Art Without a Place, Labour Without an End

By Petar Jandrić

New roads and old milestones

When the coronavirus hit the world, many of us dusted our high-school or college sciences. What is a virus? What are the main differences between linear and logarithmic curves? What does it mean to flatten the curve? We also remembered our history. Spanish Flu, Black Death… how did our ancestors deal with these threats? We suddenly rediscovered movies such as Contagion, and ‘relaxed’ ourselves from horrifying news reports with equally (and often more) horrifying fiction. Those locked in their homes, without access to work, found themselves thinking how to pay the next rent. Those who could transfer their work online, such as teachers and computer programmers, faced various challenges pertaining to working from home. Those whose work was deemed necessary, such as doctors and firemen, found themselves working 24/7 while isolated from their families. We all discovered how to home-school our children, and we all faced the challenge of retaining our sanity locked between our four walls in an increasingly insecure world. We re-learned how to wash our hands. The world, according to social networks and news reports, seemed to breathe as one.   

While we collectively discovered new realities pertaining to our specific positions within the society, an ‘old’ reality just waited to be rediscovered. Those working from lush homes have it much better than those working from cramped apartments. Those working in companies with strong social provisions have it much better than freelancers. Those working in Third Wold countries face dilemmas such as ‘corona or hunger’ (Sanjai and Naqvi 2020). Class matters. Property ownership matters. Social provisions matter. Race matters. On our brand-new road towards discovering what is now popularly termed as ‘a new normal’, we found a good old milestone – Karl Marx.

The coronavirus has created the biggest social science experiment in our lifetimes (and I do hope that it will not be replaced by an even bigger one in near future). Diverse, contextual, and nuanced global experiences of lockdown will surely be described, classified, and neatly foldered in journals, book, project reports, and other academic formats. Together with this painstaking analytic breakdown of the pandemic into it smallest detail, we also need some ‘grand’ over-arching theories to help us make sense of all this. And here I don’t aim at old-concepts-new-clothes semi-prepared attempts such as Žižek’s (2020) Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world, but something along the lines of Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis (Workers Inquiry Network 2020). Of course, the latter “collection of short summaries and critical reflections of the policies taken in different countries to deal with the coronavirus pandemic that affect workers and the unemployed” (dВЕРСИЯ 2020) is just an initial take on the problematic. Yet we do need a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches and theories; it is only at their intersections, that we can make sense out of this global pandemic mess.  

Canary in a coal mine

I am an academic researcher in a transdisciplinary field which is hard to pin-down, epistemologically and practically. Yet my transdisciplinary approaches, just like many others, still pretend towards ‘science’ – while many of us understand that the arts are just as important as the sciences, it is a well-hidden fact that even the most open transdisciplinary approaches often do not give enough importance to the arts (Jandrić and Kuzmanić 2020). At a very personal level, however, I am blessed with a partner who is an active artist. We share our ideas, topics, and interests; our works often intersect at some level which is invisible to our audience but formative for our works. At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic I wrote an urgent editorial for Postdigital Science and Education (Jandrić 2020) and invited post-digital scholars to engage with our present crisis. I issued calls for 500-word testimonies, for shorter commentary articles, for full-length original articles… And at the same time, Ana Kuzmanić issued her own call. She had a previously signed contract to do an artist book for her forthcoming exhibition, and she decided to base her book on testimonies by artists, curators, and cultural workers about the future of the cultural sector after Covid-19. Her call, entitled Art Without Place, starts with following words:   

While the Covid-19 pandemic spreads all over the world, the ban of public gatherings has drastic consequences to many occupations including arts and culture. This is a frightening situation; our lives are endangered directly, but also our material and political existence has quickly become uncertain. Reality has become more fiction than fiction, and the idea of the arts in concert halls, cinemas, and white cubes, has become uncertain. Our profession as artists and cultural workers face major challenges. The idea of radical change in the political economy of the arts is no longer merely a utopian construction; it has become a real and urgent question. In this collective project, we would like to hear about the ways in which you—artists, curators, art critics and all workers in the cultural sector—experience this shift in the moment here and now. (Kuzmanić 2020)

Reading the call, one cannot help but recall conditions in the cultural sector before the pandemic. Artists in precarious positions, moving from one project to another, mostly without permanent employment or social security. Curators, some institutionalized and some not, fighting at the battlefield of commodified ‘cultural industry’. Steep winning curve, in which only a few can make a living from their work. Already before the pandemic, workers in cultural sector were amongst the most exposed to global capitalism. To add insult to injury, some of the strongest sources of income for these people, such as live performances (theatre, music…), exhibitions and showings (visual arts, film), and so on, are heavily place-based. Immediately after lockdown, many of these precarious workers have been left without income. While it is impossible to speak of exact numbers at this stage, global lockdown has put a large percent of the cultural sector on its knees. This can be depicted in a very simple equation:

No music, film, exhibition + no social security = quick bankruptcy   

Ana, and other workers in the cultural sector, are personally interested in their own futures. But for the rest of us working in other fields, it would be foolish to think that we are exempt from their fate – our world is too global, too connected, too intertwined. With their extremely high level of exposure to corona-related disruptions, workers in the cultural sector are not merely an unlucky group to be pitied. More importantly, for all of us, they are canaries in the corona-mines – when the artists stop singing, that means that breathing air for the rest of us is getting thinner and thinner.

Art without a place, labour without an end

All over the Internet, those who are lucky to still have access to paid labour report unimaginable levels of stress, fatigue, and overwork. Artists frantically polish their funding bids; researchers publish more than ever, teachers’ workloads have gone over the roof. While we do all that in our homes, using often inadequate equipment in often inadequate workplaces, employers – who admittedly suffer from significant drops in income – are paying less and less. Only few months into the pandemic, it has become clear that the ‘new normal’ for most of us consists of more work for less pay. For those interested in social justice, the pandemic is an opportunity to rethink our society towards more social solidarity. For those interested in profits, the pandemic is an opportunity to add even more to their already unbelievably large piles of money. Unfortunately, this is not my paranoia but our global reality – as the likes of Amazon now see their profits increase at an incredible speed (Evelyn 2020), billions of people lose their sleep over paying next months’ rent and groceries.

While we try to imagine the new post-corona normal, social sciences should finally expand its scope to take the arts seriously. Our friends and family from cultural industries are more than victims of collateral damage from the coronavirus pandemic – they are also the corona-mine canaries who clearly point towards our global future. There is some truth in these social media memes that we are all in the same social, political, and economic storm of the coronavirus pandemic – and this is where this naïve truism ends. Some of us ride fancy new boats which can sail the current storm smoothly, while others ride old rickety barges suitable for ship scrap-yards. But the sea is always stronger from the strongest boat, and effects of our current crisis are stronger than any protection offered by luckier labour niches (such as tenured positions at state universities). Taking care of cultural industries is taking care of all of us. So let us hear our canary friends’ song, and let us join together in a struggle against those who want to turn word’s increased misery into their profits.

Submissions to Arts Without Place project will be open by the end of May 2020. Please click here to leave your submission: http://artwithoutplace.com/.

References

dВЕРСИЯ (2020). Covid-19: Workers archive. https://dversia.net/5757/covid-19-workers-archive/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Evelyn, K. (2020). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos grows fortune by $24bn amid coronavirus pandemic. The Guardian, 15 April. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/amazon-jeff-bezos-gains-24bn-coronavirus-pandemic. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8.

Jandrić, P., & Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Uncanny. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 239-       244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00108-5.

Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Art Without Place. http://artwithoutplace.com/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Sanjai, P.R., & Naqvi, M. (2020). ‘We will starve here’: Why coronavirus has India’s poor fleeing the cities. The Independent, 3 April. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/coronavirus-india-poor-fleeing-cities-starvation-a9438401.html. Accessed 28 April 2020.

Workers Inquiry Network (2020). Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis. Workers Inquiry Network.

Žižek, S. (2020). Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world. New York: OR Books.

A Bayonet is a Weapon with a Worker on Each End: Rethinking Veterans Day

By Colin Jenkins

In 1885, the Knights of Labor organized a successful strike against Jay Gould's Missouri Pacific Railroad. In response to the strike, Gould famously growled, "I can hire half the working class to kill the other half."

Gould was right. In any hierarchical arrangement, where power and wealth become concentrated in the hands of a few, this tactic becomes available to those wielding this power over a vast majority. Among the masses of workers, slaves, and impoverished, there will inevitably be many willing to "police their own" in order to be in the masters' good graces. History is rife with these examples.

In ancient Greece, the "most prized" slaves were awarded authority positions over their fellow slaves, sometimes given special status as overseers. Masses of slaves captured or bought from nearby Scythia were transformed into an official police force, known as the Scythian Archers, and were "brought back to Athens to carry out the laws of the state," which basically amounted to controlling and strong-arming the slave population in the city. Naturally, their willingness to brutalize their fellow slaves was rewarded with special privileges.

On the colonial American slave plantation there were those who became actively complicit in the subjugation of their fellow slaves. In return for special privileges, these particular slaves agreed to stay close to the master, live among the master and his family, and report to the master any wrongdoings or subversive actions on the part of the masses of field slaves. William Wells Brown, a slave from Kentucky, later described the privileged status he was awarded for his "service": "I was a house servant - a situation preferable to that of a field hand, as I was better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell, but about half an hour after."

In Gould's time, referred to by Mark Twain as "the Gilded Age" due to its insidious corruption and wealth inequality, social unrest among the masses of workers became commonplace. "New York City had 5,090 strikes, involving almost a million workers from 1880 to 1900; Chicago had 1,737 strikes, involving over a half a million workers in the same period." The economic elites of the time, like Gould, had two choices in addressing this unrest: (1) share a bigger piece of the pie with their workers, or (2) use force to beat workers into obedience. They chose the latter, taking Gould's words to heart, and proceeded to hire much of the working class to beat and kill the remainder into submission. Police forces and Pinkertons were amassed by the thousands to break strikes throughout the country. As consistent with history, Gould and his counterparts found plenty of workers willing to "serve" them in this role.

On a global scale, international warfare reflects this same dynamic. Throughout history, the ruling classes of each nation have utilized their working-class masses as tools of war, sending them off to fight and kill other members of the working class in remote parts of the world. The willingness of workers to follow these orders is preconditioned through various means, all of which stem from the need to maintain systems of hierarchy. The desperation that comes with being a worker in a coercive system creates immense pressure to merely survive. Today, those who find themselves choosing between minimum-wage jobs or unfathomable student loan debt are left with very little options in supporting themselves and their families. Material conditions force many into increasingly subservient positions. The mythological construction of boogeymen - savages, radicals, extremists, and terrorists - is all that is needed to create the illusion of an imminent threat. And grand tales of patriotism and "freedom" are all that is needed to persuade many to "volunteer" as tools of war.

So, we volunteer en masse. We literally hand over our bodies to powerful people whom we've never met, whose intentions and interests are not to be questioned, and whose authority over us is to be accepted as the natural order of things. We travel across the world, put our bodies in big metal machines, and take the lives of masses of working-class and impoverished people whom we've never met, whose intentions and interests are not to be questioned, and whose perceived threat to us is to be accepted as the natural order of things.

Much like the Scythian archer in ancient Athens, the house slave on a colonial Kentucky plantation, and the worker-turned-Pinkerton in Jay Gould's private army, we become willing tools of powerful interests. We choose to "serve" our masters. Many of us do this because we have no other options. Many of us do this because we are promised glory. Many of us do this because we hear the boogeyman coming. And many of us do this to simply "get in the masters' good graces." Whatever the reason, our unquestioned participation makes us complicit in maintaining the coercive systems of hierarchy that continue to dominate our world. And, despite the pats on our backs and choruses of "thank you" directed at us a few days a year, we remain collectively buried in this system, no different than our working-class counterparts throughout the world who we've been ordered to extinguish for the past two centuries.

The best way to honor Veterans is to question the system that creates us, uses us, and discards us. And the best way to honor our service is to ask ourselves who we really served and for what purpose.