PROGRAM: F/SUW CONFERENCE

Free/Slow University of Warsaw Conference Division of Labour, Forms of Capital and systems of (Self) exploatation in the Field of Visual Art

Time: 8th of November 2014, Saturday, 11.00-18.30 Venue: Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art, pavillion Emilia (entrance from ul. Emilii Plater) Participants: Hans Abbing (University of Amsterdam), Luc Boltanski (École des hautes Êtudes en sciences sociales, Paris), Gregory Sholette (City University of New York), Angela McRobbie (Goldsmiths, University of London), Isabelle Bruno (Universite Lille), Pascal Gielen (University of Groningen) Conference will be held in English.

The conference seeks to explore the field of contemporary art as social factory, which determines division of labour, attribution of statuses, and distribution of the various forms of capital. When we discuss artistic labour, we analyse the entire process of art production, in which artists are involved among other groups of producers, such as assistants, curators, technicians, administrators. We seek to expose competitive pressures both within and between those categories, mechanisms converting various types of capital (i.e. social, symbolic, and economic), systems of justification and moral economies characteristic for this mode of production.

The conference accompanies research programme Division of labour and distribution of social and economic capitals in the Polish contemporary art field conducted by the team of Free/ Slow University of Warsaw in 2013 and 2014. This comprehensive survey will be summarised by the report, published by the end of 2014 on the web pages of F/SUW and Bęc Zmiana Foundation.

Session 1 11.00 – 11.30 Registration & coffee 11.30 – 12.15 FSUW (Michał Kozłowski, Jan Sowa, Kuba Szreder), Divisions of Labour, Distributions of

Capitals and (Self)exploitation in the Field

of Visual Arts. An Introduction 12.15 – 13.00 Pascal Gielen: Artists & Repressive Liberalism 13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break Sesion 2 14.00 – 14.45 Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre: The «Collection» – a new form of capitalism.

Economic enhencement of the past and its consequences 14.45 – 15:15 Isabelle Bruno: The Talent Factor(y). A French

controversy about Menger’s sociology of creative work 15.15 – 15:45 Coffee break Session 3 15.45 – 16:30 Gregory Sholette: Dark matter, Repetition, and Complicity 16.30 – 17:15 Hans Abbing: Artists Become Active,

some in social action and others in cultural entrepreneurship 17.15 – 17:30 Angela McRobbie: skype call 17:30 – 18:30 Closing remarks and general discussion

F/SUW (Michal Kozlowski, Jan Sowa, Kuba Szreder): Divisions of Labour, Distributions of Capitals and (Self)exploitation in the Field of Visual Arts.

An Introduction The conference Art field as social factory is a part of an ongoing research project Division and organization of labour in the Polish field of contemporary art, which has been conducted by Free/Slow University Warsaw between 2013 and 2014. During the introduction, the team of F/SUW will discuss three issues: the theoretical background informing the empirical enquiry into divisions of labour and distributions of capital in the sphere of artistic production, presenting the research tools designed for this enquiry, and explaining the relevance of the problem in the particular context in Poland. These opening remarks will introduce broader problematic of the conference, setting the division of labour characteristic for the art world in the context of transforming relations between labour, value and creativity in contemporary capitalism.

The Free University of Warsaw is a nomadic centre of interdisciplinary studies, critical reflection, and independent thinking about art and society. The FUW operates parallel to the official centres of artistic and academic education. Its principle is to combine theory with praxis and culture with its social context. The FUW is an informal research centre, within the framework of which we experiment with various forms of the generation and communication of knowledge.

Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre: The «Collection» – a new form of capitalism. Economic enhencement of the past and its consequences Luc Boltanski (born 1940) is the leading figure in the new „pragmatic” school of French sociology. He is a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and the founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale. He contributed to the start of the „political and moral sociology” framework.

Political and moral sociology has gradually developed as a research programme — in the sense proposed by Imre Lakatos — around a conceptual nucleus looking to construct a theory of action based on Émile Durkheim’s theory of moral fact, revising the inheritance of ‘methodological structuralism’ from the point of view of dynamics and processes. The research program stresses how, in many conflicts, the characteristics of the disputants change during the course of the conflict. His work has significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social and economic history.

Pascal Gielen: Artists & Repressive Liberalism Based on the quantitative and qualitative research ‘The Hybrid Artist – Artistic Careers in the Post-Industrial Age’ (Van Winkel, Gielen, et.al., 2012), the sociologist Pascal Gielen will discuss in his lecture the practical conditions artists need to stay creative in an autonomous way. In the condition of post-Fordism and in the slipstream of the financial crisis artists are under pressure to deliver services to society (f.e. community art) or to the economy (f.e. creative industries). Contemporary cultural politics is analysed by Gielen als ‘repressive liberalism’, in which freedom on the labour market is promoted (f.e. freelancers) but a the same time is puted more and more in an iron cage of rules, assesments, audits. In this lecture the strategies will be discribed which are devoloped on the individual level by artists to survive and to keep on acting in these political and economical conditions.

Pascal Gielen (1970) is director of the research center Arts in Society at the Groningen University where he is associate Professor sociology of art. Gielen leads also the research group and book series ‘Arts in Society’ (Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg). He has written serveral books on contemporary art, cultural heritage and cultural politics. The research of Gielen focuses on cultural politics and the institutional contexts of the arts. Books of Gielen are translated in English, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Isabelle Bruno: The Talent Factor(y). A French controversy about Menger’s sociology This presentation will broadly sketch out the controversy about Menger’s approach to talent, which has occured over the past year in France.

Pierre-Michel MENGER is a French sociologist, professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris), who has in 2013 joined the Collège de France to hold the Chair of “Sociology of creative work”. Among other books on musicians, representational artists or graphics workers, he recently published The Economics of Creativity. Art and Achievement under Uncertainty (Harvard University Press, 2013). According to Menger, talent matters in art field but is not the decisive factor explaining differences in reputation and earnings. His main thesis is that creative work is governed by uncertainty, and that it is this very uncertainty which ultimately makes self-realization and creative innovation possible. Hence the need for techniques helping to manage this uncertainty and build career opportunities for artists.

Menger’s sociology has (fortunately) been challenged. Among others, the sociologist Manuel Schotté, who has tackled the question of talent in sport through an in-depth empirical study on the Moroccan runners, criticized him for neglecting the social origins of capacities and extra-artistic resources in the construction of a career. As for Maurizio Lazzarato, he shed light on the absence of capital in Menger’s sociology of artistic labour. His critics mainly targeted the harmful effects of such a depoliticization which, in the context of the fight of the « intermittents » (workers in the entertainment industry without steady employment), eventually defended

a conception of full employment leading to justify precariousness.

Through this tiny French controversy in sociology, the modest purpose here is to fuel our debate on one of the most profoundly entrenched professional illusions in art field, i.e. the mythology of talent.

Isabelle Bruno is Associate Professorin political science at the University of Lille (France), where she is member of the Lille Centre for European Research on Administration, Politics and Society (CERAPS, CNRS/Lille 2). Her first book, entitled À vos marques, prêts… cherchez! La stratégie européenne de Lisbonne, vers un marché de la recherche, was published in 2008. With E. Didier, she recently published Benchmarking. L’État sous pression statistique (Zones/La Découverte, 2013) and they edited with T. Vitale Statactivism: Statistics and Activism in the open journal of sociopolitical studies Participazione e conflitto (vol. 7, #2, 2014).

Gregory Sholette: Dark matter, Repetition, and Complicity Dominant notions of contemporary art are being overturned not by some radical avant-garde theory or movement, but instead by an “uprising” from within the confines of the “art factory,” as well as by newly embodied instances of informal everyday creativity that high culture has long overlooked. Theorists Negt and Kluge might have described this insurrection as the partial unblocking of a counter-public or proletarian sphere: a realm of fragmented identities and working class fantasy generated in response to the alienating conditions of capitalism. A more specific cultural interpretation suggests this mutiny from within and assault from below is the irrepressible brightening of “creative dark matter:” that marginalized and systematically underdeveloped aggregate of creative productivity, which nonetheless reproduces the material and symbolic economy of high culture. The results are explosive, or at least potentially so as this long, pent-up shadow archive spills out into the once forbidden dwelling place of mainstream law and order and high cultural privilege. From Ukraine and Hong Kong, to Thailand, Latin American and the Middle East, rising social, political and aesthetic expectations encounter an increasingly derelict and privatized public sphere where surveillance, ultra-concentrated wealth, global financialization and increasingly autonomous machine labor reduces most of us to a surplus army of under or non-employed service workers. By contrast and somewhat paradoxically, a new wave of socially engaged art is thriving on the margins of the art world. Like an enormous production wareho-

use this “post-public” creativity is developing sustainable farming, reenacting historical labor demonstrations, providing public services lost to decades of deregulatory economic policy, and initiating local bartering systems and environmental cleanups. Its vitality is something Joseph Beuys could have only dream about. And not surprisingly even this “autonomous” and “Interventionist” art is selectively becoming part of the mainstream culture industry through what Gilles Deleuze describes as an “apparatus of capture.” Nevertheless, one result of this new confrontation reveals this vibrant imaginary “from below” is pushing artistic production, pushing also discourse, pedagogy and cultural institutions into radically re-thinking definitions and possibilities not only involving the possibilities of contemporary avant-garde art practices, but also about the very nature of creativity, democracy, and political agency more broadly. The aim of my presentation will be to outline aspects of these current conditions of progressive artistic practice, while also providing a historical perspective regarding past struggles, repetitions and acts of complicity between the “shadow archive” of dark matter on one hand, and the institutions of capture on the other as we search together for whatever still remains or might perhaps be resurrected with regard to the inclusive and ideal public sphere today.

Gregory Sholette is an artist and writer whose current publications include It’s The Political Economy, Stupid co-edited with Oliver Ressler, (Pluto Press, 2013) and Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011).

Hans Abbing: Artists Become Active, some in social action and others in cultural entrepreneurship The social action of some artists and the cultural entrepreneurship of other artists appear to be antagonistic Much social action intends to fight neo-liberalist and capitalist practices and values, while cultural entrepreneurship appears to embrace them. Nevertheless, in spite of fundamental differences they are expressions of the same development, that is the movement away from being passive as artist towards being active. They are part of the emancipation of artists in a world and particularly an art world which wants and expects artists to be passive.

Artists were and many still are passively waiting to be discovered and so become recognized. They are therefore willing to work for no or very little money and no recognition. Many people in art institutions including both non-profit and for profit companies have an interest in this situation and together with artists who do not understand that they are exploited they reproduce the existing art ethos which enables the exploitation of artists.

When social action is directed at neo-liberal and capitalist abuses in society the very fact that artists are active can already undermine the art ethos and therefore indirectly the power of art establishments. Moreover, increasingly there are actions which straightforwardly attack the existing exploitation of artists by not only for-profit but also non-profit art companies and organizations and by the art establishment in general.

In cultural entrepreneurship artists embrace the participation in

markets. They do so actively and take initiative. They believe in their own art and attempt to get it across by making an effort to sell. In the case of the majority of artists who are poor and not recognized this is a form of emancipation. Moreover, in a neo-liberal world it can be an act of resilience.

However, both social activism and cultural entrepreneurship can go “wrong”….

Hans Abbing is an economist and visual artist. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Art at the University of Amsterdam. He wrote the book Why are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. In 2016, his new book will be published, The Art Period: Will Art become Common after Two Hundred Years of Splendor?

Convenors of the conference and directors of the research project: Michał Kozłowski, Jan Sowa, Kuba Szreder Administrative directors of the project:: Szymon Żydek, Bogna Świątkowska

Research team of the project: Krzysztof Bielecki (visual identity), Joanna Figiel, Mirosław Filiciak, Dorota Grobelna, Mikołaj Iwański, Anna Zawadzka, Szymon Żydek

Initiators of the project and conference organisers: Wolny Uniwersytet Warszawy Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana

Partners: Fundacja Projekt: Polska, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, British Council, Ambasada Królestwa Niderlandów w Polsce, Ośrodek Kultury Francuskiej i Studiów Frankofońskich Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Pracownia badań nad filozofia francuską IF UW The Conference is held as a part of Warsaw under Construction Festival ed. 2014.

The research is realised in the cooperation with Polish Ministry if Culture and National Heritage in the framework of the programme Observatory of Culture. www.beczmiana.pl www.wuw-warsaw.pl