worldforum06/38703999.pdf, viewed 15 May 2013. The UK Conservative Party proclaims ‘The Big Society is about putting more power in people’s hands – a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. We want to see people encouraged and enabled to play a more active role in society.’ This relates to significant cutbacks in public funding. See ‘The Big Society: Policy statement’, Conservative Party UK website, accessed http://www.conservatives.com/ Policy/Where we stand/Big Society.aspx, viewed 10 October 2013. George Y´udice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 16. ‘Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities’, Exhibition Website, accessed http://www.palazzostrozzi.org/ SezioneDenaro.jsp?idSezione=1214, viewed 6 June 2012. Justin O’Connor, with Stuart Cunningham and Luke Jaaniste, Arts and Creative Industries: A Historical Overview; and an Australian Conversation, (Sydney, Australia: The Australian Council for the Arts, 2011), p. 73; James Meyer and Tim Griffin, eds, ‘Art and Its Markets, A Roundtable Discussion with A. Weiwei, A. Cappellazzo, T. Crow, D. De Salvo, I. Graw, D. Joannou, R. Pincus-Witten, J. Meyer and T. Griffin’, ArtForum International, vol. 46, no. 8 (April 2008), pp. 293–303. Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong’, The New Yorker, 23 June 2014, accessed http://www .newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa fact lepore?current Page=all, viewed 23 June 2014. Angela McRobbie, ‘Re-thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise’, Variant, no. 41 (Spring 2011), pp. 33–4; Gerald Raunig, ‘Creative Industries as Mass Deception’, in G. Raunig, G. Ray and U. Wuggenig, eds, Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ (London, UK: MayFly Books, 2011), pp. 191– 203; Clay Lucas, ‘A Precarious Life’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 2012, accessed http://www.smh.com.au/business/a-precariouslife-20120327-1vwhy.html, viewed 7 June 2012. Ben Eltham, ‘Money and Art: Should Businesspeople Run the Creative Space?’, Crikey, 11 April 2011, accessed http://www.crikey.com.au/

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15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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2011/11/04/money-and-art-should-businesspeople-run-the-creativespace/?wpmp switcher=mobile, viewed 13 September 2012. John Lanchester, ‘What Money Can’t Buy by Michael Sandel – Review’, The Guardian, 17 May 2012, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2012/may/17/what-money-cant-buy-michael-sandel-review, viewed 7 June 2012. Doris Ruth Eikhof and Axel Huanschild, ‘For Art’s Sake! Artistic and Economic Logics in Creative Production’, Journal of Organisational Behaviour, no. 28 (2007), pp. 523–38, p. 533. Alexander, ‘Monet for Money?’, op. cit., p. 220. See Austin Harrington, Art and Social Theory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 202–3. ‘Advancing a Human Centred Approach to Development: Integrating Culture into the Global Development Agenda’, UNESCO Think Piece (New York, USA: UNESCO: 2012). ‘Communication for a European Agenda for Culture in a Globalising World’ (Brussels, Belgium: European Commission, 2007). ‘UNCTAD Creative Economy Report’ (New York, USA: UNCTAD, United Nations, 2008), p. 24. van der Pol, ‘Key Role of Cultural and Creative Industries in the Economy’, op. cit. van der Pol, ‘Key Role of Cultural and Creative Industries in the Economy’, op. cit. See ‘Deloitte Art and Finance Report’ (Luxembourg: Deloitte and ArtTactic, 2013). ‘Deloitte Art and Finance Report’, op. cit. ‘Deloitte Art and Finance Report’, op. cit. The growth in the private art market relates to auction sales – the sale of existing, high-value artworks – as opposed to financing of the creation of new artwork and emerging artists. Deloitte reports that auction sales have grown 600% in the last decade, which accounts for a large share of the total growth in the market. (See ‘Deloitte Art and Finance Report’, op. cit.) Julia Halperin also noted, ‘Non-profit arts organisations operating at a deficit rose to 43% in 2011 from 36% in 2007, due in part to the decreased funding across all levels of government’. (See Julia Halperin, ‘US arts funding hit record low in 2011’, The Art Newspaper, 24 September 2013, accessed http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/US-artsfunding-hit-record-low-in-/30445, viewed 5 December 2013.) See Ryan Stubbs, ‘Public Funding for the Arts: 2012 Update’, Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, vol. 23, no. 3 (Fall 2012). ‘Responding to the Crisis with Culture: Towards New Governance and Business Models for the Cultural Sector’, Policy Debate Report, 5 July

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2013 (Brussels, Belgium: ENCATC), accessed http://encatc.org/pages/ fileadmin/user upload/2013/Policy Debate Report 2013.pdf, viewed 5 December 2013. See ‘AbaF Survey of Private Sector Support: Measuring Private Sector Support for the Arts in 2009–10’ (Sydney, Australia: Australia Business Art Foundation (AbaF) and Australia Council for the Arts, 2011). Raunig, ‘Creative Industries as Mass Deception’, op. cit. Creative industries have taken over from the culture industry and have been seen as a positive answer because they promote creative freedom of work/projects through individualized labour. This is a problem because it leads to selfexploitation and ideological ‘enslavement’, where creative workers are willingly subjecting themselves to exploitation. As Raunig writes, ‘the actors in creative industries interpret the appeal as meaning that they have at least chosen self-precarization themselves’ (p. 202). See Michael Heazle, Uncertainty in Policy Making Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions (London, UK: Earthscan, 2010). David Throsby, Economics of Cultural Policy (New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 4. Victoria Alexander, ‘Monet for Money? Museum exhibitions and the role of corporate sponsorship’, in Rosanne Martorella, ed., Art and Business: An International Perspective on Sponsorship (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996), p. 187. O’ Connor, et al., Arts and Creative Industries, op. cit., p. 68. O’ Connor, et al., Arts and Creative Industries, op. cit., p. 75. Burton Weisbrod comments, ‘Competition for resources is driving all organizations – nonprofit, for-profit and government – to search for new markets, and a market that is new to one type of organization is quite likely to be occupied already by another.’ See Burton Weisbrod, ‘The Future of the Nonprofit Sector: Its Entwining with Private Enterprise and Government’, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, vol. 16, no. 4 (1997), p. 552. The UK Conservative Party proclaims, ‘The Big Society is about putting more power in people’s hands – a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. We want to see people encouraged and enabled to play a more active role in society.’ This relates to significant cutbacks in public funding. See ‘The Big Society: Policy statement’, Conservative Party UK website, accessed http://www.conservatives.com/ Policy/Where we stand/Big Society.aspx, viewed 10 October 2013. In Australia, a new civil society national centre for excellence is a response to reductions in government funding. The media release for the centre explains, ‘In an era of tightening government revenues and increasingly complex social issues, strengthening civil society is one key

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48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

way we can continue to improve the health, happiness and wellbeing of Australians.’ See http://www.civilsocietycentre.org.au/wp-content/ uploads/2014/06/2014-06-CSI-MR-NCE.pdf, viewed 24 June 2014. Weisbrod, ‘The Future of the Nonprofit Sector’, op. cit., p. 552. See Paul J. DiMaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint (New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 12. Throsby, The Economics of Cultural Policy, op. cit., p. 233. Throsby, The Economics of Cultural Policy, op. cit., p. 233. ‘UNCTAD Creative Economy Report’, op. cit. See Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 1991). David Cropley, ed., The Dark Side of Creativity (New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 363. Cropley, The Dark Side of Creativity, op. cit., p. 372. Y´udice describes, ‘culture is increasingly wielded as a resource for both socio-political and economic amelioration’. In The Expediency of Culture, op. cit., p. 9. See for example Bent Greve’s What Constitutes a Good Society? for a discussion of society in terms of values of efficiency and equality. In Greve, ed., What Constitutes a Good Society? (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000). Similar views can also be found in Donelson R. Forsyth and Crystal L. Hoyt, eds, For the Greater Good of All: Perspectives on Individualism, Society, and Leadership (New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 1. This is of course strikingly at odds with critical post-structuralist views of society that understand the relationship between society and individual subjectivity as contingent, relational, informed by disparities of power and contested. See Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality (London, UK: Allen Lane, 1979) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, UK: Allen Lane, 1977). See UNESCO Think Piece, op. cit.; and Eltham, ‘Money and Art’, op. cit. Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge, UK; Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2012), p. 193. Jacques Ranci`ere, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK; Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2009), p. 132. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘A Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, in, Jeremy Tanner, ed., The Sociology of Art: A Reader (New York, USA: Routledge, 2003), p. 176. Joanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xv.

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53. Ian Heywood, Social Theories of Art: A Critique (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997), p. 195. 54. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 55. Drucker, Sweet Dreams, op. cit., p. 5. 56. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, op. cit., p. 161. 57. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Mass., USA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 20. 58. Eleanor Heartney, Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Lenox, Mass., USA: Hard Press Editions, 2006), p. 7. 59. Heartney, Defending Complexity, op. cit., p. 5. 60. Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, op. cit, p. 88. 61. Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 2011) p. 226. He writes, ‘We have the valorization of a “tough, disruptive approach” and agonistic conflict (properly advanced art is patterned around “excruciating situations” and the experience of “grueling duration”) and the corollary reliance on a reductive opposition between a (good) de-centred and a (bad) unified subjectivity.’ (The One and the Many, p. 61.) 62. Kester writes ‘Unless we can grasp the complex imbrication of the local and the global, of individual consciousness and collective action, which frames this experience, our understanding of political change will remain impoverished and needlessly abstract.’ (The One and the Many, op. cit., p. 226. For Deleuze’s theorization of critical subjectivity see Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.) 63. In Empire, Hardt and Negri argue: ‘In the postmodernisation of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.’ (See Empire, op. cit., p. xiii.) See also Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK; New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 64. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, USA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 323. Cropley also discusses the way creativity relates to social upheaval, writing ‘creativity involves essentially destructive processes such as questioning received wisdom or rejecting what already exists’. See Cropley, ed., The Dark Side of Creativity, op. cit., p. 362. 65. Jeremy Tanner suggests that both sociology and art are interested in individual autonomy in relation to the collective, and this is precisely

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67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

what brings them into relation. The relationship between sociology and art is ‘to trace systematically the interconnections between particular forms of artistic volition and collective patterns of experience rooted in social structures and processes of group life’. See Tanner, ed., The Sociology of Art, op. cit., p. 12. At its core, society is about human relations and the inclusion of people within a community. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘society’ in three different senses; all of which relate to the connection and association of people with people. The definition of ‘society’ in the Oxford English Dictionary includes: i. Senses relating to connection, participation, or partnership; ii. Senses relating to the state or condition of living or associating with others; iii. A community, association, or group. (See The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), accessed http://www.oed.com, viewed 13 September 2012). Donald B. Kuspitt, ‘Critical Notes on Adorno’s Sociology of Music and Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism, vol. 33, no. 3 (1975), p. 329. See Heerad Sabeti, ‘The Emerging Fourth Sector’ (Washington, USA: Fourth Sector Network Concept Working Group, 2009). Sabeti describes ‘Pioneering organizations have emerged with new models for addressing societal challenges that blend attributes and strategies from all sectors’ (p. 1). See M. Tina Dacin and Peter A. Dacin, ‘Social Entrepreneurship: A Critique and Future Directions’, Organization Science, March 23 (2011). Jo Barraket, Nick Collyer, Matt O’Connor and Heather Anderson, ‘FASES: Finding Australia’s Social Enterprise Sector’ (Queensland, Australia: Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology, 2010); and ‘No More Business as Usual: A Social Enterprise Manifesto’ (London, UK: Social Enterprise Coalition, 2010). David Floyd, ‘Mythbusting: there are 68,000 social enterprises in Britain’, The Guardian, 21 January 2013, accessed http://www.theguardian.com/ social-enterprise-network/2013/jan/21/mythbusting-social-enteprises68000-uk, viewed 5 March 2013. Siri Terjesen, Jan Lepoutre, Rachida Justo and Niels Bosma, ‘Report on Social Entrepreneurship: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’ (London, UK: Global Entrepreneurship Research Association, 2012). ˇ zek, ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, RSA Animate Lecture Slavoj Ziˇ [transcript], 24 November 2009, accessed http://www.thersa.org/ data/ assets/pdf file/0008/1533626/RSA-Lecture-Slavoj-Zizek-transcript .pdf, viewed 10 October 2013. ˇ zek argues ‘The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a Ziˇ basis that poverty will be impossible and the altruistic virtues have really

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75. 76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

prevented the carrying out of this aim.’ In ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, op. cit. See ‘No More Business as Usual: A Social Enterprise Manifesto.’ op. cit. See Ans Kolk, Miguel Rivera-Santos and Carlos Rufin, ‘Reviewing a Decade of Research on the ‘Base/Bottom of the Pyramid’ (BOP) Concept’, Business and Society, vol. 53, no. 3 ( January 2013). Walter Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality’, in Globalization and the Decolonial Option, eds, W. Mignolo and A. Escobar (London, UK; New York, USA: Routledge, 2010), p. 354. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, USA; London, UK: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 20. Siri Terjesen et al., ‘Report on Social Entrepreneurship: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’, op. cit. Don Thompson, The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics From the World of Contemporary Art (New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 1. Isabel Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 13. Y´udice, The Expediency of Culture, op. cit., p. 348. Angela McRobbie writes, ‘I would like to propose a renewal of radical social enterprise and cooperatives. Such self-organised collectives would also be a way of providing comparable working structures across diverse occupations such as social workers/community workers and artists.’ (In ‘Re-thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise’, op. cit. p. 33.)

2 Art, Money and Society 1. James Meyer and Tim Griffin, eds, ‘Art and Its Markets, A Roundtable Discussion with A. Weiwei, A. Cappellazzo, T. Crow, D. De Salvo, I. Graw, D. Joannou, R. Pincus-Witten, J. Meyer and T. Griffin’, ArtForum International, vol. 46, no. 8 (April 2008), p. 293. 2. Donald B. Kuspitt, ‘Critical Notes on Adorno’s Sociology of Music and Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism, vol. 33, no. 3 (1975), p. 328. 3. Christopher Crouch, Modernism in Art, Design and Culture (New York, USA: St Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 31. 4. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979), p. 23.

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5. See Gary Zabel, ‘Introduction: The Radical Aesthetics of William Morris’, in Gary Zabel, ed., Art and Society: Lectures and Essays by William Morris (Boston, USA: George’s Hill, 1993), p. 12. 6. Sandy Kirby, ‘An Historical Perspective on the Community Arts Movement’, in Vivienne Binns, ed., Community and the Arts: History, Theory and Practice (Sydney, Australia: Pluto Press, 1991); cited in Martin Mulligan and Pia Smith, Art, Governance and the Turn to Community (Melbourne, Australia: Globalism Research Centre, 2010, p. 40). 7. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, op. cit., p. 24. 8. See Crouch, Modernism in Art, Design and Culture, op. cit., esp. pp. 33, 35. 9. Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 35. 10. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London, UK: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 12. 11. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1939), The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., USA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 22. See also Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Painting: The Task of Mourning’, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press, 1990). 12. Richard Brettell, ‘From Manet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism’, accessed http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/viewtopic .php?t=1668, viewed 9 July 2012. 13. Paul Wood, ed., The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (Milton Keynes, UK; New Haven, USA: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1999), p. 12. 14. Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Mapping the Emergence of the Modern Art Gallery’, Campus News (Bowdoin College), 22 August 2005, accessed http://www.bowdoin.edu/news/archives/summerresearch/002387 .shtml, viewed 9 July 2012. 15. Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London’, 19th Century Art Worldwide, vol. 6, no. 1 (2007), accessed http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/index.php/spring07/143-creating-the-french-galleryernest-gambart-and-the-rise-of-the-commercial-art-gallery-in-midvictorian-london, viewed 9 July 2012. 16. Nigel Blake and Francis Frascina, eds, Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the 19th Century (New Haven, USA; London, UK: Yale University Press in association with the Open University), p. 110. 17. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 23.

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18. F. T. Marinetti and Antonio Sant’Elia, ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’, in Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, op. cit., 172. 19. Claudia Salaris, ‘Marketing Modernism: Marinetti as Publisher’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 1, no. 3 (1994), p. 110. 20. Fortunato Depero, Futurism and Advertising (La Jolla, USA: Parentheses Writing, 1990), n. p. 21. Dawn Ades, Neil Cox and David Hopkins, ‘The Readymades and Life on Credit’ in Marcel Duchamp (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 152. 22. See Dawn Ades et al., Marcel Duchamp, op. cit. 23. Dawn Ades et al., Marcel Duchamp, op. cit., p. 160. 24. Dawn Ades et al., Marcel Duchamp, op. cit., pp. 166, 170. 25. Angela V¨olker, ‘Is the Future a Goal?’, Aleksander M. Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova: The Future Is Our Only Goal, ed. Peter Noever, (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1991), p. 27. 26. V¨olker, ‘Is the Future a Goal?’, op. cit. See also Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2005). 27. In order of reference: Max Ernst, ‘Di un surrealismo commercial’, Vita Giovanile. Vol. 7, no. 15 (1938), n.p.; Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 225–6; and Paul Wood, The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, op. cit. p. 248. 28. Christopher Green, Art in France 1900–1940 (New Haven, USA: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 53. 29. Green, Art in France, op cit., p. 54. 30. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Painting: The Task of Mourning’, Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 37. 31. Christopher Green, Art in France, op. cit., p. 59. 32. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, in Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (1939), pp. 34–49, reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism, op. cit., pp. 5–22. 33. See Peter B¨urger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 34. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 11. 35. Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality (London, UK: Routledge, 2003), p. 77. 36. Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus, op. cit., pp. 77–8. 37. Claes Oldenburg, cited in Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New York, USA: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), p. 42.

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38. Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62 (New York, USA: American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishing, 1994), 126. 39. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of our Time (Garden City, NY, USA: Doubleday, 1980), p. 154. 40. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 4–5. Cited in Merril Cole, The Other Orpheus, op cit., p. 71. 41. Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900 (New York, USA: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 597. 42. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2003). 43. Jonathan Harris, Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison, and Paul Wood, eds, Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (New Haven, USA: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 122. 44. Chin-Tau Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2002), p. 267. 45. Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1980), p. 99. 46. Alison Jeffers, ‘The Rough Edges: Community, Art and History’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 15, no. 1 (2010), pp. 29–37. 47. Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin (Halifax, Canada: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 215– 64. 48. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York, USA: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12. See also Jonathan Crary, ‘Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory (1988)’, in October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996, ed. Rosalind Krauss, et al. (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 418. 49. Harris et al., Modernism in Dispute, op cit., p. 241. 50. David Joselit, ‘Modern Leisure’ in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 83. 51. Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900, op. cit., p. 600. 52. Catherine Gudis, ed., A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 41. 53. Maud Lavin, ‘What’s Being Sold Here?’, The New York Times, 5 August 1990, accessed http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/05/books/what-sbeing-sold-here.html, viewed 10 September 2013.

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54. Takashi Murakami, ‘Life as a Creator’, Summon Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die?, eds, Kaikai Kiki Co. and MCA (Saitama-Ken, Japan: Kaikai Kiki Co, 2002), p. 138. 55. Bome, cited in Murakami, ‘Life as a Creator,’ Summon monsters?, op. cit., p. 139. Murakami describes Bome as ‘the king of the figure character world’. 56. See Amanda Cruz, ‘DOB in the Land of Otaku’, in Takashi Murakami et al., Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA: Center for Curatorial Studies Museum Bard College in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p. 14; and Jim Frederick, ‘Move Over, Andy Warhol: Painter Sculptor, cartoonist and Handbag King Takashi Murakami Hits It Big by Marrying Art and Commerce’, Time International, vol. 161, no. 21 (2003), p. 42. 57. Jerry Saltz, ‘Deal or no Deal’, New York Magazine, May 24 2007, accessed http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/32367/, viewed 10 September 2013. 58. The rise of social practice art is evident in popular media as well as theoretical discourse in contemporary art. See Randy Kennedy, ‘Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture’, The New York Times, May 20, 2013, accessed http://www.nytimes.com/2013/ 03/24/arts/design/outside-the-citadel-social-practice-art-is-intendedto-nurture.html?pagewanted=all& r=0, viewed 20 January 2014. 59. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris, France: Les presses du reel, 2002). 60. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, op. cit., p. 13. 61. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics,’ October, no. 110 (2004), p. 66. 62. Rachel Fensham, ‘(Post) community arts’ Review essay of Gay Hawkins, From Nimbin To Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 8 no. 2 (1994), accessed at http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/ 8.2/Fensham.html, viewed 10 March 2011. 63. As design theorist Abby Mellick Lopes argues, ‘The lives of products are more cultural than technical and have more to do with engineering relationships and situations between people than in delivering functions.’ In ‘The Politics of Design Conversations’, Design Philosophy Papers: Collection One (Queensland, Australia: Team D/E/S, 2004), p. 73. 64. Ben Davis, ‘A critique of social practice art’, International Socialist Review, Issue 90 ( July 2013), accessed http://isreview.org/issue/90/critiquesocial-practice-art, viewed 5 October 2013. 65. For more information on Zittel’s work and the idea of design failure, see McQuilten, ‘Playing Zittel: Andrea Zittel’s Design for Living’, Art in Consumer Culture (Surrey, UK; Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2011).

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66. Julian Stallabrass, Contemporary Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 114–15. 67. Stallabrass, Contemporary Art, op. cit., pp. 70–5. 68. Carlo McCormick, quoted in Ed Helmore, ‘LA aesthetes fight pop-art billionaire: Trustees of Museum of Contemporary Arts split by row over dumbing down of shows’ The Observer, 22 July 2012, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/22/la-row-museum-ofcontemporary-arts#start-of-comments, viewed 25 July 2012. 69. Ben Davis, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art’, op. cit. 70. Terry Smith, for example, argues quite correctly that while there is a great degree of complicity with the market in contemporary art, there are also many artists who have ‘made art on quite other premises’. See What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 248.

3 ‘Bad’ Art and its Social Benefits 1. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York, USA: Verso, 2012); Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2011); and Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 (New York, USA: Creative Time Books and Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2012). 2. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Paris, France: Les presses du reel, 2002). 3. See Eleanor Heartney’s overview of the debate about social practice in ‘Can Art Change lives?’ Art in America ( June 2012), pp. 67–9. 4. Eleanor Heartney, Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Lenox, MA, USA: Hard Press Editions, 2006), p. 5. 5. Ben Davis, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art: What Does It Mean to Be a Political Artist?’ International Socialist Review, Issue no. 90 ( July 2013), accessed http://isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-practice-art, viewed 5 October 2013. 6. Davis, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art’, op. cit. 7. ‘Arts and Business: Partnerships That Work: Research Report’ (Sydney, Australia: Australia Business Art Foundation (AbaF) and Australia Council for the Arts, 2010). 8. Julian Stallabrass, ‘Manifest Opulence’, London Review of Books Blog, 18 October 2013, accessed http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/10/18/ julian-stallabrass/manifest-opulence/#sthash.Mw8T1JRH.dpuf, viewed 15 November 2013.

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9. Ben Davis describes this as ‘mopping up the symptoms of social problems instead of going after the disease itself’. (In ‘A critique of social practice art’, op. cit.) 10. Alison Croggon has recently explored the economic context of Australian art in response to proposed government funding cuts in her article, ‘Why Art’, Overland, no. 212 (Spring 2013). 11. An Australian Business Art Foundation report shows that in Australia, visual arts support accounted for the largest share of private sector support (40% of total share of sponsorship). While art galleries were more likely to be supported through philanthropic donations (75% of private sector support), arts festivals and visual arts practice were primarily supported through sponsorships (85% private sector support). See ‘AbaF Survey of Private Sector Support: Measuring Private Sector Support for the Arts in 2009–10’ (Sydney, Australia: Australia Business Art Foundation (AbaF) and Australia Council for the Arts, 2011). 12. See for example ‘Philanthropists come bearing corporate gifts’, Marketing Week, [online serial], vol. 35, no. 35, p. 24 (September 2012). The article outlines increased corporate social responsibility, corporate philanthropy and community projects among big businesses including Shell, IKEA, McDonalds, Crocs, Proctor & Gamble, Tesco and L’Oreal as a response to public sentiment about profiteering and the Global Financial Crisis. 13. ‘Deloitte Art and Finance Report’ (Luxembourg: Deloitte and ArtTactic, 2013). 14. Barbara Pollack, ‘Air Kissing: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art about the Art World’, ArtNews, vol. 107, no. 1 ( January 2008), p. 131. The exhibition was held at Momenta Art in Brooklyn, curated by Sasha Archibald. 15. See for example Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, op. cit. Bourriaud relates new relational/social practices to utopian values of the modernist avantgarde. 16. Jeremy Tanner suggests that both sociology and art are interested in individual autonomy in relation to the collective, and this is precisely what brings them into relation. The relationship between sociology and art is ‘to trace systematically the interconnections between particular forms of artistic volition and collective patterns of experience rooted in social structures and processes of group life.’ (In J. Tanner, ed., The Sociology of Art: A Reader (New York, USA: Routledge, 2003), p. 12.) 17. In Artificial Hells, Bishop maintains the importance of social art being evaluated on the basis of its aesthetic qualities, with autonomy from an explicit social function. (See Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2012) p. 40);

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

and Groys argues that elitism is an aspect of the marginalized nature of critical art. He aligns elitism with art that is made for an audience of artists, rather than consumers, and argues, ‘In this sense, “elitist” art actually means “minority art”.’ (In Groys, ‘Art and Money’, e-flux Journal, no. 24 (2011), accessed http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-andmoney-2/, viewed 9 October 2013.) Neil Alper and Gregory Wassal, ‘Artists’ Careers and their Labor Markets’, in V. Gisburgh and D. Throsby, eds, Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier, 2006), p. 856. Alper and Wassal write, ‘The greater earnings inequality of artists is reduced when only full-time year-round workers from each group are compared.’ (In ‘Artists’ Careers and their Labor Markets’, op. cit, p. 856.) Lionel Bently, Elena Cooper, Martin Kretschmer and Sukhpreet Singh, ‘Copyright contracts and earnings of visual creators: A survey of 5,800 British designers, fine artists, illustrators and photographers’ (Bournemouth; Cambridge, UK: Bournemouth University; University of Cambridge; CIPPM Publishing, 2011.) Bently et al., ‘Copyright contracts and earnings of visual creators’, op. cit. p. 3. Bently et al., ‘Copyright contracts and earnings of visual creators’, op. cit. p. 3. Marita Flisb¨ack, ‘A Survey of Artists’ Income from a Gender Perspective: Economy, Work, and Family Life’ (Stockholm, Sweden: Arts Grants Committee, 2007), accessed http://www.konstnarsnamnden .se/Sve/Filer/PDF-Filer/KN Jamstalldhet Inlaga engelska.pdf, viewed 2 February 2014. Flisb¨ack, ‘A Survey of Artists’ Income from a Gender Perspective’, op. cit. p. 63. Flisb¨ack, ‘A Survey of Artists’ Income from a Gender Perspective’, op. cit. The report noted, ‘income the artists in this study earned from their business activities was generally low, and the gender income gap among them was widest, precisely, in the income-earner category composed of those whose income derived solely from self-employment’, p. 74. David Throsby and Anita Zednik, ‘Do You Really Expect to Get Paid? An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia’ (Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts, 2010), p. 9. Emphasis Throsby and Zednik. CoUNTess: Women Count in the Artworld Website, accessed http:// countesses.blogspot.com.au/, viewed 7 March 2014. Julian Stallabrass, ‘Manifest Opulence’, op. cit.

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ˇ zek, ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, RSA Animate Lecture 29. Slavoj Ziˇ [transcript], 24 November 2009, accessed http://www.thersa.org/ data/ assets/pdf file/0008/1533626/RSA-Lecture-Slavoj-Zizek-transcript .pdf, viewed 10 October 2013. ˇ zek, in ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, op. cit. 30. Ziˇ 31. See No Longer Empty Website, accessed www.nolongerempty.org.au, viewed 12 August 2013. 32. The mission of A Blade of Grass is described as follows: ‘We provide resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change.’ See A Blade of Grass Website, accessed http://www.abladeofgrass.org, viewed 20 September 2013. 33. ‘This Side of Paradise’, No Longer Empty Website, accessed http://www. nolongerempty.org/nc/home/what-we-do/exhibitions/exhibition/ this-side-of-paradise/, viewed 10 September 2013. 34. Martin Mowbray, ‘Community Capacity Building or State Opportunism’, Community Development Journal, vol. 40, no. 3 ( July 2005), p. 264. 35. Tina Orlandini, ‘Reinventing the Pop-up Gallery with Sights on Community’, Huffington Post, 29 May 2012, accessed http://www .huffingtonpost.com/tina-orlandini/reinventing-the-popup-gal b 1553389.html, viewed 20 October 2012. 36. ‘Take It to the Bank’, The Art Newspaper, 28 November 2012, accessed http://www.theartnewspaper.com/in-the-frame/2012/11, viewed 10 July 2013. 37. See ‘Fact Sheet: Use of Vacant or Underutilised Floor Space for Artist Studios’, Creative Spaces Website, http://www.creativespaces.net .au/assets/creativespaces factsheet useofvacantspaceforartiststudios.pdf, viewed 18 October 2013. 38. See the case studies section of the Creative Spaces Website, accessed www.creativespaces.net.au, viewed 18 October 2013. 39. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 546. 40. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, op. cit. p. 546. 41. See for example David Cropley, ed., The Dark Side of Creativity (New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 372. 42. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term greenwash as ‘Misleading publicity or propaganda disseminated by an organization, etc., so as to present an environmentally responsible public image; a public image of environmental responsibility promulgated by or for an organization, etc., regarded as being unfounded or intentionally misleading.’ (In The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), accessed at http://www.oed.com, viewed 13 September 2013.)

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43. As an adjective, bad is as defined simply as ‘Not good’. Further detail provides ‘of poor quality of little worth’. (In The Oxford English Dictionary, op. cit.) 44. The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press) op. cit. 45. See Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’, in R Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1981, c1951), pp. 76–82. 46. See Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62 (New York, USA: American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishing, 1994). 47. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press, 1986). 48. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, op. cit. p. 154. 49. See Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2004). 50. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York, USA: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12. 51. Guy Debord, ‘Capitalism: A Society Without Culture’, in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), pp. 74–5. 52. Debord, ‘Capitalism: a Society without Culture’, ibid. 53. Karen Kurczynski, ‘Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism’, in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed. Joan Marter (New Jersey, USA: Rutgers, 2007). Of the relationship to Informel, Kurczynski notes ‘Jorn, in fact, acknowledged the formal relationship of his work to Tachism and Informel [. . .] But when Informel came to mean only purely abstract art and an academic and overtly mystical discourse, Jorn rejected the term ‘informel”, (p. 112). 54. Asger Jorn, ‘Detourned Painting’, On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957–1972 (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 142. 55. Jorn, ‘Detourned Painting’, op. cit., p. 141. 56. Claire Gilman, ‘Bad Painting? Asger Jorn’s “Modifications”’, in Eva Badura-Triska and Susanne Neuburger, eds, Bad Painting: Good Art (Amsterdam, Netherlands: MUMOK Museum, 2008), p. 160. Kurczynski likewise comments ‘Jorn was never interested in simple critique, but always in a positive creation.’ (In ‘Ironic Gestures’, op. cit. p. 14.) 57. Kurczynski, ‘Ironic Gestures’, op. cit., p. 114. 58. Helle Brons, ‘Masculine Resistance: Expressions and Experiences of Gender in the Work of Asger Jorn’, October, no. 141 (Summer 2012), pp. 133, 149.

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59. Susanne Neuberger, ‘The First and Last Painting? An Experimental Setup for Bad Painting’, in Bad Painting: Good Art, op. cit., p. 12. 60. Neuberger, ‘The First and Last Painting?’, op. cit., p. 22. 61. Marcia Tucker, Bad Painting, exhibition catalogue (New York, USA: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1978), n.p. Tucker’s emphasis. 62. See Lawrence Alloway, ‘Art’ in The Nation, 11 Feb 1978, pp. 157–8; and Leanne Domash, ‘Good Art, Bad Talk’, in Women Artists News, vol. 4, no. 2. ( June 1978). Domash describes ‘the mostly irritated, nearly hostile audience’, accuses the artists descriptions as simplistic; the panel discussion as ‘bad’ and ‘careless’ (p. 96). 63. See Douglas Crimp and Howard Singerman, ‘Pictures and Positions in the 1980s’, A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia Jone (Maldon, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 64. See Neuberger, ‘The First and Last Painting? An Experimental Set-up for Bad Painting’, op. cit., p. 12. 65. See Quentin Bell, Bad Art (London, UK: Chatto & Windus, 1989). 66. Bell, Bad Art, op. cit., pp. 16–18. 67. Jorn, cited in Kurczynski, ‘Ironic Gestures’, op. cit., p. 121. 68. In the catalogue for Jorn’s 1977 exhibition at the Gruenebaum Gallery, Guy Atkins all but dismissed the vandalistic aspects of the detournement paintings, and brushed over their political association with the SI, focusing on the expressive aesthetics. In Atkins, Asger Jorn: The Crucial Years, 1954–64 Paintings (New York, USA: Gruenebaum Gallery, 1977). Likewise, the 1982 catalogue that accompanied Jorn’s exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum omitted the link between the detournement paintings and the SI. See Asger Jorn: The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (New York, USA: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1982). 69. A number of historians have looked at issues of gender in the work of Jorn and the SI. See for example Helle Brons, ‘Masculine Resistance’, op. cit.; and Patrick Greaney, ‘Insinuation: Detournement as Gendered Repetition’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 110, no. 1 (Winter 2011). 70. In Claire Gilman, ‘Asger Jorn’s Avant-garde Archives’, October, no. 79 (Winter 1997), p. 45. 71. Jorn, ‘Guy Debord and the Problem of the Accursed’ (1964), Substance, no. 90 (1999), p. 163. 72. See introductory essays in Marcia Tucker and Marcia Tanner, eds, Bad Girls, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, MA; New York, USA: MIT Press and New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994). 73. Mary Boone, cited in Guerrilla Girls, Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: the Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes (New York, USA: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 92.

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74. Marcia Tucker, cited in Guerrilla Girls, Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers, op. cit. p. 93. 75. Melena Ryzik, ‘Pussy Riot Takes Manhattan, Quietly’, The New York Times, 8 June 2013, p. 1. 76. No named author, ‘Slave Labour and Criminal Cultures; Russian Prisons’, in The Economist, 19 October 2013, p. 59. 77. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 1982). 78. Christoph Grunenberg, ‘Attraction-Repulsion Machines: The Art of Jake and Dinos Chapman’, in Jake & Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People (London, UK: Tate Publishing, 2006). 79. Peter B¨urger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 80. Dave Beech, ‘Shock: A Report on Contemporary Art’, in Jake & Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, op. cit., p. 110. 81. Paula Scher, ‘Barbara Kruger (Review)’, Print, vol. 54, no. 3 ( July 2000), p. 119. 82. Peter McKenzie, cited in Sharon Verghis, ‘Dash it dots are not the only Aboriginal Art’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 November 2001, p. 17. 83. Richard Bell, cited in Timothy Morrell, ed., 1992 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, exhibition catalogue (Adelaide, Australia: Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1992), p. 12. 84. For information on the public’s backlash, including MP Gerry Wood’s call to retract the prize, see ‘Artist’s T-shirt Sparks Controversy’, in The World Today: ABC Radio [transcript], 20 August 2003, accessed http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s928604.htm, viewed 15 March 2014. Journalist Rosemary Sorenson was sceptical about his political intent, writing ‘Bell’s theorem – as he has called one of his paintings – is, then, based on a deep-seated morality. It’s morality in motion, however, which swirls around his ambiguous aphorisms.’ (In ‘Shout it from the rooftops’, The Australian, 9 July 2006, p. 40.) Others were condescending; Michael Reid described, ‘The work contained the rather cute though caustic art prize oriented, post-modern slogan Aboriginal Art It’s a White thing.’ (In ‘Art was ever a statement’ The Australian, 27 August 2003, p. T14); Courtney Kidd determined ‘Despite this message, the piece was not the strongest in the show’ in a review for Art and Australia (see ‘20th National Telstra Award’, Art and Australia (Autumn 2004), p. 477). 85. Rex Butler, ‘Richard Bell’s Psychoanalysis’, Australian Art Collector, no. 30 (October–December 2006), p. 139. 86. Jeremy Tanner, The Sociology of Art: A Reader (New York, USA: Routledge, 2003), p. 12.

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4 Art as Enterprise 1. See Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist is Present, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (New York, USA; London, UK: Museum of Modern Art; Thames & Hudson, 2010). 2. Sara Wookey, ‘An Open Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in Marina Abramovi´c’s MOCA Performance’, The Performance Club Website, accessed at http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/openletter-to-artists/, viewed 10 April 2014. 3. Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2013) p. 4. 4. For a discussion of Andy Warhol’s managerial approach, see Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic (Maryland; Pennsylvania, USA: Baltimore Museum of Art and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). For a discussion of Takashi Murakami’s approach to art as business, see Mako Wakasa, ‘Interview with Takashi Murakami’, Journal of Contemporary Art, 24 February 2000, accessed http://www.jca-online.com/murakami.html, viewed 7 April 2014; and Takashi Murakami, ‘Life as a Creator’, Summon Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die?, eds Kaikai Kiki Co. and MCA (Saitama-Ken, Japan: Kaikai Kiki Co, 2002). 5. Helen Molesworth, ‘The Artist as Manager’, in Work Ethic, op. cit., p. 152. 6. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, op. cit. p. 11. 7. Catherine Wagley, ‘Marina Abramovi´c’s Gala Controversy’, LA Weekly, 19 December 2011, accessed at http://www.laweekly.com/public spectacle/2011/12/19/marina-abramovics-moca-gala-controversyjeffrey-deitch-confronted-and-the-performers-speak-out, viewed 10 April 2014. 8. Wagley, ‘Marina Abramovi´c’s Gala Controversy’, op. cit. 9. Marina Abramovi´c is quoted as saying on stage, ‘MOCA said no nude men, so if you want to complain there’s no men at the tables, complain to them’, in Susan Michals, ‘Naked as They Came: Eating With Nudes at Marina Abramovi´c’s LA MOCA Gala Performance’, The Gallerist, 13 November 2011, accessed at http://galleristny.com/2011/11/nakedas-they-came-eating-with-nudes-at-marina-abramovics-la-moca-galaperformance/, viewed 10 April 2014. 10. Wookey, ‘An Open Letter’, op. cit. 11. See ‘Yvonne Rainer Blasts Marina Abramovi´c and MOCA LA’, The Performance Club Website, accessed at http://theperformanceclub .org/2011/11/yvonne-rainer-douglas-crimp-and-taisha-paggett-blastmarina-abramovic-and-moca-la, viewed 10 April 2014; Wagley, ‘Marina Abramovic’s Gala Controversy’, op. cit.; and Michals, ‘Naked as they came’, op. cit.

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12. Susan Michals, ‘Naked as they came’, op. cit. 13. See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, no. 110 (2004). In her later book, Artificial Hells, Bishop distances herself from Grant Kester’s dialogic and community-building perspective on social practice, writing, ‘By contrast, I would argue that unease, discomfort or frustration – along with fear, contradiction, exhilaration and absurdity – can be crucial to any work’s artistic impact.’ In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, London; New York, 2012), p. 26. 14. Jacques Ranci`ere, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK; Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2009), p. 120. 15. Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 39. She does not completely dismiss the ethical, but suggests that the aesthetic merit of the work be considered first. See Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 26. 16. Wookey explains ‘I was expected to ignore (by staying in what Abramovi´c refers to as ‘performance mode’) any potential physical or verbal harassment while I was performing.’ [In ‘An Open Letter’, op. cit.] In correspondence with Yvonne Rainer, Wookey further explains, ‘Of course we were warned that we will not be able to leave to pee, etc. That the diners may try to feed us, give us drinks, fondle us under the table, etc but will be warned not to. Whatever happens, we are to remain in performance mode and unaffected.’ [In ‘Yvonne Rainer Blasts Marina Abramovi´c and MOCA LA’, op. cit.] 17. Bishop, Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 230. Bishop describes the aesthetic as ‘an autonomous realm of experience’, that allows ‘space for perversity, paradox and negation’, in line with Ranciere’s idea of dissensus, returning to the modernist idea of art’s autonomy as a means to sustain critique. [In Bishop, Artificial Hells, op. cit., pp. 38–9.] 18. Bishop, Artificial Hells, op. cit., 238. 19. Bishop writes, ‘The perverse pleasures underlying these artistic gestures offer an alternative form of knowledge about capitalism’s commodification of the individual, especially when both participants and viewers appear to enjoy the transgression of subordination to a work of art’. [In Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 238.] 20. Yvonne Rainer, cited in ‘Yvonne Rainer Blasts Marina Abramovi´c and MOCA LA’, op. cit. 21. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London, UK; New York, USA: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 1. 22. Wookey explains ‘I chose, up till now, to be anonymous.’ [In ‘An Open Letter’, op. cit.]

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23. John Powers, ‘I was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf ’, The New York Times, 17 August 2012, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/ magazine/i-was-jeff-koonss-studio-serf.html, viewed 14 April 2014. 24. Powers, ‘I was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf ’, op. cit. This observation is echoed by commentator Kyle Petreycik who has written about the high turnover of staff and ‘factory’ conditions of Koons’ workplace. See Petreycik, ‘Why Not to Work for Jeff Koons’, Hyperallergic, 29 January 2013, accessed at http://hyperallergic.com, viewed 14 April 2014. 25. John Powers, ‘I was Jeff Koons’s Studio Serf ’, op. cit. 26. Sara Wookey, ‘An Open Letter’, op. cit. 27. Michael Kimmelman, ‘The Importance of Matthew Barney’, The New York Times, 10 October 1999, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/ 1999/10/10/magazine/the-importance-of-matthew-barney.html?page wanted=print, viewed 5 March 2014. 28. In order of reference: Benjamin Weil, ‘Matthew Barney’, Flash Art ( Jul– Sep 2008), p. 172; Jerry Saltz, ‘Matthew Barney: Imported from Detroit’, Artnet Magazine, 5 October 2011, accessed at www.artnet.com, viewed 5 March 2014; Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, ‘Travels in Hypertrophia’, Artforum, vol. 33, no. 9 (May 1995), p. 6; and Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster’ Cinema Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, (Winter 2006), p. 12. 29. Specifically, the call-out described ‘Volunteers will need to be positioned on a steep set of stairs (approx. 2 height per step). Ascending/descending these stairs requires some agility, and may be uncomfortable if you have a fear of heights. The stair can also be very slippery. You should wear boots or enclosed shoes that can get wet/dirty’. In ‘River of Fundament Seeks Volunteers for Film Shoot’, Parsons The New School For Design Website, 6 October 2013, accessed at http://amt.parsons.edu/blog/volunteersneeded-for-matthew-barney-film-shoot/ viewed 6 March 2014. 30. Dan Duray, ‘Barney and Friends: My Day as an Extra on the New Matthew Barney Movie, Or How I Spent (Part Of) My Summer Vacation’, The Gallerist NY, 3 September 2013, accessed at http://galleristny .com/2013/09/barney-and-friends-my-day-as-an-extra-on-the-newmatthew-barney-movie/ viewed 6 March 2014. 31. Dan Duray, ‘Barney and Friends’, op. cit. 32. Dan Duray, ‘Barney and Friends’, op. cit. 33. Alfred Hickling, ‘River of Fundament review – Matthew Barney’s magnum opus is calculated to divide opinion’, The Guardian, 3 March 2014, accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/culture, viewed 10 March 2014. 34. ‘Cremaster’ is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The muscle of the spermatic cord, by which the testicle is suspended’. In The Oxford

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36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), accessed at http://www.oed.com, viewed 13 March 2014. Francesco Bonami, ‘Matthew Barney: The Artist as Young Athlete’, Flash Art ( July–September 2008), p. 171. Keller and Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster’, op. cit. p. 13. Cremaster Cycle Website, accessed at http://cremaster.net/, viewed 10 March 2014. Nancy Spector, ‘Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us’, Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle (New York, USA: Guggenheim Museum Publications and H.N. Abrams, 2002). Noah Horowitz, ‘Comment on ‘Financialization of Art’ (by Mark C. Taylor)’, Capitalism and Society, vol. 6, no. 2, article 6 (2011), p. 5. Stephen Tumino argues, ‘The important thing that needs to be critiqued in Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is its return to and evacuation of class as a tropic performance in the time of global social inequality.’ In Tumino, ‘“Barneyworld”: The Cultural Imaginary of the Global Factory’ Textual Practice, vol. 26, no. 3 (2012), p. 493. Bonami, ‘Matthew Barney: The Artist as Young Athlete’, op. cit., p. 171. Tumino, ‘Barneyworld’, op. cit., p. 510. Keller and Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster’, op. cit., p. 10. Keller and Ward describe, ‘The Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which represents Barney and produces the Cremaster films, has declined to discuss the film’ budgets.’ (Keller and Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster’, op. cit., p. 10.) Keller and Ward, op. cit. The prices cited here are from auction records at Sothebys. The price of $571,000 USD was for the acquisition of a limited edition version of Cremaster 2 in 2007, which was enclosed in a vitrine and packaging that included ‘tooled saddle leather, sterling silver, polycarbonate honeycomb, beeswax, acrylic and nutmeg’. The price of $457,000 USD was for an edition of five photographs sold at auction in 2008. The photos were held in ‘self-lubricating plastic frames’. The piece was part of an edition of 10. (See Sotheby’s website, accessed at http://sothebys.com, viewed 5 April 2014.) Robert Kuttner, ‘We are all Detroit’, The Huffington Post, 11 August 2013, accessed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/we-are-alldetroit b 3741418.html, viewed 10 March 2014. Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York, USA: Picador, 2010), p. 297.

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35.

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49. Keller and Ward, ‘Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster’, p. 9. 50. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, ‘Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-modern Condition’, in Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (New York, USA: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 20. 51. Matthew Barney, cited in ‘A Dialogue on Blood and Iron: Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto on Joseph Beuys’, Modern Painters (September 2006), p. 67. 52. Keti Chukhrov writes, ‘The class gap within the “class” of immaterial workers is enormous and often depends on the area or country of residence.’ In Chukhrov, ‘Towards the space of the general: on labor beyond materiality and immateriality’, in Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity and the Labor of Art, e-flux journal (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 103). 53. Chukhrov, ‘Towards the space of the general’, op. cit, p. 109. 54. Tumino describes Barney’s work as ‘highly prized by his corporate investors and art collectors worldwide and, consequently, so popular’. In Tumino, ‘Barneyworld’, op. cit., p. 507). 55. Dan Duray, ‘Barney and Friends’, op. cit. 56. The work was performed at El Espacio Aglutinador, a contemporary art space in Havana, Cuba. See Santiago Sierra Website, http://www.santiagosierra.com/996 1024.php, viewed 4 April 2014. 57. See Santiago Sierra Website, http://www.santiago-sierra.com/996 1024 .php, viewed 4 April 2014. 58. Santiago Sierra’s website describes, ‘Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between $15– 17, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about $67.’ See Santiago Sierra website, http://www.santiagosierra.com/200014 1024.php, viewed 4 April 2014. 59. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844’ (Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 71. 60. Carlos Jimenez, ‘Santiago Sierra: Or Art in a Post-Fordist Society’, ArtNexus, vol. 3, no. 53 (2004), p. 69. 61. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, Bomb, no. 86 (Winter 2003/2004), p. 65. Sierra also says, ‘Art is conceptual entertainment. Regardless of how radical it is, it has great penetration on the market’ (‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit., p. 69). ˇ zek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London, 62. Slavoj Ziˇ UK: Routledge, 2000), p. 31.

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63. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit. p. 65. 64. Pilar Villela Mascaro ‘Not in My Name: Reality and Ethics in the Work of Santiago Sierra’, in Santiago Sierra: 7 trabajos = 7 works (London, UK: Lisson Gallery, 2007). Cited in a review by Adrian Searle, ‘Absolute Excrement’, The Guardian, 4 December 2007, accessed http://www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2007/dec/04/art, viewed 4 April 2014. 65. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit. p. 65. 66. See Santiago Sierra Website, http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200807 1024.php, viewed 4 April 2014. 67. Scott Indrisek, ‘Santiago Sierra: Or Art in a Post-Fordist Society’, Art Nexus, vol. 3, no. 56 (2005), p. 75; Amanda Church, ‘Santiago Sierra’, Art in America (May 2009), p. 164. Indrisek’s review is loaded with irony, humour and titillation, which undermines the apparently formal analysis of the visual qualities of the work. He writes, ‘Quit blushing – this is high culture we’re talking about’ (p. 75). 68. Church, ‘Santiago Sierra’, op. cit., p. 164. 69. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, op. cit., p. 79. 70. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, op. cit., p. 79. 71. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, op. cit., pp. 70, 73. 72. Bishop, Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 223. 73. Bishop argues that effective works enable ‘the presentation of conventionally under-exposed constituencies’, and ‘to give visibility to certain social constituencies’ (Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 239; p. 238). 74. Bishop, Artifical Hells, op. cit., p. 238. 75. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, USA; London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 23. 76. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit. p. 64. 77. Ruben Bonet, ‘Santiago Sierra’, Art Nexus, vol. 3, no. 5 (2004), p. 127. 78. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit. p. 65. 79. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), p. 597. 80. See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2005). 81. Relyea, Your Everyday Art World, op. cit., p. 11. 82. Sierra, cited in interview with Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit., p. 127. He has also said, ‘Negativity is the only

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85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90.

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coherent reaction one can have in a society where the battle’s already lost [. . .] I think that negativity is an expression of how the class struggle takes us in a determined direction and how the art world functions, and the real world too.’ (‘Santiago Sierra: Teresa Margolles’, op. cit., p. 66.) Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 546. Henry A Giroux, ‘Benetton’s ‘World without Borders’: Buying Social Change’, in Carol Becker, ed. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (New York, USA; London, UK: Routledge, 1994). Giroux, ‘Benetton’s ‘World without Borders’: Buying Social Change’, op. cit., pp. 198. Giroux, ‘Benetton’s ‘World without Borders’: Buying Social Change’, op. cit., pp. 198–9. Sarah Kendzior, ‘The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine: What Does our Addiction to Disaster Porn Say about Us?’ Politico Magazine, 20 February 2014, accessed http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ 2014/02/kyiv-ukraine-protests-disaster-porn-103721.html#ixzz30Fw CO9DT, viewed 29 April 2014. Dave Beech, ‘Santiago Sierra’ Art Monthly, no. 260 (2002), p. 37. Bishop writes, ‘This is not to say that ethics are unimportant in a work of art, nor irrelevant to politics, only that they do not always have to be announced and performed in such a direct and saintly fashion.’ In Artificial Hells, op. cit., p. 26. Interviews suggest that they support their practices through a mix of commissions, grants, some private sales and teaching work. A broader search of the literature similarly failed to produce records of sale prices for their work, although Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Harrell Fletcher are both represented by commercial galleries, suggesting that they do sell their work on the market. See for example the Artfacts Website, which lists public auction results for contemporary artists. Both Fletcher and Ukeles are listed; however, there are no auction records, suggesting minimal presence on the market. See http://www.artfacts.net/. Fletcher, in particular, is known for testing new models for the redistribution of profits in the art market. He organized a fundraising art auction for Portland State University in 2008, for example, where there were no prices on the works. Instead bidders bought certificates which they then exchanged in a ‘first come, first served’ basis for works by artists such as Dan Graham and Miranda July. See Portland State University website, accessed http://www.pdx.edu/events/2008-SilentAuction-and-Scholarship-Awards-Party, viewed 28 March 2014.

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NOTES TO PAGES 110–115

91. Iggy Azalea, Trocon Markous Roberts, Natalie Sims and The Invisible Men, ‘Work’. Recorded by Iggy Azalea on The New Classic (CD) Island Records. (Rockfield Studios and Monnow Valley Studios, Wales 2013). 92. Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Tom Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles on Maintenance and Sanitation Art’, in Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 2000), p. 309. 93. Ukeles comments, ‘Its maintenance mission is to create, during the property owners and their clients’ prime action hours, an appearance of stasis, beyond time.’ Cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit, p. 307. 94. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit, p. 309. 95. See Mark B Feldman, ‘Inside the Sanitation System: Mierle Ukeles, Urban Ecology, and the Social Circulation of Garbage’, in Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, no. 10/11 (Spring/Fall, 2009). 96. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit, p. 10. 97. See Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit. 98. Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, Global Visions: Towards a New International in the Visual Arts (London, UK: Kala Press, 1994), p. 17. 99. Ukeles, cited in interview with Michael Miller, ‘Trash Talk: The Department of Sanitation’s Artist in Residence is a Real Survivor’, The Gallerist, 15 January 2013, accessed http://galleristny.com/2013/01/ trash-talk-the-department-of-sanitations-artist-in-residence-is-a-realsurvivor/, viewed 11 April 2014. 100. Ukeles, ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “Care”’, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts website, accessed http:// feldmangallery.com/media/pdfs/Ukeles MANIFESTO.pdf, viewed 10 April 2014. 101. Chukhrov, ‘Towards the Space of the General: On Labor beyond Materiality and Immateriality’, op. cit., p. 95. 102. Gerald Raunig describes, for example, ‘most of the people labelled as “creatives”, work freelance and/or as self-employed entrepreneurs with or without limited contracts [. . .] Here flexibility becomes a despotic norm, precarity of work becomes the rule, the dividing lines between work and leisure time blur just like those between work and unemployment, and precarity flows from work into life as a whole.’ (In ‘Creative Industries as Mass Deception’, Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’, eds G Raunig, G Ray and U Wuggenig (London, UK: MayFly Books, 2011), p. 199. 103. See Shannon Jackson, ‘High Maintenance’, in Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Hoboken, NJ, USA: Taylor & Francis, 2011), p. 99.

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104. See Jackson, ‘High Maintenance’ op. cit., p. 100. 105. Ukeles, cited in Miller, ‘Trash Talk’, op. cit. 106. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit., p. 317. 107. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit., p. 318. 108. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit., p. 318. 109. In her ‘Sanitation Manifesto’ of 1984, Ukeles wrote, ‘We are, all of us whether we desire it or not, in relation to Sanitation, implicated, dependent.’ See Feldman, ‘Inside the Sanitation System’, op. cit., p. 52. Emphasis the artist. 110. Ukeles discusses various sources of income in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit. 111. Natalie Stanchfield, ‘Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, Artslant, (May 2008) accessed http://www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom/ 21257 viewed 10 April 2014. 112. Emily Lloyd, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit, p. 299. 113. Press release, ‘The Department of Sanitation and the Ronald Feldman Gallery to present “The Social Mirror” collection truck’, Department of Sanitation New York City Website, accessed http://www.nyc.gov/ html/dsny/html/pr2007/21407a.shtml, viewed 10 April 2014. 114. See Gisele Regatao, ‘One NY Artist: Sanitation Department Artist in Residence Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, WNYC News, 29 June 2013, accessed http://www.wnyc.org/story/303894-one-ny-artist-sanitationdepartment-artist-residence-mierle-laderman-ukeles/ viewed 10 April 2014. 115. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit. pp. 312–13. 116. Ukeles, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, op. cit., p. 318. 117. Feldman, ‘Inside the Sanitation System’, op. cit., pp. 53–4. 118. Chris Sharp, ‘Critics Choice: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’, Artforum, 9 April 2013, accessed Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Website, http://www.feldman gallery.com/media/ukeles/general%20press/2013 Ukeles Artforum sharp.pdf, viewed 12 March 2014. 119. Ukeles, cited in Miller, ‘Trash Talk’, op. cit. 120. Ukeles, cited in Miller, ‘Trash Talk’, op. cit. 121. See Elizabeth Carnegie, ‘“It wasn’t all bad”: representations of working class cultures within social history museums and their impacts on audiences’, Museum and Society, vol. 4, no. 2 ( July 2006), pp. 69–83.

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122. Carnegie, ‘It wasn’t all bad’, op. cit., p. 73. 123. Eveline D¨urr, ‘Urban Poverty, Spatial Representation and Mobility: Touring a Slum in Mexico’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol 36, no. 4 ( July 2012). ˇ zek, ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, RSA Animate 124. Slavoj Ziˇ Lecture [transcript], 24 November 2009, accessed http://www.thersa .org/ data/assets/pdf file/0008/1533626/RSA-Lecture-Slavoj-Zizektranscript.pdf, viewed 10 October 2013. 125. See ‘Blot Out the Sun’, video, Harrell Fletcher Website, accessed at http://www.harrellfletcher.com/2006/index3b.html, viewed 10 December 2013. 126. See James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969). 127. Jacques Ranci`ere, The Emancipated Spectator (London, UK: Verso, 2011, pp. 18–19). 128. Fletcher describes, ‘there is humor in surprise, a delightful humor, as opposed to a sarcastic or cynical humor. I’m completely happy it’s there. Lots of things that are serious can also be really funny. I feel that what makes my work funny is that I’m taking it very seriously.’ In Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, Dialogues in Public Art, op. cit, p. 159. 129. Fletcher, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, op. cit, p. 256. 130. Harrell Fletcher, cited in Allan McCollum, ‘Interview: Harrell Fletcher’, Bomb, no. 95, Spring 2006, accessed http://bombmagazine.org/article/ 2800/harrell-fletcher, viewed 3 March 2014. 131. Dykeman, cited Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Jay Dykeman’, Dialogues in Public Art, op. cit., p. 176. 132. Fletcher, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, op. cit, p. 155. 133. Fletcher, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, op. cit, p. 155. 134. Dykeman, cited Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Jay Dykeman’, op. cit, p. 176. 135. Fletcher, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, op. cit, p. 158. 136. Fletcher, cited in Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Fletcher and Seltzer’, op. cit, p. 158. Emphasis Fletcher’s. 137. See Harrell Fletcher Website, http://www.harrellfletcher.com/2006/index 3b.html, viewed 5 December 2013. 138. See Julian Stallabras, ‘Manifest Opulence’, London Review of Books Blog, 18 October 2013, accessed http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/10/18/ julian-stallabrass/manifest-opulence/#sthash.Mw8T1JRH.dpuf, viewed 15 November 2013.

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139. See Harrell Fletcher Website, op. cit. 140. Fletcher, cited in McCollum, Bomb, ‘Interview: Harrell Fletcher’, op. cit. 141. See Harrell Fletcher et al., People’s Biennial (New York, USA: Independent Curators International, 2011). 142. ‘Guiding Principles for Community Partnerships’ (Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts, 2013). 143. See for example Alison Young, Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014); and Sarah Boxer, ‘The Rise of Self-Taught Artists: Out Is the New In’, The Atlantic Magazine, 14 August 2013. 144. Fletcher, cited in McCollum, ‘Interview: Harrell Fletcher’, op. cit. 145. Fletcher, cited in McCollum, ‘Interview: Harrell Fletcher’, op. cit. 146. Dykeman, cited Finkelpearl, ‘Interview: Jay Dykeman’, op. cit., p. 176. 147. Fletcher, cited in McCollum, ‘Interview: Harrell Fletcher’, op. cit.

5 Art as Social Enterprise 1. Mayamiko presented this event along with design firm Slaves of the Extraordinary in October 2011. See Mayamiko website, accessed at http://www.mayamiko.org/inspired-2011.html, viewed 31 March 2014. 2. Angela McRobbie, ‘Re-thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise’, Variant, Issue 4 (Spring 2011), p. 34. 3. John Lloyd, ‘Human Capital’, Financial Times, 23–24 February 2013, p. 11. 4. Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Postmedium Condition (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 1. See also Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris, France: Les presses du reel, 2002). 5. Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’, 2000, op. cit. p. 15. 6. Toby Cecchini, ‘Culture Klatch’, The New York Times T Magazine, 5 March 2013, accessed http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/ 05/food-matters-culture-klatch/?gwh=B8DEE55E8439D40249FE9007 C242ACFB&gwt=pay, viewed 2 April 2014. 7. In a study of social enterprises that work in communities experiencing poverty, Marie Lisa Decanay observes, ‘Social enterprises that engage the poor as passive beneficiaries have a tendency to foster subservience and dependency that may lead to a hardening of social exclusion.’ In ‘Social Enterprises and the Poor’ (Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen Business School, 2012), p. 347.

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8. Andrea Zittel, ‘Smockshop’, A–Z Website, accessed at http://zittel.org/ smockshop, viewed 20 February 2014. 9. See Andrea Zittel: Critical Space, eds Paola Morsiani and Trevor Smith (New York, USA: Prestel Verlag, 2005); Rainald Schumacher, Andrea Zittel, 18 May–8 November, exhibition catalogue (Munich, Germany: Ingvild Goetz, Sammlung Goetz, 2003); and Andrea Zittel, Personal Programs, exhibition catalogue, ed. Zdenek Felix (Hamburg, Germany: Hatje Canz Verlag, 2000). 10. Alex Coles and Andrea Zittel ‘A-Z: Interview’, Art Monthly, no. 343 (February 2011), p. 4. 11. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life (Minneapolis, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 12. Hal Foster argues this point in Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes, (London, UK: Verso, 2002). 13. F. Granata, ‘Liberation through Limitations: Zittel’s smockshop’, Fashion Theory, vol. 12, no. 4, p. 545. 14. Isabelle Graw describes these competitive and individualistic conditions for artists as ‘increasing economic pressure to succeed in view of the compulsive wholesale exploitation of life in celebrity culture.’ (In High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 13.) 15. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, UK; New York, USA: Continuum, 2004), p. 145. 16. Zittel, cited in Alex Coles, ‘A-Z: Interview’, op. cit., p. 4. 17. The group states: ‘The Pacific Women’s Weaving circle is a dynamic space where Pacific Island women come together every fortnight to share traditional craft skills in a fun and relaxed environment. The Weaving Circle is dedicated to sharing cultural knowledge, continuing ancient handicrafts and building strong relationships, beginning with local Pacific Island women.’ See The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle website, accessed http://www.pacificwomensweavingcircle.com.au/, viewed 28 March 2014. 18. Maryann Talia Pau, ‘Interview’, The Design Files (August 2011), accessed at http://thedesignfiles.net/2011/08/interview-maryann-taliapau/, viewed 28 March 2014. Their listing in the Our Community Arts and Culture Directory outlines their purposes in more detail, and states one of the goals as: ‘Provide economic opportunities for women through arts and cultural projects, market stalls.’ Accessed https://www.ourcommunity .com.au/directories/listing?id=53841, viewed 28 March 2014. 19. Mis-design Website, accessed at http://mis-design.tumblr.com/page/4, viewed 28 March 2014. For further discussion of art and gift-economies,

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

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where alternatives modes of transaction are explored including barter and gift-giving, see Ted Purves, ed. What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany, USA: State University of New York Press, 2005). Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London, UK: Cohen and West, 1966). Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ (Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 71. Maryann Talia Pau, ‘Industry Roundtable on Creative Social Enterprise’ [transcript], The University of Melbourne, 2012. Maryann Talia Pau, ‘Industry Roundtable on Creative Social Enterprise’, op. cit. The Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle website, op. cit. Maryann Talia Pau, ‘Industry Roundtable on Creative Social Enterprise’, op. cit. Maryann Talia Pau, ‘Industry Roundtable on Creative Social Enterprise’, op. cit Irena Bokova, ‘The Power of Culture for Development: Economic Cooperation and Development Review’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Report (Paris, France: UNESCO, February 2013), accessed http://en.unesco.org/post 2015/sites/post2015/files/The%20Power%20of%20Culture%20for%20 Development.pdf, viewed 15 May 2013. Hendrik van der Pol, ‘Key Role of Cultural and Creative Industries in the Economy’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – Institute for Statistics Report, (Canada: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2007), accessed at http://www.oecd.org/site/ worldforum06/38703999.pdf, viewed 15 May 2013. Van der Pol, ‘Key Role of Cultural and Creative Industries in the Economy’, op. cit. Raymond Dart writes, ‘Although some scholars discussed non-profit commercial ventures in the early 1980s, social enterprise and social entrepreneurship emerged only in the late 1990s.’ In ‘The Legitimacy of Social Enterprise’, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, vol. 14, no. 4 (Summer 2004), p. 421, pp. 411–24. For discussion of the role of cooperatives in Europe and the link to social enterprise, see Carlo Borzaga and Giulia Galera, ‘The Concept and Practice of Social Enterprise. Lessons from the Italian Experience’, International Review of Social Research, vol. 2, no. 2 ( June 2012), pp. 95–112. See Marek Hudon and Joakim Sandberg, ‘The Ethical Crisis in Microfinance: Issues, Findings, and Implications’, Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 4 (October 2013), pp. 561–89; and Yilmaz Bayar ‘Future

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34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

of Microfinance in Light of the Recent Crises in Major Microfinance Markets’, Social Business, vol. 3, no. 3 (2013), pp. 243–9. Comparing the emergence of social enterprise across seven regions and countries worldwide, Janelle A. Kerlin writes, ‘The general theme underlying the emergence of social enterprise in all of the seven regions and countries is weak state social programs or funding, due to either the retreat or poor function of the state. The United States, Western and EastCentral Europe, as well as South America all experienced, to differing degrees, a withdrawal of state support in the 1980s and/or 1990s.’ In ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Global Emergence of Social Enterprise’, Voluntas, no. 21 (2010), pp. 162–79, p. 167. ‘The Limits of Social Enterprise: A Field Study and Case Analysis’ (New York, USA: Seedco Policy Center, 2007). For further discussion on alternative art practices and spaces in South Asia, see Roger Nelson, ‘Non-profit Art Spaces in Cambodia: Strength in Diversity’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 253 (September 2012), pp. 22–4; for a discussion of emerging art spaces in China see ‘Oscar Ho Hingkay’, Artforum International, vol. 48, no. 10 (Summer 2010), pp. 293, 380; and for a discussion of ephemeral artistic practices in Africa see Alyson Purpura, ‘Framing the Ephemeral’, African Arts vol. 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2009), pp. 11–15. Thane Peterson, ‘Art’s New Frame of Reference’, Business Week, no. 4015 (December 2006), pp. 116–17. Victoria D. Alexander and Marilyn Rueschemeyer, ‘Introduction’, Art and the State: The Visual Arts in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 1–2. Alexander and Rueschemeyer, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 2. Alex Perry, ‘Africa Rising’, Time, vol. 180, no. 23 (2012), p. 49. See Osei-Duro website, accessed at http://www.oseiduro.com/about, viewed 20 January 2014. Marx describes surplus value as relative to productivity, ‘Relative surplusvalue is [. . .] directly proportional to that productiveness. It rises with rising and falls with falling productiveness.’ In Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), p. 319. In contemporary capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, this surplus value also incorporates knowledge: ‘Knowledge, information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital (“knowledge capital”) as is the most elementary labour of the worker.’ In Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, op. cit., p. 234. Keti Chukhrov describes this as ‘an anthropological division of people into two races of producers’. In Chukhrov, ‘Towards the Space of the General:

NOTES TO PAGES 155–161

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44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

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On Labor beyond Materiality and Immateriality’, in Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity and the Labor of Art, e-flux journal (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 109. Suzy Menkes, ‘Rebranding Africa’, The New York Times, 14 May 2012, accessed http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/fashion/15ihtfafrica15.html? r=1&smid=tw-share, viewed 2 March 2014. Kristin Tillotson, ‘Urban Outfitters’ Hipster Panty is a Navajo No-no’, Star Tribune, 14 October 2011, accessed http://www.startribune.com/ lifestyle/style/131612793.html, viewed 20 March 2014. Sarah Karmali, ‘Feathers Ruffled at H&M’, Vogue, 12 August 2013, accessed www.vogue.co.uk, viewed 21 March 2014. See Isabel Wilkinson, ‘Are People Letting Karl Lagerfeld off the Hook for his Native American Headdresses?’, NY Magazine, 11 December 2012, accessed at www.nymag.com, viewed 21 March 2014. Jasmine Malik Chua, ‘Is the African-Inspired Fashion Trend a Form of Cultural Imperialism?’, in Ecouterre, 21 May 2012, accessed at www.ecouterre.com, viewed 21 March 2014. Chua, ‘Is the African-Inspired Fashion Trend a Form of Cultural Imperialism?’, op. cit. Isabel Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, op. cit., p. 18. Nathan Gray, cited in Andrew Self, ‘Fashion, Hipsters and the Appropriation of Culture’, Overland Literary Journal ( January 2014), accessed at http://overland.org.au/2014/01/fashion-hipsters-and-theappropriation-of-culture/, viewed 20 March 2014. Gray, cited in Andrew Self, ‘Fashion, Hipsters and the Appropriation of Culture’, op. cit. Self, ‘Fashion, Hipsters and the Appropriation of Culture’, op. cit. Jon Hugget, ‘Social Enterprise and Meritocracy: Watch out for the Blindspots’, The Guardian, 19 October 2012, accessed at http://www.the guardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/oct/19/three-blindspotssocial-enterprise-meritocracy, viewed 13 March 2014. Jon Hugget, ‘Social Enterprise and Meritocracy’, op. cit. Taz Tagore, cited in Lisa Palmer, ‘Snapshop: The Gift of Giving’, in Entrepreneur, June 2008, p. 55. Giorgi Jamburia, ‘Sustainability of Social Enterprises: A Case Study of Sweden’ (Stockholm, Sweden: KTH Industrial Engineering and Management, 2013), p. 28. See Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, accessed at http://www.gem consortium.org/, viewed 26 March 2014. A typical report on social enterprise start-up will refer to mainstream business start-up success and failure rates. See for example the Harvard Business Review: ‘The failure

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rates for new companies and markets [. . .] are high. That is true anywhere in the world.’ In J. Thompson and I. MacMillan, ‘Making Social Ventures Work’, Harvard Business Review, (September 2010); and ‘The Limits of Social Enterprise: A Field Study and Case Analysis’ (New York, USA: Seedco Policy Center, 2007). 58. Jonathon Lewis, ‘Are Social Entrepreneurs Failing to Fail?’, The Huffington Post, 8 February 2013, accessed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ jonathan-lewis/are-social-entrepreneurs- 1 b 2646308.html, viewed 2 March 2014.

Conclusion 1. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New York, USA: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 143.

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Wilkinson, Isabel, ‘Are People Letting Karl Lagerfeld Off the Hook for his Native American Headdresses?’, NY Magazine, 11 December 2012, accessed at www.nymag.com, viewed 21 March 2014 Wood, Paul, ed., The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, (Milton Keynes, UK; New Haven, USA: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1999) Wookey, Sara, ‘An Open Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in Marina Abramovic’s MOCA Performance’, The Performance Club Website, accessed at http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letterto-artists/, viewed 10 April 2014 Wu, Chin-Tao, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s (London, UK; New York, USA: Verso, 2002) Young, A., Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014) Y´udice, George, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, USA: Duke University Press, 2003) ‘Yvonne Rainer Blasts Marina Abramovi´c and MOCA LA’, The Performance Club Website, accessed at http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/ yvonne-rainer-douglas-crimp-and-taisha-paggett-blast-marinaabramovic-and-moca-la, viewed 10 April 2014 Zabel, Gary, ‘Introduction: The Radical Aesthetics of William Morris’, in Gary Zabel, ed., Art and Society: Lectures and Essays by William Morris (Boston, USA: George’s Hill, 1993) Zittel, Andrea, Personal Programs, exhibition catalogue, ed. Zdenek Felix (Hamburg, Germany: Hatje Canz Verlag, 2000) , ‘smockshop’, A-Z Website, accessed at http://zittel.org/smock shop.php, viewed 20 February 2014 ˇ zek, Slavoj, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London, UK: Ziˇ Routledge, 2003) , ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, RSA Animate Lecture [transcript], 24 November 2009, accessed http://www.thersa.org/ data/assets/ pdf file/0008/1533626/RSA-Lecture-Slavoj-Zizek-transcript.pdf, viewed 10 October 2013

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Index Abramovi´c, Marina, 5, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 100, 132, 173 Adorno, Theodor, 2, 15, 19, 25, 26 antagonism, 105 Atget, Eugene, 33 Avant-garde, 52, 67 bad art/bad painting, 60, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 77 Bad Girls, 69, 73 Barney, Matthew, 5, 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 132, 173 Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 28, 30, 64 Bell, Richard, 4, 60, 70, 78, 79, 173 big society, 8, 14, 47, 49, 51 biopolitical/bio-cultural, 19, 45 Bishop, Claire, 19, 44, 45, 53, 89, 90, 105, 106, 109, 133 Boltanski, Luc, 2, 107, 161 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 18 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 44, 45, 47, 49, 105, 148

Burden, Chris, 86, 101 B¨urger, Peter, 36, 77 capital, 6, 10, 22, 39, 104, 114, 155, 156, 165, 174 capitalism, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 24, 26, 31, 33, 41, 42, 43, 45, 58, 61, 76, 80, 85, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 107, 110, 132, 137, 142, 145, 164, 172, 173, 174 change/transform, 1, 7, 19, 21, 23, 57, 59, 60, 62, 67, 75, 80, 89, 105, 107, 108, 109, 114, 115, 120, 122, 130, 147, 159, 168, 169 Chapman, Jake and Dinos/Chapman Brothers, 4, 60, 76, 77, 173 Chiapello, Eve, 2, 107, 161 Chicago, Judy, 87, 142 civil society, 14, 162 Colonialism/neo-colonialism, 22, 136 commodity, 2, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 62, 64, 85, 86, 96, 97, 104, 106, 129, 143, 151, 172

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complicity, 3, 6, 17, 18, 24, 48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 58, 77, 80, 89, 92, 103, 105, 110, 118, 129, 171, 172, 173 Constructivism, 32, 52 consumer society, 1, 62 contemporary art, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 17, 18, 23, 24, 35, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 73, 76, 82, 83, 85, 87, 92, 127, 129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 145, 147, 157, 163, 172 Cost/price, 10, 23, 28, 29, 39, 46, 84, 96, 100, 102, 103, 110, 138, 155, 161 CoUNTess, 54 Courbet, Gustave, 27, 29 creative industries, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 84, 85, 90, 98, 100, 132, 155, 161, 173 Creative Spaces, 50, 56, 58, 59 cultural appropriation, 152, 162, 163, 166 culture industry, 15, 40, 41, 48 Dada, 35, 52, 60, 61, 64 Davis, Ben, 45, 47, 50, 143 Debord, Guy, 40, 61, 62, 72 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 6, 19, 100, 145, 171 Duchamp, Marcel, 31, 33, 34, 67 Duray, Dan, 93, 96, 99 Dykeman, Jay, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 Dzidefo Women’s Collective, 5, 138, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 169, 174 equity/inequity, 4, 50, 54, 58, 75, 76, 172

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ethics, 88, 89, 101, 102, 105, 106 exploitation, 5, 13, 14, 22, 23, 82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 124, 131, 132, 139, 162, 171, 173, 174 failure, 17, 67, 70, 74, 140, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170 Fletcher, Harrell, 5, 29, 84, 110, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 173 Fluxus, 52, 61, 86 Foster, Hal, 36, 38, 113 Futurist, 25, 30 Ghana, 4, 5, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 169 Greenberg, Clement, 34, 61 Groys, Boris, 17, 53 Guattari, F´elix, 2, 6, 100, 145 Guerrilla Girls, 4, 60, 73, 74, 75, 173 Guys, Constantin, 25, 28 Haacke, Hans, 39, 48, 49, 172 Hardt, Michael, 2, 6, 19, 106 Heartney, Eleanor, 18, 50 Hi Red Center, 86 Hickey, Dave, 46, 48 Hill Seth, Kate, 144 Hilli, Lisa, 147, 148, 149 Hirst, Damien, 25, 46, 47, 96 Holzer, Jenny, 41 industrial/industrialization, 2, 26, 30, 32, 33, 45, 84, 86, 87, 91, 92, 110, 126, 127, 131, 148, 161

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Jeffers, Alison, 40 Keogh, Molly, 141, 143, 144, 159, 169 Kester, Grant, 19 Koons, Jeff, 41, 48, 69, 84, 91, 92, 96, 172 Krauss, Rosalind, 139 Kristeva, Julia, 76 Kruger, Barbara, 41, 42, 60, 77, 78, 79, 173 LA MOCA Gala, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 100, 132, 173 Laclau, Ernesto, 2, 6, 17 Levine, Sherrie, 86 MacDougall, Steve, 124, 125, 128, 131 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 30 Marx, Karl, 33, 102, 107, 151 Mathias, Maryanne, 159 Mayamiko, 5, 135, 169 meritocracy/meritorious, 165, 169 modern/modernism/modernist, 3, 9, 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 46, 50, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 74, 86, 98, 126, 141, 148 Morris, William, 26, 27, 28, 32, 48 Mouffe, Chantal, 2, 6, 18 Murakami, Takashi, 43, 44, 48, 86, 139, 172

Negri, Antonio, 2, 6, 19, 106 nineteenth century, 25, 26, 28, 29, 40 No Longer Empty, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59 non-profit, 12, 14, 20, 23, 47, 58, 135, 142, 154, 155, 164, 166, 167, 168

INDEX

instrumental/instrumentalization, 8, 9, 23, 51, 52, 97, 109, 172

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Oldenburg, Claes, 36, 37, 172 Orta, Lucy, 45 Osei-Duro, 5, 138, 141, 156, 159, 160, 161, 163, 166, 169 Pabustan, Peggy, 143, 144 Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle, 5, 138, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 154, 169, 170, 174 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 16 Pau, Maryann Talia, 147, 148 Picasso, Pablo, 34 policy, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 49, 51, 52, 57, 58, 120, 137, 155 politics, 6, 7, 16, 17, 18, 19, 50, 61, 71, 72, 79, 84, 89, 91, 94, 96, 107, 133, 173 post-modern, 38, 44, 73, 76 poverty, 21, 23, 50, 53, 55, 56, 97, 107, 122, 139, 155, 158, 164 Powers, John, 91, 92 profit, 2, 12, 14, 20, 23, 29, 34, 81, 86, 96, 126, 136, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 168 Pussy Riot, 4, 60, 74, 75, 173 Rainer, Yvonne, 83, 91 Ranci`ere, Jacques, 16, 89, 126, 133 Rauschenberg, Robert, 36, 86

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Reciprocity Foundation/Appreciate Design, 5, 138, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174 Relational Aesthetics, 44, 45, 47, 71, 89 Relyea, Lane, 85, 87, 107 resistance/rebellion/subversion, 6, 16, 18, 26, 28, 39, 46, 72, 103, 106, 109, 121, 133, 143 147, 171 Robert, Patrick see also United Colors of Benetton, 36, 86, 97, 108 Rodchenko, Alexander, 32 Ruskin, John, 26 Salle, David, 38 Schapiro, Miriam, 87 Schnabel, Julian, 38, 69 Serra, Richard, 95 Sierra, Santiago, 5, 84, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 118, 122, 132, 173 Situationist International, 49, 61 Sloterdijk, Peter, 17, 59, 108 smockshop, 5, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 154, 159, 169, 174 social engagement/socially engaged, 1, 51, 52, 62, 71, 73, 81, 89, 110, 133, 160, 163, 171, 172, 173, 174 social practice, 3, 4, 7, 18, 19, 24, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 59, 62, 71, 73, 80, 81, 84, 127, 130, 137, 139, 172 social turn, the, 18, 52, 133, 172 society, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,

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28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 79, 80, 84, 90, 91, 98, 104, 106, 107, 120, 138, 148, 171, 174, 175 sociology, 3, 15, 16, 19, 24, 52, 80, 138, 171 Spoerri, Daniel, 36 sustainability, 3, 7, 158, 164, 169 tensions/problems, 2, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 21, 29, 44, 45, 47, 51, 52, 55, 57, 59, 75, 85, 108, 109, 118, 151, 155, 165, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174 Toscani, Oliviero, 108 Tucker, Marcia, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74 twentieth century, 2, 3, 18, 25, 42, 52, 60, 68, 78, 154, 172 twenty-first century, 17, 20, 42, 44, 47, 80, 171 UK, 4, 5, 8, 12, 14, 20, 53, 135, 136, 154 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 5, 84, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 132, 133, 173 UNESCO, 10, 11, 153 United Colors of Benetton see also Robert, Patrick advertising campaign, 108 USA, 4, 5, 12, 21, 31, 38, 50, 70, 75, 92, 138, 155, 156, 160, 162, 166 wages, 53, 54, 75, 84, 91, 92, 113 Warhol, Andy, 36, 43, 86, 87

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Zittel, Andrea, 5, 45, 46, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 159, 174 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 2, 21, 23, 50, 55, 58, Ziˇ 103, 123

INDEX

Willats, Stephen, 40 Women of Kireka, 5, 138, 156, 164, 165, 166, 170, 174 Wookey, Sara, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 132

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