Precarious Presence
when I was in my early 20’s, kinda like low key studying and didn’t have a single shit but cute project space exhibition yet, i had an acquaintance complain ‘bout how all these exhibitions she was having, didn’t do shit. i was like, huh? dat bish be trippin! as if all of that platform, exposure, dissemination of talent, springboard for creative output, publicity and hype around her work wouldn’t help to develop her practice? how could someone have like fifteen exhibitions a year and say they’re really badly struggling to pay rent and feed their belly?
well, probably be-cause all these “first world western centers of civilization” have a minimum wage that does not belong to the realms of artistic production.
there is no abiding law to pay artists when they are exhibiting their work in germany, where that gal was speaking, nor within most other “first world” contexts. there is recommendations from the german senate. unfortunately most major art institutions in ger- many are as truthful to these recommendations as ya average cheatin’ fuckboy.
the non-committal thing can be kinda healthy to keep project spaces, experimentation and the youth alive and poppin’. however, it is just a big ass fuckery in contexts where the framework is based on a certain amount of “professionalization” and capitalization off the artist’s labour. y the fuck do ppl still think it is okay to pay everyone involved in an exhibition but the artist?
in her 2019 book “wages against artwork” writer leigh claire la berge refers to silvia federici’s 1974 feminist classic “wages against housework” that declared within its opening manifesto “they call it frigidity. we call it absenteeism. every miscarriage is a work accident. more smiles? more money. nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile. neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.”
the decommodification of the “labour of love” - unites mamacitas globally to this day through the universal joys of unpaid housework and caring responsibilities. similarly well-intended justification bs is the cornerstone when it comes to not payin’ artistic production.
la berge argues the narrative of artistic labour shall be linked to a similar mythology. a purely loving activity created as an escapism to “actual work” and ties this especially to socially engaged art practices. while this becomes significantly crucial for aesthetic experiences intended to be disseminated outside of the “art market”, her analogy of the subway sandwich makes clear that the process of decommodification is inherent 2 almost all artistic labour rn. when u sell a sandwich at subway, the process of making the sandwich is payed for and the sandwich is payed for.
now: imagine u make printworks, videos, sculptures, photographs. even if u belong to “the lucky 5%” that might be collecting dinero for some of the works later on the mysterious art bazaar, ur actual work of producing the stuff ain’t waged.
miss leigh claire traces this phenomenon back to the timeframe where the EUropean “enlightenment” period morphed into romanticism & as another gift “old white men” left us. the well known myth of the starving artist: loving his work so damn much - his sacrifice to live at the margins of society, is what in fact creates the validation of his passionate practice. The enlightenment bros was already cancelled yesterday, so it’s gonna keep me from elaborating further on how most of these privileged bishes wasn’t in that urgent need of a dollar anyway. generational wealth or imperialist profits got them good.#hivermeer
our all time fav critical boss bitch locates another narrative as reason for the precarity spectacle. in the essay “the terror of total dasein” hito steyerl writes “no one working in the art field expects his or her labour to be irreplaceable or even mildly important anymore. in the age of rampant self-employment or rather self-unemployment the idea that anyone would care for one’s specific labour power seems rather exotic. ...in addition to delivering works, artists, or more generally content providers, nowadays have to perform countless additional services, which slowly seem to become more important than any other form of work. the Q&A is more important than the screening, the live lecture more than the text, the encounter with the artist more important than the one with the work. not to speak about the jumble of quasi-academic and social media PR formats that multiply the templates in which unalienated presence is supposed to be delivered. the artist has to be present, as in marina abramović’s eponymous performance. and not only present, but exclusively present, present for the first time, or in some other hyperventilating capacity of newness. artistic occupation is being redefined as permanent presence.”
whereas this permanent presence is a steady, consequential development throughout the last
decades of digitization and our relationship with miss tech, miss rona made the virtual presence
expectations run wild. like, fanatical style assumptions of artists having nothing else to do than produce content for free. so much content, their practice becomes content and they themselves the commodity. makes sense; because of the lockdown armageddon artists r mad strugglin’ 2 show or sell their work physically, so we should ask them to produce uncompensated content- labour to starve in quarantine and save the MoMA.
ppl have this weird tendency to normalize things that are cultural as “natural.” we do this in our physical clan bubbles and the algorithmic construction of our unsocial media engineering only intensifies the shabang. man, it feels low key absurd for me having to emphasize it ain’t okay to expect folks to work for free. but it weirdly still irritates others within photoland, contemporary arts n academia circles.
it irritates these museums folks from big ass state funded tax payer sweat consuming institutions, when a fellow video artist asks for a screening fee. it surprises that academia gal: i be the first person asking for an honorary to speak at a conference, since all the other ivory tower residents are working for free, cause the academy pays. chattin’ to a friend working in the music industry, suddenly i get irritated cause he be like “what? the artists don’t get a percentage when their work is sold 6 times higher on the secondary market?”
bish, i was like “bruh, this is so true, even spotify has more love than christies” hyperubertotalnormalization #thevectoralistclass
#mckenziewarkpreaching #watchoutfornfts
&this is just speaking about the little percentage of folks that r having gallery representation & r making works u can actually sell well like.. ah.. paintings of relatable things from the internet. wallahi! the other billion art workers are what gregory sholette called the “dark matter”. in his eponymous book he argues that “imagination and creativity in the art world originate n thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. this broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite”
miss dark matter 2021: just finished their MFA in debt with honours.
it might be argued that the art
university industrial complex has turned debt into an artistic medium they be teaching transdisciplinary to all of their students. how to acquire and archive debt, how to care for and
caress the pigments of debt, how to blend and dry and personalize your preferred debt texture and give the cinematographic features of ur debt an aperture 1.8 bokeh bankrupt shine.
seeing and marketing art solely as a luxury commodity ready to flip ya swiss ass bank account & turning artists into branded corporate sluts is a shit show. the human species loses so much magic through the instagrammable, sothebyan perpetuation of this narrative. equally non-sense tho is thinking anticapitalist progressives are waiting to live under a bridge and we will dismantle capitalism with reinforcing classism. kimberlé crenshaw taught us class intersects with all the other OG oppressors. this oppression ensemble manufactures the expansive class scale bell hooks summed up with “it is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life.”
let’s keep it real. the art world is far from being “decolonized” - many of the few global south folks, that can actually access our big beautiful art world based on western hegemony, belong to the same few local elites that have prolly been profiting for generations from selling their ressources, land or ppl to the imperial powers. there is very few miraculously strong and stubborn examples of global south folks that manage to fight thru an art career without being generational wealth rich kids or marrying into real estate. most of them: mad busy tryna survive while building the missing institutions, in spaces drained by western imperialism, without a burnout.with kismet.
the diversity of faces we are seeing printed within art fairs or magazines are still mostly representational. in 2017 the latin american and african art market made up less than 4% sales globally. mashallah, sales are rising throughout the pandemic. globalisation within and outside of the arts has so far pretty much been reserved for rich elites, white ppl and commodities.
“diversity” stays
dark matter,
sustaining the artistocracy.
*actionable steps towards
more socio-economic
diversity within ur western
arts organization can be
found in british “jerwood
arts” inclusion employer
toolkit
of course all a this is the ugly echo of bigger economical “trends” that make up our current wealth gap frenzy, a situation that tech bros, political decisions and covid accellerated into the
economic world order varoufakis coined “technofeudalism”. big man blue chip eating the
heart out of all a those low level mafia members inside and outside the art world.
so, instead of performing wokeness on the gram; hash-taggin’ #blacklivesmatter and forgetting about your antiracism half a year later, be aware that if you aren’t paying for labour, you are complicit with white supremacy. the communities that have been historically disenfranchised by colonialism, imperialism and commodification of their bodies and souls are not invited to your party.
fiy, amidst the art market drop of 58% less sales in the first half a year of the pandemic, compared to 2019 the number of female gendered humans in the 100 best selling artists has doubled in 2020. it went from 7 to 15.
LOL
tho, pinpointing solely to macroeconomic factors keeps us from holding ourselves accountable. how am i complicit in creating the structures i say i don’t want? artist/curator/artcritic/writer duo the white pube joined other transparency movements in the arts and made all of their income public. i.e. the shit pay that major institutions make. we need more conversations like this. when we stop to align artistic success with money in the bank we take a step otw to storm that ivory tower. when we create the conditions for money in the bank the second. fuckin’ invite 5 artists less and use the money for a proper fee. decline unpaid shows, talks, tiktok posts.
yes, like 40% of gen z wanna do “something creative” with like, photography or like design or something & building a fair and sustainable industry around this desire ain’t happenin’. (suddenly universal basic income be knockin’) the rise of the creative class has defined the 21st century workforce independent of the bubble we call contemporary art. but every person living through this bubble has the chance to check themselves. to mould this bubble into a place where the ppl that feed the system will be able to feed themselves.
