THE ARTS RESEARCH CENTER AT UC BERKELEY PRESENTS
VALUING LABOR IN THE ARTS: A PRACTICUM
I AM AN ARTIST
THIS DOES NOT MEAN I WILL WORK
FOR FREE
I HAVE BILLS JUST LIKE YOU
THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING
INTRODUCTION
Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum Workshop and Debate April 19, 2014
The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with artist and MFA candidate, Helena Keeffe, is delighted to welcome you to Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum, a day of artist-led workshops that engage with questions of art, labor, and economics, taking place on Saturday, April 19. For Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum, we are hosting an amazing group of artists, curators, and writers from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, to stage an intimate yet wide-ranging exploration about art and labor, about alternative economies in the arts, and about strategies for working in ever changing “art world” landscapes. In addition to the workshops, all registered participants will spend some portion of their day touring the Berkeley Museum of Art’s current exhibition “The Possible” in addition to working with Eleanor Hanson-Wise (The Present Group) and Catherine Powell (Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU) to develop a Bay Area cultural survey and to expand their own thinking in relation to the Bay Area’s broader labor history. In the early evening, we will re-convene together en masse at the David Brower Center to debrief, to share insights, and to share a meal. To register, please review the eight different workshops printed in full in this booklet. After you’ve made your decision, visit our EventBrite site to register for ONE workshop. Registration will take place on a first come, first serve basis. Note: We are asking all participants to contribute a $10 registration fee which includes a boxed lunch, the full day of workshops, and a reception at the David Brower Center.
SCHEDULE 10- 11:30:
Registration opens at 10am/Welcoming remarks begin at 11am UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720
11:30 - 1:30 : Workshop Session A Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor Defining Value, Labor and the Arts Participation ≠ Compensation Collective Actions | Moving Thought Parallel Session Tour The Possible exhibition and attend Sharing Knowledge is Sharing Power 1:30 - 2:30: Lunch 2:30 - 4:30: Workshop Session B Yoga for Adjuncts: The Somatics of Human Capital Appropriate technologies Big Soft (BS) Contract The Exchange Archive Parallel Session Tour The Possible exhibition and attend Sharing Knowledge is Sharing Power
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5:15 - 8:00
Wrap-Up Session at Brower Center & Reception David Brower Center 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704
Helena Keeffe & Lauren van Haaften-Schick
When is it okay to work for free? Why is remuneration a concern for artists and arts workers? What perpetuates the devaluation of artistic labor? How have artists confronted these challenges? Can we devise a scheme for artists to follow during negotiations for compensation? Is it possible to create a shared standard of artist needs?
for the lack of payment and who have turned these conflicts into opportunities for teaching or encouraging change. We will consider tools that artists have devised to evaluate situations: when to work for free, when to demand more, and how to better define the myriad grey areas of artistic work. Such tools include Helena Keeffe’s project Standard Deviation. Workshop participants will discuss their experiences with such negotiations Artistic labor is often assumed to be and will be asked to formulate their own standards unquantifiable, difficult to define, existing solely for when and why to say yes or no to unpaid—and within a gift economy. At the same time, we live sometimes paid—art work. in the era of the presumed professional artist, in which art practitioners are expected to be hyperAt the conclusion of the workshop, we will performers, on the clock, and giving it all for the devise a tiered system of standards for paid and promise of exposure. Both assumptions about unpaid work within the arts, and will print these art work have positive aspects: a gift economy conclusions as a broadside. Participants will be encourages collectivity and mutual exchange while asked to pool the terms they have devised for the professionalization of the arts presumably mapping their own standards as artistic laborers. elevates the artist to a more respected role in Rather than seek a collective standard, we society. Yet the collision of these contradicting will recognize that personal needs and ethics assumptions has instead cast artists as precarious regarding payment for artistic labor will vary workers, in which they are expected to give and among participants. Modeled after the structure of to perform endlessly without any established Creative Commons licensing, which ranges from standards for remuneration. free distribution to tightly controlled, we will devise a 3-5 tiered system for how, why, and what artists The workshop “Gauging the Gray Area: should expect and demand to be paid in different Standards for Artistic Labor” consists of a scenarios. We hope that this broadside will not conversation and exercise through which only be the spark of many future conversations, participants will consider the ways that we value but will begin to be used as a concrete tool among our artistic labor and attempt to formulate a set artists for measuring the value of their work. of standards for answering the above questions in our professional and daily lives. We will discuss examples of artists who have refused work
SESSION A | WORKSHOP 1
Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor
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SESSION A | WORKSHOP 2
Defining Value, Labor and the Arts Lise Soskolne for W.A.G.E.
Nothing can easily be defined within the perpetually expanding and liquifying field of the arts. This is particularly true of its economy, in which the lack of parameters and transparency enable the exploitation of cultural labor. Without the ability to precisely define the labor supplied, the monetary value it creates, or the criteria used to determine its compensation (usually inadequate or nonexistent), artists and cultural practitioners will continue to accept exploitation as a requirement of participation in the arts Conceived in 2010 by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) as a key tool in its efforts to end this state of indeterminacy, W.A.G.E. Certification is a program that recognizes nonprofit arts organizations and museums that voluntarily pay artist fees meeting a minimum standard. This past January, A.K. Burns, Howie Chen, Andrea Fraser, Alison Gerber, Stephanie Luce, Andrew Ross, Marina Vishmidt, W.A.G.E., and Artists Space staff—representing the institution and the organization as a test case—came together for the 2014 W.A.G.E. Summit in New York City to establish the policy for this program.
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Over the course of two days, we considered, debated, negotiated, and developed a fee schedule and a revised set of principles that now constitute the W.A.G.E. Certification. This involved a granular analysis of value and labor within the context of the nonprofit arts sector and beyond—in other words, defining the natures of the field and the work and placing a dollar value on the work. This workshop will reconstruct the summit’s process of analysis and create an opportunity for participants to apply W.A.G.E. Certification to the Bay Area arts landscape. Additionally, we will account for the time and labor involved in preparing for and executing this workshop practicum at the ARC. As a group, and with the participation of the ARC’s director, Shannon Jackson, we will use this exercise to help define the very economy in which we are participating, considering its relationship to The Possible exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and to the economic context of public higher education in which the ARC is based.
Stephanie Syjuco Or: Towards the collective production of a bestpractices handbook on offering compensation to others, formulated by artists for artists.
This workshop aims to produce a set of questions and thought experiments in order to collectively generate an outline for a bestpractices handbook on compensation for artists Or: How to involve other individuals in your who are lead instigators of participatory projects. projects, to not take advantage of them, and to Attendees will shape the dialogue and provide make informed and ethical decisions about how real-world scenarios, and I will share examples of you compensate them. projects that attempted to analyze or complicate the definitions of compensation. The questions With the rise in participatory (or socially posed will help artists develop their understanding engaged) art practices and their recognition within of what they deem fair and ethical in a field that institutions and exhibition venues, how do artists constantly demands negotiation of the terms formulate methods of ethical compensation for author, artist, participant, and subject. The bestthe people involved in creating their works: other practices handbook will be a working document artists, participants, collaborators, volunteers, paid that grows as it travels to different discussion workers, and interns? This workshop is for artists groups beyond the ARC colloquium. who create projects that rely on other people’s labor for their production; its focus is on artists Sample questions and discussion topics becoming ethical compensators in developing include: How do you compensate others if you can these projects. From DIY, low-budget events to barely pay yourself from your production budget? major museum shows, artists are increasingly When does the structure of a gift economy and faced with slippery questions of how to negotiate the idealism of working outside of monetary and define compensation. In many cases, they exchange positively feed your project’s concept, are struggling to find real-world, candid examples and when does it become potentially abusive to that others would be willing to share. Budgets, others? When should a participant be credited for funding, and the role of uncompensated labor can involvement in your project? How do you define be taboo discussion topics when a project relies and value cultural capital versus economic capital on a gift economy. Stories abound of mishaps, for compensation? How can institutional funding misunderstandings, and even mistreatment due problematize compensation for your participants, to trial-and-error navigation of ethics and ideals. potentially creating a tiered system? Is it possible Hard questions and frank answers are needed in to create transparent compensation for everyone order to begin to formulate how participation in a involved in your project? How does interrogating project does, or does not, equal compensation. oneself as an artist-producer positively contribute to a larger ethical worldview of valuing labor in the arts?
SESSION A | WORKSHOP 3
Participation ≠Compensation
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SESSION A | WORKSHOP4
Collective Actions | Moving Thought Sara Wookey
Collective Actions | Moving Thought is titled after a research project centered on the dialogue between improvisational movement, writing, and critical discussion. Utilizing a movement-based process, this workshop aims to be an experiential platform for collective practice, for understanding shared and differing views on labor and value in the arts, and for creating dances. This workshop is inspired by and operates in the tradition of dance collectives such as Grand Union (1970–76), Lower Left (1994–ongoing), and LIVE (2007–ongoing). It is informed by my 2012 “Open Letter to Artists” and by my experiences as a subsidized artist in Europe, in my work with Yvonne Rainer, and as a founding member of the Choreographer’s Working Group (2008–12).
Structure
Goals
20 min. move together (no speaking)
• Engage in experiential structures that articulate the labor of the art of dance making.
10 min writing 15 min discuss and mind map 15 min break 20 min. move together (with focus from map) 10 min writing 15 min sharing 15 wrap up
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• Prompt a discussion on value, labor and the arts through a practice of dancing and writing. • Highlight collective processes as a means of moving forward our definitions around labor and value in the arts, in particular, the performing arts.
Christian Nagler
Greetings practitioners! Let’s begin by balancing on one leg. Good. Or if you can... try balancing on no leg! Feeling shaky? Remember: falling over is totally all right. Precarity is the greatest teacher. Let me start off with a simple fact: art schools--which employ, at intermittent, recombinant intervals--a revolving majority of urban cultural workers, artistteachers -- have led the way in the loosening up of the rigid idea of the educator as wage-earning body. Let’s accept this--let it sink in. Let it quiver under the fascia. We can’t go home again. We can’t go back. We have only now. Or, to put it another way, let’s find a new home in the floating world of now’s institution, of managed, interlocking slots of short-term info-labor. The private art school: overseen from afar, quantitatively, by tech-entrepreneur trustee boards and investment bankers with teams of consultants to translate their risk-management strategies into administrative policy. Let’s take some deep breaths. Let go of attachment -- drop in, log in to a few hours of contact time. Let’s call the teaching artist it. Short for spir-it. A transparent crystal of self, clear bridge between worlds. It: ancient wisdom of the one who dwells at the margins of the institution, who plays the edge of stability, no past, no future, alive and vigilant in the shimmering present. * * * What does the artist offer the educational institution? It offers an idea of work as a shirking of work. A miracle! If you’re working there’s something wrong. You’re always working. You’re never working. The divine worker is the one who works hard but whose value lies in your capacity to shirk work, to put joy above duty. Let’s embrace these contradictions. The divine art worker is one whose suspicion of the institution is a practice of non-attachment. Whose skillful practice of non-attachment inspires trust in others -- especially in those multiplying administrators who float like lonely bodhisattvas. Pause now to ignite the divine worker who reposes fitfully, deliciously in the center of the anahata chakra. It is the divine worker. The divine cognitive worker in me bows to the divine cognitive worker in you.
Why cling to the old contractual baggage that neoliberal institutions have dispensed with? Flow with the new labor-capital relation, where there is no longer any determined quantitative time-value, where there is no longer any necessary constant in economic relations. In all the time of life, the human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting. * * * Still standing on one leg? Give in to the wobble. The wobble, if accepted, will help you stand tall, or to fall if you need to.
SESSION B| WORKSHOP 1
Yoga for Adjuncts: The Somatics of Human Capital
Trust in the abundance of the universe to manifest an infinite supply of labor just like you. No demands -- only supply! You, the divine worker, love your free-time -- time to create! -- but you know there could never be enough time for the expansiveness of your visions. This is wisdom. So you abide in the space of a conceptual free-time, where you work for no pay. Instead of clinging tightly to your free-time, you let the institution imagine this free time for you. The work of the divine institution records the infinity of your conceptual freedom-time! In this way the divine cognitive worker is supple and selfless, letting your imagination become one with a greater force. You’re still balancing ? Amazing. Don’t worry if those around you fall over. Failure -- failure to have a career, a house, a guaranteed income -- is the greatest teacher. Remember, the universe, the institution doesn’t need you. All it asks is that you show up. Or not. Aspire to this simplicity of need. Identify with a higher force, which knows more about larger flows than your limited body. Throw out the rigidity of contracts. No contraction -expansion! No positions -- poses to move through. There is a juiciness to this angle of flow. How to hold this paradox in your inner expanse: That you are beautifully extra, that this excess, this abundance, composes you, cellularly. And yet you yourself compose the institution. You are three quarters, or more, of its actual being! You are its perfect face! Note: Some of these ideas were adapted from the following texts After the Future by Franco Berardi; The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali; Human Capital, by Gary S. Becker.
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SESSION B | WORKSHOP2
Appropriate technologies Abigail Satinsky Artists and other creative people who organize their lives around the arts have long dealt with the problem of the lack of money by utilizing the very same resourcefulness they apply to making art. They have formed cooperative living and studio arrangements; started their own businesses; become grant-writing virtuosi; begged, stolen, borrowed, and even invented currencies. This situation is nothing new, and yet artists face a new existential crisis. Thinking about one’s artistic practice as an entrepreneurial venture to be branded and marketed is becoming the default for today’s aspiring professional artist, when there is little public support for governmental (i.e., tax-based) funding for the arts on a mass scale and individual giving is increasingly a transactional relationship based on reward systems like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Supporting an artistic practice has long been difficult, but with the meteoric rise of a speculative art market and its consolidation of capital, as well as the crushing debt awaiting those aspiring to get into the game, the many different kinds of art careers, art worlds, and art lives aren’t being considered, particularly as models with which to debate, challenge, and improve the current state of affairs. Appropriate technologies is a term coined by the Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful, first published in 1973, in which he called for economic solutions to globalization that were founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. This idea has been foundational for much thought today on sustainable development and environmental preservation. Schumacher’s idea of decentralization involves the concept of
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“smallness within bigness” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal, such as an ecological approach to production or “Buddhist economics,” a spiritual approach that (among other ideas) advocates for self-sufficiency and local resources allocated for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life. Can this idea be relevant toward sustaining a wide range of cultural production? This philosophy is utilized today in a growing network of art initiatives that commission art works specifically for subscribers, using the models of community-supported agriculture (CSA) or magazine subscriptions. Creating artist editions for sale is a not a new idea, but the link to the CSA model—which also emphasizes decentralization, community control, and ethical, small-scale production—can spark a new conversation about what sustainability means as well as bring us closer to the “enoughness” that Schumacher advocates. This workshop will be a critical discussion of how these communitysupported art projects succeed, fail, or offer new possibilities; we will conduct a series of thought experiments regarding how to build from there. Participants will also develop speculative plans for an appropriate technology pertinent to their personal circumstances.
Cassie Thornton Do you want money, or do you want to be alive? Do you want a wage, or do you want support and attention? Do you want to mark your hours down and hand them to someone, or do you want that person to love you—or at least to like what you do? As an artist or worker, do you believe a wage is the best way to value your work, or does it seem to be the only way to value it? In this workshop, as an experiment, we will act as if money is not the missing ingredient in the arts but rather a decoy that turns attention towards accumulation of material wealth and away from the art itself.
In this workshop, participants will articulate what money represents to them and explore the possibility of more direct paths of exchange that lead to desired outcomes and values. Using somatic and verbal challenges, participants will experiment with talking about money and performing exchanges. As a group, participants will explore what types of contracts shape their lives and how they might take active roles in redefining those contracts. We will discuss how not to write grants and how not to throw a fundraiser. We will explore an example of an artistic reinterpretation of a contract, the recent work Fedora Archive, in which an artist’s labor The value of money is a Big Soft (BS) social is the material on loan to an institution, debt contract that is not backed by commodities. becomes interpersonal, and the institution Its value is instead backed by our emotional, commissions a critique of itself. We will ask: to psychological, and physical attachment to it. If whom do we owe the most, and what should we we train ourselves to see money for what it is—a give them? What happens when we consciously state-enforced mutual agreement about what deprioritize money? How might written and we must value—then other financial concerns social contracts be softened when we do not such as debt and wages could potentially lose play assumed roles of purely economic selftheir power over us. Can we use art to untrain interest? ourselves, to reject money and to articulate what we really want? Again, what do we really want?
SESSION B| WORKSHOP 3
Big Soft (BS) Contract
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SESSION B | WORKSHOP4
The Exchange Archive Caroline Woolard This workshop will consist of a short presentation on the Exchange Archive, followed by a discussion about the conditions and contradictions that make gifts, bartering, and/or monetary payments feasible. Like the projects in the archive, I practice exchange-based work: rather than outsourcing labor and exploiting interns to produce art, I work with my hands, swap labor for labor, and demand a percentage of every budget. For example, if the budget is zero dollars, as with any social movement, I work for free.
Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) archives of the 2013 “Artists Experiment” initiative, I found a history of exchange projects from the past forty years, from Franz Erhard Walther’s First Work Set (1963–69) to Ben Kinmont’s I Need You (1992). I decided to include in this archive exchange projects that have not yet been collected by MoMA, for these works offer an expanded notion of embodied exchange. From Jose Antonio Vega Macotela’s Time Divisa (2006–10) to Carey Young’s Mutual Release (2008), these projects reveal the reciprocal labor, production, and distribution of artworks as integral to the meaning My interest in exchange practices comes of the works. from living and working in New York City for the past decade. While rent continues to rise and wages stagnate, I find hope and support in daily practices of barter, cooperation, and wisdom from the solidarity-economy movement. Scouring the
Some qualities of EXCHANGE WORKS: 1. They should be touched/used/activated. 2. They connect two people in a reciprocal encounter or agreement. 3. They are bigger than an event or object (production and lifecycle are parts of the work). 4. They move between art and nonart spaces (as actions/tools/instruments). 5. They should be replicated, existing as multiples or as open-access ideas, available to remix. Everyone is encouraged to add a work to The Exchange Archive: theexchangearchive.com.
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Catherine Powell, Eleanor Hanson Wise and Oliver Wise Catherine Powell, the director of the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, will offer historical insight on strategies for organizing that have led to empowerment for workers. She will relate this history to the arts, explaining how a survey that makes the realities of remuneration more transparent can empower artists.
PARALLEL SESSION
Sharing Knowledge is Sharing Power
Eleanor Hanson Wise and Oliver Wise, codirectors of The Present Group, will present the beta version of the Compensation Foundation, a platform for collecting, sharing, and analyzing how contingent workers are remunerated. This beta test will focus on visual artists’ reports on Bay Area organizations, businesses, and alternative spaces. The Wises will cite inspirations for their project and address the delicate nature of getting people to talk about and share information about money. Participants will be asked to complete a survey, to give feedback about the platform’s structure and design, and to discuss the effort to create transparency in a field where financial information is most often kept secret.
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ANDPLEASE
THINK TWICE BEFOREASKING ME TO
DONATEART
FOR YOUR CHARITY
*UNLESS IT IS TO HELP ANOTHER
ARTIST
BECAUSE IT DOESN’T
HELPMEONEBIT WITHEXPOSURE INSTEAD, HOST AN OLD FASHION
CAKE WALK
WHO DOESN’T WANT TO WIN A CAKE?
Valuing Labor in the Arts is sponsored by a graduate arts grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Brower Center, Division of Arts & Humanities, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Value, the English Department, the History of Art Department, the Art Practice Department, the Richard And Rhoda Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities, and funds from ARC supporters.