DEAR ARTIST,
SO, I HAVE TO TELL YOU THE CRAZIEST STORY...
A MUSEUM HIRED ME TO PUT ON A SHOW.
SO I WENT TO WORK AT MY STUDIO.
AFTER LABORING FOR 6 MONTHS,
AFTER TWO WEEKS OF INSTALLATION,
AFTER COUNTLESS MEETINGS WITH THE MUSEUM,
I PUT ON A SHOW. A GREAT SHOW!
I SENT THE MUSEUM MY INVOICE.
THEY SENT ME A CHECK MADE OUT FOR A TON OF EXPOSURE.
MY LANDLORD KEEPS ASKING FOR A RENT.
I SIGNED OVER MY EXPOSURE.
TURNS OUT I DON'T HAVE A STUDIO ANYMORE.
MISSING YOU,
W.A.G.E.
re-posted from Art-Agenda
Showing posts with label Professional Practice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Professional Practice. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2009
Friday, June 13, 2008
Renewable Energy
The immanent demise of eO inc. was given greater poignancy with the announcement of an exhibition at Malmo Konsthall, The Hamsterwheel.
“The Hamsterwheel is an exhibition initiated by the Austrian artist Franz West, and was originally presented at La Biennale di Venezia, 2007. The exhibition has since then travelled to the Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. At each exhibition venue the presentation of the works and relation to each other changes dramatically.
The Hamsterwheel can be seen as a playful comment to the wheel of life – the life as an artist. A wheel where we struggle to go forward, to get ahead. That always takes us forward, and still – at the end – nowhere. The exhibition attempts to show art as turbulence.
Having for many years watched, and been part of, many artists initiatives driven by committed, energetic, optimistic artists, that finally collapse under the pressures of a huge voluntary workload with little financial support or return, the “hamsterwheel” seems an apt metaphor.
But is the impassioned energetic activity simply wasted? One suspects that there is a drive mechanism attached to wheel, which, as artists instinctively struggle to go forward, generates power to keep the top heavy apparatus of the art industry lurching onwards.
Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum.
It is amazing that an activity carried out by a group of people, the majority of whom cannot make enough money from it to earn a living, can give rise to the huge infrastructure of well paid administrators, managers, cultural planners, curators, critics and writers, academics, gallery operators, government officers etc. We are of course grateful for the contribution they make to the industry.
Designed by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late nineteenth century
“The Hamsterwheel is an exhibition initiated by the Austrian artist Franz West, and was originally presented at La Biennale di Venezia, 2007. The exhibition has since then travelled to the Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. At each exhibition venue the presentation of the works and relation to each other changes dramatically.
The Hamsterwheel can be seen as a playful comment to the wheel of life – the life as an artist. A wheel where we struggle to go forward, to get ahead. That always takes us forward, and still – at the end – nowhere. The exhibition attempts to show art as turbulence.
Having for many years watched, and been part of, many artists initiatives driven by committed, energetic, optimistic artists, that finally collapse under the pressures of a huge voluntary workload with little financial support or return, the “hamsterwheel” seems an apt metaphor.
But is the impassioned energetic activity simply wasted? One suspects that there is a drive mechanism attached to wheel, which, as artists instinctively struggle to go forward, generates power to keep the top heavy apparatus of the art industry lurching onwards.
Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum.
Designed by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late nineteenth centuryTuesday, April 01, 2008
Professional Practice
Just back, and clearing out the inbox, so thought I would share these snippets from Nettime before deleting.
"I think we need a non-commercial public sphere, as a complement to other proletarian and marginal public spheres which can put pressure on the state and make up for the insufficiencies of formal democratic representation. In other words, I think there should be an anarchic civil-society sphere that produces political confrontation and conflict. I am not naive or bitter enough to think that can be the only dimension of social existence!"
best, Brian
“I visited Glasgow about 18 months ago and was able to sense in a matter of days the attraction the city holds for creative people, and the way the arts are being used to regenerate what was formerly a declining industrial centre."
The complicitness of artists and 'arts professionals' in the instrumental use of the visual arts as propaganda for the rapid neoliberal structural readjustment of the city really could not be more explicit. However, I am bemused by the seemingly prevalent academic spectre of an art "passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society".
Cheers,
Leigh
"What would happen if art stops with relentlessly criticizing the existing state of affairs, or with passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society? What if art would, on the contrary, fully identify with and affirm the prevailing norms, values, practices, etc., even adding some oil to the fire? The latter would, in other words, demand of artists to no longer automatically assume the role of the ‘good guys’, the eternal idealists, dreamers, etc., who always try to make the best out of the current situation, pushing the system to be something other and better than it is. It would, inversely, ask of them to stop protecting society from what it wants and turn it into the worst version of itself, so as to confront it with its own unsustainability and undesirability."
Ned Rossiter on:
Cultural Activism Today, The Art of Over-Identification
"I think we need a non-commercial public sphere, as a complement to other proletarian and marginal public spheres which can put pressure on the state and make up for the insufficiencies of formal democratic representation. In other words, I think there should be an anarchic civil-society sphere that produces political confrontation and conflict. I am not naive or bitter enough to think that can be the only dimension of social existence!"
best, Brian
“I visited Glasgow about 18 months ago and was able to sense in a matter of days the attraction the city holds for creative people, and the way the arts are being used to regenerate what was formerly a declining industrial centre."
The complicitness of artists and 'arts professionals' in the instrumental use of the visual arts as propaganda for the rapid neoliberal structural readjustment of the city really could not be more explicit. However, I am bemused by the seemingly prevalent academic spectre of an art "passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society".
Cheers,
Leigh
"What would happen if art stops with relentlessly criticizing the existing state of affairs, or with passionately producing alternative visions and utopias for today’s late capitalist society? What if art would, on the contrary, fully identify with and affirm the prevailing norms, values, practices, etc., even adding some oil to the fire? The latter would, in other words, demand of artists to no longer automatically assume the role of the ‘good guys’, the eternal idealists, dreamers, etc., who always try to make the best out of the current situation, pushing the system to be something other and better than it is. It would, inversely, ask of them to stop protecting society from what it wants and turn it into the worst version of itself, so as to confront it with its own unsustainability and undesirability."
Ned Rossiter on:
Cultural Activism Today, The Art of Over-Identification
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