 |
 |
I've been following the preservation debate closely. Very interesting, but as is often the case although I have wanted to contribute to it I have been too busy. It is that time of year (it always seems to be that time of year). Given that today I am snowed in I find I have a few minutes spare to contribute. Josephine's post touched on something that is a bit of a hot topic in the UK at the moment and which I have been involved in debating elsewhere and I thought it worthwhile to respond. I hope this gets posted to CRUMB even though it is oblique to this month's main topic. Events like ISEA, and the academic conference model it derives its structure from, are problematic for artists. I attended the first three ISEA's without paying. The first one (Utrecht) as an exhibiting artist, the second (Groningen) as a member of the organising committee and the third (Sydney) again as an exhibiting artist (I was paid a proper fee for that too, but by the Australian Film Commission, not ISEA itself). Since then I have not attended ISEA as the expectation has always been that I (like everyone else) would have to pay a conference fee. I found this, as a jobbing artist who seeks to maximise their fee income, weird as I felt I was sponsoring an event that should be sponsoring me. Thus I focused on those events, festivals and venues that paid. However, I also work in academia and have no problem with the idea of paying to attend academic conferences. These conferences are paid for by the academics (or rather, their institutions) who are attending, whether as speakers or audience. You pay to listen, but you also pay to give your pitch. Whilst this seems strange to me as an artist as an academic it makes perfect sense. These are not public events so there are no punters paying our way. Who else is going to pay for these conferences, most of which are convened by similar academics responding to a perceived need in a specific academic community? Where it becomes problematic is when artistic and academic roles get all mixed up, and this is where in the UK at the moment there is quite a debate going on. As Arts Council (and especially Lottery money) has diminished we have seen an equivalent ramping up of funds in the academic sector. With the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the Higher Education Funding Council of England and the inclusion of Art and Design in the University sector Research Assessment Exercise we have also witnessed rapid growth in the availability of academic funds to practicing artists. The thing is, these funds are not technically available for artistic practice but for artistic research...and it is in this fine distnction that the argument lies. When is practice research and when is research practice, and when are they not? Some artists perceive research as antonymic to practice. Common place comments might propose that artists should not be "research active" as it functions to compromise their status in the artworld as exhibiting artists making their way on the basis of sales and fees. That is, the artist is perceived to have been "institutionalised" and their independence compromised. John Thompson, outgoing Research Professor at Middlesex University, made just this argument at a recent Tate Britain conference (also quoted in a recent Artists Newsletter article). That a Research Professor proposes this argument is particularly concerning, for as the first part of their title suggests, they should be concerned with research. This would appear to be somebody shooting themselves in the foot (perhaps this was why he was outgoing?). Nevertheless, he has a point, at least in respect of how perception of things can be critically important, and it is this same argument that leads many artists (myself included) to question whether they should be paying to show their own work (eg: ISEA). What such arguments miss is that artists have always worked in diverse socio-economic contexts, whether that be theocratic capital, corporate capital, private capital or state capital. Artists have never had an "independence" to be compromised. Artists are compromised simply by being members of the human race; by necessarily functioning within various socio-economic contexts. Now we can add to that list the academic context. Of course, each context extracts its own price from the artist as they seek to adapt to the dynamics that underpin the particular system. Unless you wish to indulge the mythic image of the starving artist hiding in their garret (and die young) chances are you will need to decide within which context or contexts you wish to work. I feel it is important to note that you can work across contexts and "play" a number of games at the same time. Realising this though does not make the arguments go away, as context always functions in determining value and how things get done. In this regard artists have to think very carefully about the implications for the kind of work they make and how it will be seen and valued. This is really where the argument gets interesting for there is no doubt that there is a huge difference between the sort of art that is made in relation to corporate capital (eg: large paintings or sculptures destined to adorn corporate headquarters) and that which is publicly funded (the ephemeralities of performance and media art, for example). The question is what sort of art is going to benefit from association with what is now an established academic economic context (which in my travels seems to be the case not only in the UK but also in Australia and Canada and starting to be the case in some European countries). My initial sense of this is that work that is concerned very much with its own processes, with interdisciplinary apporaches to practice and which is also able to adapt well to linguistic and critical contextualisation as part of its fabric (that is, not where the art is the object of the critique but functions to contain that critique) is the sort of work that is being supported. The demands that are made by the funding councils (and the sub-funds arising from them) are such that research projects (which in another world we could call art projects) are required to embody these characteristics from the moment they are germinated as a funding proposal (rather than a sketch on the drawing board). This places demands on artists that some (perhaps justifiably) will have great difficulty responding to. The problem for these artists is that many of them hold down jobs in art schools and now that these schools are looking to maximise their research income they will find such artists a liability and look to marginalise them, supporting instead those that are "research friendly". As you can imagine, this is where a lot of bad feeling is currently being generated. To bring this around to the current CRUMB topic, it could be argued that whilst the issue of preservation of media art might be seen as largely of interest to those in the museum sector it is also notable that much of the work being done in this area is being done in academia, as evidenced by the Computer Arts Histories project at Birkbeck, the Artists Film and Video database at St Martins and numerous other examples. CRUMB itself owes its existence to this funding context. All of these initiatives have started out with individual artists, critics or curators recognising a need. They have not been initiated by the institutions that house them. It has, like the art itself, been a case of bottom up activity. In this respect perhaps we can all claim out little patch of independence. I am not sure how we preserve that? Best Simon On 24.02.05 00:00, "Automatic digest processor" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:05:05 +0100 > From: Josephine Bosma <[log in to unmask]> > Subject: conference economies > > hello Crumbs and Oliver, > > > Oliver Grau wrote: > OG> To begin with the correction: I was not talking about academia, but about > OG> science, speaking of methods. > > Well, so was I, but maybe not clearly enough. This could be where my > mistake lies, if I made one. I saw the call for papers to this > conference, and did not apply because it had the look of an academic > conference. This means in practice: one can maybe get selected to give > a paper, but then one is to organize one's own travel and accommodation > fee, plus often one has to pay to give the talk as well, the > 'conference fee'. This is the reason I never respond to calls like > this one. To me it feels like a cheap trick, get all the content, and > have the people pay to work for you really. (ISEA works like this too, > but it has a different history, it was an artist initiative and seems > more like hacker confs, where everyone pays to make the event > possible. A bit like: > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005 , but this is > even more open in structure) I understand this is the way academic > conferences have worked for a long time, and I think it is not > appropriate anymore. If you are not part of a system or structure that > pays all this for you, you can more or less forget attending. The new > media have brought about new institutions and professionals which fall > outside of this system or which now have to find ways to squeeze > themselves into it in order to survive. The latter is something which > makes me very wary, especially since the 'academics' which try to deal > with the same matter have a comfortable advantage position in this, > whereas their knowledge (excusez if the remark seems an insult, it is > not meant this way) and work methods do not always fit the bill. > > But I can't find any info on the fees etc on the Refresh site, so my > comments might not make any sense at all. > > > best wishes, Simon Biggs [log in to unmask] http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ Professor, Fine Art, Art and Design Research Centre Sheffield Hallam University, UK http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/cri/adrc/research2/