Outside of the inside of the outside, Talk at One way or Another, Artspace, 2009

Outside of the inside of the outside

Talk at the Artspace symposium One way or Another on the panel Social Implications of Artist Initiatives, 2009.

In this panel we are addressing the “social implications” of artist self-organisation – which we interpret as the connections art (and artist self organized structures) make to the social, that is community, activist or progressive movements. At the outset we would like to point out that this is something that has been awkwardly addressed in Australia in the last few years. Socially engaged art is often relegated as “political” and therefore boring, obvious, unworthy of attention and funding, support or interest…. even embarrassing. This is not to comment on the art being made but the climate that surrounds it: in Australia political art practices have been given a somewhat shameful status as “not quite art”. It is therefore quite difficult to start a conversation on the social implications of artist self-organisation without acknowledging this point: it frames how those practices have evolved, and the social implications they have had.

In the last ten years there has been a change of this dynamic internationally - the rise of tactical media, user-generated, collectivist, open source, dialogic culture inspired by Seattle, Genoa and the counter-globalisation movement has sparked interest in the “political exhibition”. Even if just to remain relevant and survive, institutions have needed to listen and respond to activist art. Some very established institutions such as the Kunsthalle Fridericianum opened themselves up to What, How and for Whom (WHW), a radical art collective from Zagreb, to organize a survey show of artist collectives in 2005. WHW are a good example of what we are talking about here – they are deeply political and interested in communist ideology in the “post-Soviet” world – their first show ten years ago was to celebrate 152 years of the communist Manifesto - yet they have been able to work inside institutions in a way it would be hard to imagine in the Australian context of the last few years.

Some institutions have even openly embraced changes in culture and activism as a way to energise and transform their practices, they too have been excited by the discussions surrounding activist culture and its artistic implications. In fact internationally “institutional critique” has been so developed that activist artists are facing almost the opposite challenge to us – they talk about the subsumption of radical art within the institution and the problems of cooption - here the problem is different.

In the flyer for this conference an important question was raised: is it realistic to expect artistic institutions to function as the locus for a transformative practice, or is such activity better undertaken elsewhere? We feel this gets to the crux of this discussion. The most exciting, transformative, radical, dynamic practices always come from elsewhere – underground and non-institutional arenas – and this is as we would expect. New ideas percolate from within fringe and marginal circles where artists and collectives can experiment spontaneously, without the hierarchies and rules associated with institutions. Art has been driven by these experiments and their lack of responsibility to anybody but themselves.

But we want to throw the question back at the institution – why would you not want to have these transformative practices within your doors if you could? What we notice in Sydney is the lag between these practices developing and the willingness of institutions to allow them to scale-up and develop with the greater resources and funding that an institution can offer. Often they have to be accepted overseas before institutions are willing to show or fund them here. The loss for this is ours – we lose money and support that could help develop new things when they are fresh and exciting – but also the institutions, that end up only relating to these practices after they have already become institutionalized.

As a side point we are not interested in elevating the museum as an arbiter of what makes art good but we are not arguing for a complete exodus from museums either – we see the role that they can play in developing art practices: our approach is a nomadic one – working between the artist initiated and institutional as the situation allows or demands. But to return to the question of this lag, it means that when institutions attempt to involve underground movements they often miss the mark, conservative them or prevent them from being ‘true’ to their nature. As an example, the MCA has held a Zine Fair two years running, although this event is a positive step as an acknowledgment of DIY culture, it is still run within an institutional framework, that immediately shifts the event away from the politics and DIY sentiment which inspired it in the first place. Why not divest the power of the institution in such a situation by allowing the zine making community to organise the event themselves?

As a way of improving relations between institutions and DIY practices perhaps the institution could relinquish control over these events to the people who organise them. This branching out would allow these transformative practices to occur in the institutional spaces of art, with their resources, but open them up to new ways of doing things and innovative practices. One example of this, for us, was Performance Space being willing to allow us (as freelance curators) to operate within their auspices in organizing There Goes The Neighbourhood. We feel this is the direction art institutions should go if they are to take seriously the social implications of artist run practices. What if it was common practice for institutions here in Sydney to divest themselves of their power momentarily and invited freelance, one off, independent, DIY, radical artists and curators to hold exhibitions, festivals, events within their doors? If this was part of our culture here we think we would have a more dynamic, flexible and creative relationship between the artist initiated and the institution.

The ambition which drives many DIY practices is what makes them interesting and vibrant and this drive we feel is uncontrollable by institutions – artist run initiatives will always continue “one way or another”. But ambition can run up against lack of resources and it is at this moment that institutions have a role to play.

One barrier we faced in TGTN was that there are not many funding sources within Australia to bring international people here for projects, as presumably this is the terrain of art institutions. Internationalism has been fundamental to our practice – we feel a dialogue with overseas artists, curators and theorists is crucial to help develop artists work here – as much as trips and residencies overseas. We challenge the parochialism of this funding emphasis – its actually Australian artists who lose out by not having this dialogue in their own backyard.

The direction that funding is heading rewards certain practices over others, certainly activist or DIY art practices have struggled to get a hearing, even if they have reached significant audiences here or overseas. To give just two examples; promoting squatting and other “illegal” activities has been used to reject funding applications; and despite the significance of collaborative practices art collectives are currently unable to apply for OzCo studio residencies. But more broadly we question the cultural value of the huge disparity between the levels of funding for biennales and elite events versus that provided for underground, smaller and moreemerging arts festivals, despite the fact that these events may involve and develop many more artists. Is this the direction we want art to go?

We don’t raise any of this negatively. Nothing can stop artist initiated projects from developing as we don’t invest the institutions with power to stop or make what we do - to borrow a term from Negri our creativity is “constituent” and ultimately thwarts the logic of institutionalization. But we do feel that a more dynamic dialogue is possible and the benefactor would be artists obviously (any artist knows you only learn to make art when you have opportunities to work), but it would also be the institutions that would find themselves closer to what is transformative and interesting as it happens.

The social implications of artist run initiatives, like the social implications for art more broadly, are dynamic and fluid: art influences the social sphere just as the social sphere influences art. We finish our presentation with a quote from Brian Holmes “the reversal of biopower into biopolitics brings tactical media – and all forms of post-vanguard art – into a larger circulation of struggles, where what is distributed are the means of empowerment ie the means of self creation. The subversive carnivals of the turn of the century embodied this production of a new political subjectivity, at grips with political power but also able to temporarily turn away from it, to celebrate a prefigured social transformation in the here-and-now”

Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg