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Subject:

Re: conference economies

From:

Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:51:42 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

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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/

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