Rant 56: How Cameron Put My Potential To Work

Hi Helen. You might like to listen to Saturday Live on Radio 4 and hear Sir Ken Robinson on creativity in schools/ life/ jobs this morning?  I don't really know about "the Big Society" - or rather I tend to ignore politicians and their stupid catch phrases that they want to be associated with, and yet don't really comprehend in the fullest sense. the big society is just what happens, has always happened, with or without the blessing of politicians.

I'm sure that you probably are fulfilling your potential in the sense that you are doing what you love and believe in. I don't think we should think that we are working for free for the government, but rather I know that, along with many others working as volunteers in many sectors, we are the bedrock of Society. It doesn't really matter whether the high earning lawyers and bankers etc recognise or appreciate what we do or not. If they are as excited and fulfilled doing what they do then that's fine - we are part of something much bigger that will sustain them all and create future generations that can think and feel and have the ground breaking ideas that make the World go round (or stop).  Without people like us the whole world would have fallen apart long ago and by failing to encourage the arts this will surely set Britain back economically and socially. This knowledge should feed us and fuel us to work harder to continue in our striving - meanwhile the care working and the gallery attendant work are the periods of our week when our minds are free to plan and create future projects and just think and harness the energy and ideas. We are the lucky ones as you say. And as Sir Ken points out - we didn't go into the arts anticipating aquiring private jets did we?!

 Yes, I agree that time which is what one might think of as 'idle' being a gallery assistant, can in fact be very productive but for anyone doing this 9-5 because they need to pay the bills and cant find any other way into the arts, it can also be very fustrating. The reason I bring up the Big Society is that despite the popular idea that politicians use language and concepts which are empty, I think this government are highly ideological. It's quite a clever tactic that they appear to be completley ungrounded (will back track on policy according to public opinion) but at the same time they're shifting the goal posts, and therefore we need to shift ours. They're instrumentalising what was a liberating experience- volunteering, and I want to point to this. It doesn't mean people should stop doing things for free but many many voluntary organisations are having their funding cut, so we can see that their argument isn't about valuing what's already going on in the voluntary sector anyway.  

Artists and Curators often exist in the precaritat; people working in cultural jobs they can't afford, funded by zero-hour contracts in the "real world". This isn't the big society, this is an uncaring extension of capitalism. "There's no alternative to capitalism, so if the thing we love doing doesn't make money, we just have to pay to do it", the reasoning goes. The Big Society is the final push of this idea - bringing the invisible hand of the market to libraries, healthcare, anything that costs money that doesn't make it.

I'd have to disagree that artists invented the concepts behind a Big Society. I'd disagree strongly; it seems like yoking a popular idea to the fact that people working in the arts often get a bum deal. The reason your work as an artist/cloakroom attendant never stops isn't because capitalism is putting your awesome coat-storing skills to work at the same time as using your curatorial powers for good. It's because capitalism hates you.

Yeah, that's right; capitalism hates you. It hates all artists, curators, and even ceramists. In doing things that don't have a strict monetary worth, you - we, as artists - remind people that there are things beyond family that can't be brought. We passed through a time of neoliberalism, after the collapse of alternatives to the free market, when it seemed like that might get forgotten, but some things are just too important.

I just thought I'd chip in with an extra reply to my earlier reply. I'd been mulling the idea of capitalism hating us, and thinking about the initial statement of artists inventing a prototype version of "Big Society"...

In a way, the low-paying jobs for graduates in the cultural sphere is a sort of punishment. Capitalism doesn't have gulags; it has minimum wage and sink estates. If only all these underemployed curators had studied something useful, like web design, they could be paid commensurate to their intellect! Although, as Jaron Lanier points out in "You are not a gadget", that would often mean making sure that advertising can be displayed on the internet.

In David Lynch's movie Dune, a complex SF plotline is rendered down to the words "the spice must flow". A similar breakdown of capitalist churn would be "money must be spent". A Lacanian analysis of what is "Real" is what must be supressed. Our societies dominant ideologies have no space for anything than what capitalism drives us towards, spending and buying.

Is the big society saying that the things that cannot be brought, like health and culture, will have to be paid for by the individual who values them? If so, then this is a validation of anybody who works a shitty day job before creating art, because as money must be earned before it is spent, those other, valueless things must be created before they are seen.

The Real benefits of good health and cultural wealth cannot be ignored; look at Singapore, Dubai, or Libya for societies that attempt to work on pure capitalism alone, and you'll see the flaws of those environments very quickly.

I think I now understand and agree with what both of you are saying - but if I don't then I'm sure it's my failing not yours! My own instinctive take on this is we don't want to play pawn to Cameron's king however unwittingly, as care worker or gallery attendant or whatever, then we have to outwit him by using our own skills as subversively as possible whenever we get the chance. Personally I thrive off the idea of Capitalism hating us - hatred is a good powerful reaction. As artists our own criteria for the success of an artwork is this: Would Cameron or his cohorts want to own this piece? YES we do hope so because it's beautifully crafted and beguiling. Could he own it? NO because it's not for sale to him or his cohorts. What would happen if he did own it and gaze at it from his fancy Etonian perspective? He would get sick and lose his Kingdom we hope because it was created with the intention of confounding this kind of private ownership. It would sit on his wall rebelling and revealing it's many exquisite layers of unpalletable meanings to him over the days and weeks so that, in the end, he would feel nothing but shame. At least that's what we would want our work to engender in such a man and his friends and cohorts and his intentions with his "Big Society". The whole notion of being a political prisoner, of being encarcerated, albeit through poverty rather than by being locked up in an underground bunker, kicks in for me at the idea of what is currently happening in this country politically. They can lock me up, starve me, torture me but they can't take away my soul.

But then again London is a very expensive place to live and work - care workers like my partner earn relatively good ammounts here in the back of beyond.  And perhaps looking after people in their final months, days or hours of need is a more fulfilling way to spend a night than a day spent taking and handing out coats that belong predominantly to wealthy bankers, lawyers, leisured classes and perhaps worst of all, art world officianados?!

The 15th Century John Heywood poem springs to mind in relation to this Rant. "Let the world slide, let the world go; A fig for care, and a fig for woe! If I can't pay, why I can owe, And death makes equal the high and low"

'Capitalism hates you'

I like that.

I, like Helen, work in various galleries in various roles. I don't really mind working a low paid job (at the moment), because it pays my rent (at the moment), and because I'm starting to get offered more paid freelance work.

I have peeped through the bejewelled curtain of freelance work, and it pays well...

I have thought about going for more permanent, contracted roles (office admin things), but in all honesty I need the flexibility... My galleries really do honour their side of the casual-contract bargain, meaning that I can go away an artist's residency for three weeks and come back to a job. A lot of places don't honour that side of the bargain, e.g. "if you don't work Friday night you're not coming back"

So, a bit like an out of date version of Helen, I feel like a New Labour wet dream, like I'm a poster boy for the 'flexible worker' that they wanted everyone to be. Politicians are terribly keen for people to adapt to 'the new economic climate', which is strange because as Pete says, capitalism doesn't need you to adapt to it's whims. It doesn't need you to thrive when it shifts entire workforces, or closes big employers, or enforces incredible notions of how public services should be run.

The Big Society is, I think, a slightly different idea to the flexi-casual-freelance problem that Helen is talking about. The Big Society is a bit more of a foggy-eyed Tory thing, with a Neoliberal gloss that might hurt actual volunteering. It isn't openly malevolent, just unrealistic and nostalgic. It is the continuing basis of every political decision on outdated, disproved, market theory that seems to be the real problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwTDhjaFFS0

I would say that actually capitalism (secretly) loves us. It might pretend it doesn't but in reality it can't get enough. It knows that we are exploitable due to our poor economic situation (which when we decided to become artists we chose) and we might protest but no-one really listens but the art world and who outside of the art world really cares about our predicament?

To think art is separate to capitalism is wrong, it is wholeheartedly in the centre of it all, whether we like it or not. The art market is capitalism in full flow. Our art (and experience/knowledge) is sold and bought. We talk about art careers and not practice, and are made to think of our practice in terms of a business. We get involved in schemes run by local government and authorities whose aim is to improve failing areas through regeneration by painting shop shutters or putting artwork in empty shops or to help "failing" school leavers by running a workshop which ticks all the boxes. I am fully part of this as someone who works as a gallery assistant, whilst studying, trying to make artwork, be a curator, run workshops with "failing school leavers" as well as have a life which invariably means going on holiday to spend time in art galleries. Artists are the living embodiment of Delboy, we work every day, making very little money, unless you are lucky, so we don't have to work in a "proper" job. Yet thats the choice we made and I personally wouldn't want to change it but how do we make it work for us?

Whilst artists did not invent the Big Society we are implicit in it. Projects. such as the art in empty shops scheme, papers over the cracks of the real problem of economic failure within a run down area (how many well off areas have this scheme?). The artist instead of accepting this should subvert it, either from within or out. Instead of a shopart scheme maybe their should be a bankart scheme, where local artists one day go to their local bank and present an exhibition, be it performance, painting, installation etc (Not sure if UK Uncut have already done this). After all it won’t be long until, when the cuts kick in, there won't be many places for artists to exhibit.

Hate and love are all part of the same thing are they not? And exhibiting in banks sounds so uninspiring Ben! Ours is only open two days a week now with much banking is conducted online these days - and having to compete with coffee coloured hessian and signs about and displays of how to invest dosh we don't have is not really a joyful prospect. Give me an empty shop window or the wall of a derilict building any day. I also think you have to beware of tarring us all with the same brush when you use the big "we". Not all artists live in cities or depend on galleries and private buyers - there are alternatives. Some artists do try to subvert this within their art practice (and yes we do call it a practice not a business) - even if art and capitalism do go hand in hand they can also fight like cat and dog along the way. And some of us do consider the choices that we make in relation to how not to depend on the mainstream art buying establishment to continue our practice. It is dangerous to lump artists together. Many of the best gallery spaces now are cooperatives or collectives and to me it seems that it's those who surround art rather than the artists themselves who pander to an old, tired and often irrelevant art market.

Your insistence that the art world is part of capitalism shows the extent to which capitalism permeates any resistance to it. Imagine yourself in the middle ages of Europe; the ruling paradigm of the world is that God and the Monarchy are above all others and untouchable in that state. Everything exists because of their munificence.

I've been to council-run business training for artists. I've stood on gallery floors for hours, mindlessly staring at the walls until my paycheck came. I've done residencies in run-down areas. So I'm pretty familiar with that world. But, as Hans Abbing points out in his treatise on the economic development of artists, you can't continue to live that lifestyle. Most artists choose to move on, get a 'real' job, and make more money doing something else as they grow older.

If the art world really was at the centre of capitalism, artists would skip the bit where they struggle to make the rent by working two jobs, go on weird residencies, and do training courses in tax returns. They would all become nail technicans, or something similar. The part that you're forgetting is the non-financial reward of making and doing, the thing that keeps people creating, even when they are deep into their overdrafts.

The mechanistics of the art world have been co-opted by capitalism, it's true. That's why you aren't seeing land art being made, or work like Robert Barry's conceptual classic, "Closed Gallery". But don't make the same mistake that a medival monk would have made, or that Francis Fukyama made when he titled his book "The End of History". Captialism, for all it's apparent strengths, is just a system that we are living in. How you let it define your actions is up to you.

Yes I like this argument best Pete - music to my eyes. Thank-you.

Awesome. Thanks!

My statement was deliberately being provocative and was trying to discuss the pressures that for me, are always there, socially economically or culturally. I agree completely with what you (Tumim & Prendergast and Pete) are saying. There are alternatives and we should not forget that. My idea of bankart scheme was partly said in jest as well as in relation to UKUncut, not as a govt-funding scheme but that artists could "take over" the bank in protest about the position we are in. This protest I am sure already happens, or something similar, and these are the art practices we maybe need to turn to.

I also agree not all artists depend on galleries or buyers (I don't and I am not sure that I want to) but that is the predominant idea of an art world that is pushed, I feel, in the area I live in. My comment about art business instead of art practice stems from my own experience of going to countless courses (hopefully I will learn not to some day) and hearing about art and business, sustainability, policy etc etc. The creative side seems to be lost in these circumstances and is something I try hard to resist. Hence the sentence 'thats the choice we made and I personally wouldn't want to change it but how do we make it work for us?' I want to be an artist and I have made the decision not to have a full time ‘real’ job but need to make this work for me, i.e. as Pete says in relation to capitalism, how you let it define your actions is up to you. However I do feel, for me, there is always the pressure economically, culturally and socially to conform.

I am not saying the art world is part of capitalism and therefore we (I) must accept it and get on with it but that we (I) must challenge it and even with all the pressures that are put on us (me) to become part of it no matter how hopeless a task that sometimes feels. Hope that makes more sense.

Of course I (we) understand your point Ben. But my advice, some 23 years after graduating from art college, is that you avoid conformity within your art practice, as if it were pure heroin.

Pete- I dont agree with the idea that artists make things which cannot be bought. There is nothing that you, me or any other artist can make which cannot be accomodated by capital. This is a given assumption underlying any other argument I discuss.

Ben- "Art is at the centre of capital whether we like it or not" I agree, the art world is the most unregulated free (no contracts) market. It's incredible to think the amounts of money that are circulated on pure convention of Mafia style law. Most exchanges are word of mouth, no legislation etc.

Matt- I agree that precariat and big society are different but there is an essentially ideologically small state to both, which can be related to the free liberal ecomics discussed above.

Tumin and Prendergast- I seem to disagree with alot of your opinions but maybe also misunderstand them? I agree that it's more fufilling to do carework than do invilation but I'm not sure where this gets us. I used to do exhibitions in empty shops, it's a great example of capital approprirating artistic value.

In terms of theoretical discourse, I find your reply to be just a smidgeon above "I'm rubber and you're glue".

 Yes, that phrase does come to mind, at least we can agree on that!

 Yes there is a uncharted talent Being ignored and dismissed me. what chance do i have against the idiots that are in charge ?