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On Organizing the Labor of Artists Black Blac Bla Bl B Re: Invitation to contribute a text to the journal Blackout Dear ____________, We are sitting here at ECAV in our current working place, which is the salle de réunion at the administration. Our fingers are typing this letter to invite you to contribute a text within the Art Work(ers) research project. We are thinking about how closing factories and the use of industrial ruins have affected our ways of working in the arts, and of the promises of creative economies. What narratives have been created to tell stories of art and industrial production as well as of deindustrialisation. Besides looking at historical examples such as EAT, Artist Placement Group, Equipo 57 & Grupo Y, Solidarnos & Ryszand Wasko, or Agricola Cornelia, whose work emerges in between art and (industrial) production modes, we are thinking of perruques (homers) and strategies to “reinterpret” the Taylorist use of machines with Situationist strategies. The question that we have in mind is less “why X has happened” but rather “why the alternatives Y did not take place”. Two sites have become particularly important during the research: Chippis (site of the former Aluminium factory, today Constellium) and Ivrea (site of the type- writing machine factory Olivetti). How differently two factories have shaped the cities, societies and cultural scenes in which they were situated with their idea of labour. 1 In our research, we observed the Blackout 0: Art Labour will be phrased involvement of artists and writers in the around the following contents: production of experimental publishing within industrial projects. Among them, 3 Editorial: Invitation to Contribute a Text poets such as Leonardo Sinisgalli would start the monthly magazine Civiltà delle 5 Two Paradoxes, One Reversal and an macchine (1953–79), while art historian Carlo Impasse: On Organizing the Labor of Ludovico Ragghianti initiated SeleARTE Artists (1952–65). They addressed the workers, W.A.G.E. the cultural scene and a wider audience through contributions by Italo Calvino, 17 Political Envision of Heritage and Nino Franchina, Umberto Eco and Eugenio Deindustrialization Struggles: Carmi among others. All of them workers, The Work of Artist Collective Mesa8 each one in their field, but more often in a David Romero Torres trans-disciplinary setting. The Olivetti typing machine factory was deeply connected to its 25 Museum of Public Concerns publishing house, the Edizioni di Comunità: Mabe Bethonico, Victor Galvão books such as La condition ouvrière by Simone Weil were translated, not only 37 Public Art Tours for the sake of patronage or pedagogical Chrisantha Chetty emancipation of the workers, but rather to support the reflection on labour and 45 Jardins à Fabriques, Constructing production in social and cultural terms. It is Visions also for these reasons that a wide number Guillaume Pilet of novels, magazines and poems inscribed within the letteratura industriale trend, 59 Thinking with Your Hands emerged around utopian factory projects in Robert Ireland the 1950s and 1960s. 65 I Read Myself Among the gestures that we have thought Leah Anderson of for the Art Work(ers) research project, we therefore decided to re-activate these forms 74 Biographies of publishing. We have planned two issues 80 Colophon of the Blackout magazine, and would like to invite you to contribute to the issue zero. For your contribution, we would like to Our idea would be to collect in Blackout zero propose the following conditions: writings on artists labour. – The salary is 500 CHF. – We wish to discuss further, through coffee or a skype, the general context of your contribution. 2 3 – We would be glad to contribute to your Two For close to ten years, WAGE has been reflections with materials (texts, images, agitating in the contemporary art field around a single demand: that non-profit videos) from our research, if you wish so. Paradoxes, art institutions pay artists for the work – We would like to receive from you an they contract us to do. While this could abstract of 250 words including the main One Reversal be perceived as an epic act of durational points of your text, and a biography. performance, it might likewise be written – We will discuss with you the timeline for off as an inconsequential adjustment and an to an institutional field in need of total your submission in accordance with our structural reform. It turns out to be neither, editorial process. Impasse: On because WAGE is not an artwork and any truly inconsequential adjustment would Let us know if you are interested in this not have taken a decade to make. collaboration and if you have the time to Organizing The very simple demand to be paid is as much an effort to recalibrate the art participate. We are looking forward to institution as it is an effort to recalibrate hearing from you! the Labor of the labor of artists. Looking back, it has also been an effort to recalibrate the Warm wishes, Artists institution of being an artist because the call for compensation also called into question what artists do, why we Petra Köhle, Robert Ireland, Federica Martini do it, and whom we do it for. Out of For Art Work(ers) these questions have arisen a series of incidental paradoxes, reversals, and impasses that have led us to WAGENCY – a forthcoming initiative by WAGE to organize artists and institutions, along with buyers and sellers of art, together around a shared politics of labor. WAGE’s focus on regulating the payment of artist fees by non-profits was critical to redefining the relation between artists and institutions as being one of labor and not charity, but WAGE emerges from a long tradition of artists organizing more broadly around the issue of remuneration for cultural work in the U.S. that dates back to the 1930s. W.A.G.E We see the contemporary fight for artist compensation as being situated within a wider struggle for equity by all those who supply content without payment standards or an effective means to organize. Today this might casually include anyone who navigates the Internet as a prosumer, and that includes most of Layout: 25' 34'' Corrections: 7' 23'' its users – evading the simultaneous 4 5 consumption and production of media, That’s what WAGE did when it enforce compensation, so the only under the term “Artist.” WAGE does social and otherwise now itself takes came together in 2008 by looking at the way to regulate the unregulated – to distinguish between the “Contracted work. But beyond the data-driven demands made by an open, multiracial get institutions to pay artists – is by Artist” who has been engaged by an participation baked into having a digital coalition of artists, filmmakers, and persuading them to. WAGE uses organization to participate in programs, presence, a more narrowly defined writers over a period of three short years, administrative direct action to remind and the “Sub-Contracted Artist” who may understanding of a content provider 1969–1971. The Art Workers Coalition them that unless they back up the be engaged by an artist to participate in a might be anyone who produces that targeted museums with an insistence moral and political claims they make project or program. which can be read, watched, or listened on their reclamation as something like through their programs with materially An Artist Fee is the expected to online. a form of representative democracy, equitable institutional policy, then they remuneration for an artist’s temporary The antiquated distribution accountable to that era’s civil rights, anti- are failing as institutions. But this is only transactional relationship with an mechanisms that used to generate war, and women’s movements asserted half of WAGE’s work. The other half is institution to provide content. An artist revenue for hard-copy industries like through what we might now consider the persuading artists that what they do is fee is not compensation for the labor music, publishing and journalism have moral rights of artists. labor which is increasingly less a process or materials of making art and it is not been laid to waste by the reasonable Their demands were many and of persuasion than one of coercion, intended as compensation for the content expectation that we all have a right to they were interlocked. After three years engaging what appear to be two distinct itself. Rather, it is for its provision. This free web-based content. But without of uncompromising action calling for a constituencies, artists and institutions. includes and is the work of working with consumers willing to pay for it, the redress of the art institution in its totality, In addition to coercion, WAGE does an institution. struggle to re-establish profitable the coalition fractured in and around its the policy-based work the state has business models continues, and for multiplicity of demands. The end result declined to do in its failure to recognize Out of WAGE’s effort to define the labor content that behaves like a public good was just one concrete policy change: the value of artists’ work as a public of artists relative to the closest thing when it resists or is compromised admission-free days at museums now good and to support it as such. WAGE we have to an employer has emerged a by monetization, the public charity often reduced to a single corporately stepped in and produced guidelines paradox. In articulating on hyper-specific is looking like an increasingly viable sponsored evening per week. Noting and standards that delineate how much economic terms what the figure of the option. Bookstores, newspapers, and this, WAGE chose to work toward a single money institutions should pay us and artist is and what it does, we first had to magazines seem to be gravitating achievable goal instead and one that was what they should pay us for.
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