Read without ads and support Scribd by becoming a Scribd Premium Reader.

Language:

Download

Go BackAdd Note

Link

Embed

Save for later

INTRODUCTION

–

We can see how the collapse of the economy is affecting every-one. Something must be done. Let’s talk. No, it can’t wait. Things are bad. We haveto work things out. We can only do it together. What do we know? What have otherstried? What is possible? How do we talk about it? What are the wildest possibilities?What are the pragmatic steps? What can you do? What can we do? [Continues Inside]

A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT

ART

WORK

FREE

ART, LABOR, AND ECONOMICS

TAKE A COPY. MAKE AN EXHIBITION.HOST A DISCUSSION IN YOUR TOWN.

ART WORK

A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics

This Is Our Real Job

Temporary Services

Art Versus Work

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Two Diagrams: The Business o Artand The Non-Proft Art Practice

Lize Mogel

The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!

Holland Cotter

Personal Economy

Anonymous

OurGoods.org

Jen Abrams, Louise Ma, Carl Tashian,Rich Watts, Caroline Woolard

Organize! What the Artists’ Union o the 1930s Can Teach Us Today

Nicolas Lampert

Small Business as Artistic Medium

Robin Hewlett

Selected Moments in the History o Economic Art

Compiled and written about byTemporary Services

Send Me Your Money

, By ChrisBurden, recorded live on KPFK Radio,Los Angeles, March 21, 1979.

Transcribed by Temporary Services

State o the Union

Gregory Sholette

Thoughts on Standardizing FairArtists’ Lecture Fees

Harrell Fletcher

Report on

The

City From Below

Scott Berzofsky and John DudaFor The City From BelowOrganizers

Micro Granting rom the Bottom Up

InCUBATE

Think Big, Act Small

Linda Frye Burnham

34628Personal Economy

Anonymous

A Letter rom W.A.G.E

W.A.G.E.

Lansing and Three Fires Territory:Toward an Activist-based IndigenousNeo-Regionalism

Dylan A.T. Miner

Watch Where You Are Putting ThatPencil

Anthony Elms

Seven Years o Chaos

Carolina Caycedo

License Action

(Jan. 17 - 18, 1981)

Guerrilla Art Action Group

Global Mega-Merger Announced with

We Can Run the Economy

Campaign

16 Beaver Group

Red Lines & Death Vows: MortgagePolitics in the 20th Century

Damon Rich

Personal Economy

Anonymous

W&N

Teaching Artist Union MembershipCard

Teaching Artist Union

Money Drawings

Harold Jefferies

How Do You Respond to the EconomicDepressions o the World?

Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke for theJournal of Aesthetics & Protest EditorialCollective

This Newspaper is an Exhibition

Temporary Services

Distribution o This Paper

Temporary Services

789101112141819A Field Guide or the Future:Introducing the Institute orApplied Aesthetics

Chris Kennedy

Personal Economy

Tim Kerr

Personal Economy

Anonymous

Under the Gun

Nato Thompson

Menu: Funding Emerging Art withSustainable Tactics

FEAST

Justseeds: Collectivism in aCulture Machine

Dan S. Wang

Probably not Peaches

Nance Klehm

Impractical Laborers, Unite!

ILSSA Co-Operators

Personal Economy

Anonymous

Epeios, a Sculptor

Written by Cooley WindsorIllustrated by Futurefarmers

The U.C. Strike:At Last, the Shit Hits the Fan inCaliornia

Brian Holmes

Lost South

Adam Trowbridge andJessica Westbrook

Personal Economy

Anonymous

We Patch Flats. Detroit.

Compiled by Nick TobierWith contributions by Lolita Hernandez,Stacy Malasky, Nate Mullen, and AaronTimlin

20212223242526272930313233343537363839



THIS IS OUR REAL JOB

Temporary Services

We can see how the collapse o the economy is aecting ev-eryone. Something must be done. Let’s talk. No, it can’t wait.Things are bad. We have to work things out. We can only do ittogether. What do we know? What have others tried? What ispossible? How do we talk about it? What are the wildest possi-bilities? What are the pragmatic steps? What can you do? Whatcan we do?We know that larger numbers o people nd them-selves increasingly shut out o the American “promise” o wealthand security. The majority o committed and practicing artistshave long given up these expectations in avor o having thereedom to pursue their work. We’ve all made sacrices or ourtime, our work, and our own dreams. Let’s ace it – being an art-ist in the United States is dicult. Hell, just keeping your headabove water is harder or an increasing number o Americans,artists or not. Federal unemployment numbers are constructedin such a way as to mask the real human toll and misery o joblessness in the U.S. The ocial number hovers around 10%.We’re being told to get used to it, but we would rather exploreideas or reworking the economy to benet everyone. Whereis the discussion about how to sustain our entire country andnot just our banks, corporations, and those who are privilegedenough to be in the top 10% o our “earners”?The deeply irresponsible and criminal activities o themen and women who wreaked havoc on the global economy,ushering in the Great Recession (or whatever you want to callit) have caused untold hardship or people already scraping by.Bring us their heads! Or at least take their bonuses to und thearts, education, and health care.Things have become demonstrably worse or artistsand arts organizations. A 2008 report rom the National Endow-ment or the Arts tells o an astounding 63% increase in artists’unemployment rom 2007 to 2008. The public discourse aboutunding or creative projects is oten limited to chatter aboutlarge-sum prizes unded unsteadily by oundations, commercialentities, or amily trusts. Want to be an artist? Join a reality showand viciously compete or the title o “Art Star” while havingyour every move be documented or six weeks in the hopesthat your witty bon mots and camera-riendly pretty ace willresult in a one-time cash bonus. Another option – compete withyour colleagues and riends or smaller and smaller grants (aslong as the government, the non-prot organizations, and theacademic system continues to be able to raise unds rom theirown sources).Where are the large-scale ideas that depend uponAmerican ingenuity rather than competition? When did und-ing the arts and the people that make them become optional?Why is visual art, which can be understood as a basic ounda-tion or human communication, not unded as an integral parto our lives as Americans? Why don’t we think being an artist isa “real job”?We can optimistically point to times in the past whenthings were more hopeul and better or artists and arts institu-tions. For example, the Works Progress Administration’s Fed-eral Arts Program once had money and was empowered to hireartists to take photographs, make murals, write stories, com-pose poems, and document the tremendous times the countrywas going through. Federal unding employed and nurturedsome o the greatest American artists: Dorothea Lange, Langs-ton Hughes, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Zora Neale Thurston,Thomas Hart Benton, and many others. It let us with tremen-dous public works, glorious murals, and a sense o strength andabundance that should be reclaimed out o the ashes o dirtycapitalist shenanigans. However, this program was only possibleater much pressure rom the Let, rom unions, and rom artiststhemselves. It also worked because o leadership that carriedout a vision that the ree market could not harbor – nor wouldit tolerate or long. The inrastructure that sustained programslike the Federal Arts Program was completely dismantled.We can also see ourselves at the bottom o a down-ward spiral that started with Ronald Reagan’s election. The vi-cious greed and racism that propelled the “Reagan Revolution”culminated in last year’s massive global nancial collapse, thelogical conclusion o the Reagan administration’s toxic ideologi-cal blend o business deregulation and trickle down uck-you-nomics (two perilous antasies that we see or what they are).Artists were easy targets and tools in the culture wars Reaganand his allies unleashed to dismantle the New Deal and GreatSociety eorts at wealth redistribution and economic parity.We’ve oten been amazed at the act that so many students andyounger artists have no idea what kinds o great things receivedgovernment unding pre-Culture Wars and beore the neuteringo the National Endowment or the Arts. One can trace the ori-gins o early encouragement or even a vast genre as Video Artthrough looking at the record o NEA unding in the 1970s.Capitalism works really really well – or a limitednumber o people. With tighter constraints on business andwealthy people, the number o people who can sustain them-selves increases. Take away the constraints and less people ben-et. More o us can see this clearly now. It is sad that it takessuch a big crisis to get people to reconsider the “status quo”.We are in a moment very much like the Great De-pression. Unortunately, we cannot depend upon the creationo governmental programs, the learning institutions, museums,and archives, or even basic social planning to help ease the situ-ation in the U.S. or artists. According to a report made in 2006by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprot Washington, D.C.based think tank, the top 5% o income earners in the UnitedStates own 60% o the average U.S. household net worth. Fur-thermore, according to

Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership

(a bookand research series by Edward N. Wol o New York University’sEconomics department), a ull 20% o the U.S. population ownsnegative nancial wealth. That means that 20% o us, artists,proessors, students, directors o museums, security guards, andotherwise actually live in debt. While many o us contribute tothe struggle o American existence and create art that carriesmeaning and hope or all, our lives are still privy to the whimso the top 5% earners – who eectively make decisions or allo us through their daily economic and cultural choices. Manyo those top 5% are on the board o directors or both corpora-tions and cultural institutions. Is it no surprise that our majormuseums increasingly are using corporate sponsorship to leadtheir programming and name their galleries? Is it any surpriseat all that even the language o art discourse is being invaded bybusiness terminology?For ar too long, the rhetoric and logic o the mar-ket has dominated the production o discourse and livelihoodsaround art. Letting the market decide, as Reagan, Milton Fried-man, and other ghosts o capital past cried, has drastically lim-ited what we think art is and can be in our society. We have seenhow quickly the commercial market collapsed, hurting largenumbers o people. The commercial art market in the UnitedStates has hemorrhaged gallery ater gallery. The focks in thestables have been turned loose into the wilds o uncertainty andworry that the rest o us live in as normalcy. There will be nobailout or economic triage to save the galleries. The nancialcollapse has put a big crack in the hegemony over resources anddiscourse that the commercial system has long enjoyed. It isnow even harder to see success in the speculative art market as aviable option or most artists, though the dictates o the marketare still what gets passed o as curriculum or an MFA at mostuniversities.Universities continue to crank out masters o ne artswho have next to no possibility o getting gainul employmentand little to no role in creating uture employment outside thealready tiny pool o highly coveted tenure track positions. I you are an educator, we challenge you to use your privilege andyour security to improve things or your students and the rest o us. I you are an adjunct teacher, we encourage you to make itdicult or your university to continue exploiting you. Union-ize. Walk out. At least make sure to milk every resource youcan, preerably to enable and supplement educational modelsthat happen outside o these institutions. Scan those rare andout o print library books and periodicals and put ‘em online.Check out A/V equipment and use it to put on ree events oreveryone. Get as many guest lecturers paid through your class-es as you can. Bring the visiting out-o-town lecturers to anextra event space and encourage them to do a bonus talk orpeople who aren’t clued in to academic calendars around town.Sow dissent. Teach the brave truth o poverty rather than thesniveling, competitive lie o the Top 5%. Make everyone’s paypublic knowledge – demand equity or all o us who createthe next generations o artists and thinkers. It is time or someleveling and accountability, even or you progressives in the artschools.Now is a perect moment to push or new ways o doing things, developing better models, and to question com-mercial orms o art making and the commodication o humancreativity and signicance. It is also an excellent moment tolook backwards at old models that might be ripe or rework-ing, and the myriad strategies and support systems that artistshave invented in order to survive creatively and economically.It is a time to ght or a dierent uture, better treatment, anda diminished role or the market in art discourse. Resistanceto the status quo has been minimal. Artists or the most partare hiding and hoping things will get better. We must gather,pool knowledge and resources, agitate, question, conront thissystem and make alternative models using the creativity thatwe reserve or other kinds o artistic production in more stabletimes.This newspaper asks us all to consider how to use thismoment to do several things: to work or better compensation,to get opportunities to make art in diverse and challenging set-tings, and to guide art attitudes and institutions, on all levels, inmore resilient directions. It is also an examination o the powerthat commercial practices continue to wield and the adverseeects this has had on artists, education, and our collective cre-ative capacity.We have ocused our attention and eorts on theUnited States, though an international edition is needed, asthere are no longer discrete nation-based economies. We leavethat to others to take on. The struggle in the U.S. is a largeenough starting point. The dominant discourse in this coun-try pays very little attention to the massive numbers o peopleworking outside the commercial centers o production. Thisgives a alse sense o the complexity, diversity, and regional di-erences that are readily ound when one just looks, asks, andpays attention.This paper culls together writings rom artists, cura-tors, critics and theorists, rom across the United States andPuerto Rico. Contributors were asked to refect on a range o topics: the country’s economic situation, how conditions arein their locations, what they are willing to ght to change, andmore. Included are historic examples o artists’ projects, initia-tives and other eorts to nd money or their work or to createbroader inrastructural support or others. We called upon ournetworks or contributions but you might have a dierent net-work than us. Please read this paper and share it with others.Make copies and make an exhibition out o it. Use it as the basiso a discussion. Share it with your classroom.Finally, check out www.artandwork.us or more writ-ing, images, and ideas that didn’t make the print edition. Thereare places there or you to share your thoughts and ideas andconnect with other artists, teachers, students, arts administra-tors, curators, preparators, interns, and others. We would loveto get your eedback and hear about the conversations that thisproject has instigated. How are you doing? How are you sus-taining your artwork? This is the moment to assert our prin-ciples, redene our core values, and help each othercontinue to make great work.