September 12 – October 10, 2007Does art have to be hungry?
Valuation, as one of the basic occupations of the society, encompassing a range from personal to broader societal criteria, determines and enables the positioning of an individual in a social environment in which he lives and works or, as the case may be, creates. The very perception of the words work and create presents the first obstacle we run into when we label diverse vocations or types of creativity according to societal norms. Assembly line, factory, office, trade etc. are spaces where, by general standards, one does not create but rather work. Work as such demands its pay, since it is socially valuable and has to be rewarded with an earned payment without question. There is no place for dilemmas here. A creator, whom we most often equate with the artist, faces, however, a minor difficulty. The society more often than not puts creating into the frame of (useless) social activities, which does not bring any surplus and which belongs to the realm of private relaxation and satisfaction. Its usefulness has objectionable parameters – most often it serves as entertainment, tension release, relaxation, diversion from everyday work. So why would the kind of work which is not connected to a tangible saleable product and is therefore flirting with useless creating, be paid. The artist should take up useful work, valued by society as worthy of payment.
In the case of a Slovenian artist, his survival is most often bound to the support from public institutions, which value his work and set the amount of payment accordingly. In most cases, the sum of money is bizarre to such extent, that it does not even cover the basic production costs, let alone the costs of survival. There remains the possibility of trading their “products”, the ones that the broader society most often doesn’t recognise as satisfactory for monetary purchase. Yet, in the time when the international contemporary art market is blooming on all levels, in Slovenia it is completely underfed. The blame is to be looked for both on the level of the cultural policy climate as well as in the reception of such novelty (for the Slovenian space) from the side of the professional public. Whilst a profession in the cultural sphere is valued as the segment that deserves to get an appropriate payment, the artist is left to wait for mercy from the public institutions, since he can not sell his works on the market. This is, coarsely speaking, on the verge of ‘prostitution’ and is a frequently heard outcry of the professional public. The logical conclusion is the following: the artist/creator should do work which is valued as payable and engage in creativity/relaxation in his leisure time. In such situation, it is hard to avoid not to point a finger (also) at the cultural workers – the mediators between the artists and the public.
The pressing questions of artist survival strategies have lately been appearing more intensely in the local contemporary art context, however without excessive understanding for the opinions of the artists themselves. The artists serve here as examples of the practice spoken about rather than living subjects who in reality eke out a living in their profession, while at the same time the speakers and advocates of better conditions are (without dilemmas) on the payrolls of different institutions. For this reason, SUR*VIVER, the project of Tina Smrekar is at this moment of key importance for Slovenia and the broader region, since the speaker belongs to that social stratum, whose work is surrendered to charity. The artist has transformed a personal experience to a research-exhibition project, which will, how ironically, in the context of gallery presentations most probably be paid, at least in the form of a symbolical fee. This ongoing project, presented so far mainly through lectures and installations and also encompassing over fifty interviews with artists from around the globe is, in the exhibition in Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, upgraded with works of artists who, in different ways, react to the same questions.
One of these works is statistics nr. 1, a project by the Slovenian tandem son:DA, developed during the time of the great Slovenian contemporary art ‘spectacle’ – the last U3 (Triennial of Contemporary Slovenian Art). The difficulties and possible solutions to the conditions of production in the local context served as the starting point of this triennial, which has sadly turned into the opposite of its initially set goals. The artists were, for the benefit of a pretentious and (too) expensive gallery presentation which they were given no influence over, faced with a lack of means for the production of individual works, which were supposed to serve as an overview of exactly this pressing problematics. In the situation, son:DA decided on looking for donations in the private sector, which the participating artists would use for production of the work as well as fees for their own invested work. The collected money was distributed among all participating artists (each artist received the equal amount of money), which is presented on the table which also shows how the money intended for production of the exhibition has been redirected into other channels, far from the artists’ pockets.
In a somewhat more narrative way, Tanja Lažetić’s Dialogue in the Kitchen, Volume I deals also with the story of artist survival. The interviews with selected Slovenian artists raise questions such as survival conditions, (non)existence of a market in Slovenia, weather financial success means also producing works of higher quality, weather society takes care of artists, etc. Even if the answers by each artist are very different, they all point to the malnutrition of the contemporary art production and its creators. Still, to the listener’s great relief, the artists show optimism and enthusiasm, which is, in the given conditions, of key importance for the Slovenian art scene.
The project of the German artist Susan Schmidt entitled The Part-time Jobs of the Avantgarde takes a walk into history, into the time of the historical avantgarde, its players and their strategies of survival, a topic seldom written about by art historians. Such ‘banal’ part of artists’ lives is, for admirers and lovers of earlier and contemporary art alike, mainly a disturbing element, for which there is little understanding, since the greatest works are created in the worst periods of the artist’s life anyway. The greater the existential misery of the artist, the ‘greater’ the artworks produced during that time, so the art history (too) eagerly teaches us. Although in her work the artist combines analysis and fiction, the survival of the artist/subject is by far not a fictitious story. It is true that in contemporary fiction the heroes almost never sit down at a table and eat a decent meal, even less pay their electricity bills, but after all, for the most part, real life revolves around exactly this ‘banality’. Welcome to the real world of the artists, whose mailboxes are just as well filled with numbered leaflets the amounts on which are, just as with people who do get paid for their work, draining the already half-empty wallets. Yet it is worth to suffer for art, isn’t it? How else would one satisfy the empty consumerist souls who have more than enough of their own problems. Art should entertain and amuse, since that is its mission, even though with a rumbling stomach.
Alenka Gregorič
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Tanja Lažetić
Dialogue in the Kitchen, Volume I
Installation, 2006
In the series of interviews with selected visual artists a number of dilemmas that artists are facing today in Slovenia are brought to the fore: How does one make a living? How are artists connected with society? Should art address social issues, and if so, how? Should art be politically charged? How should society take care of its artists? To what extent is their work appreciated? What is the art market in Slovenia like? Does financial success condition artistic quality? Why do successful Slovene artists spend most of their time abroad?
Susan Schmidt
The Part-time Jobs of the Avantgarde
video, 2007
work in progress
“The discovery of labor as the source of property and wealth, as developed by John Locke and Adam Smith, pushed the concept of labor from an activity once despised by the aristocracy to a highly valued occupation in the eyes of the emerging bourgeoisie.” (translated from Marion von Osten, Kulturelle Arbeit im Post-Fordismus)
Susan Schmidt is interested in the soft aspects of society, such as
myths, attitudes and beliefs. She often works with everyday items and
situations and recontextualizes them. In her recent work The Part Time Jobs of the Avantgarde, she is interested in the classic avantgarde artist and their strategies of balancing artistic and pragmatic aspects of existence. Much is known about their artistic work, yet the economic aspects of the artist’s life are hardly written about nor openly discussed.
Departing from the historical context of art, Schmidt is further
interested in more general questions regarding contemporary concepts of labor, productivity, professionalism and identity. How and by whom are these concepts and values constituted? How do economic success and professionalism depend on each other? Am I what I do?
The work was supported by a DAAD research-fellowship and the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
son:DA
statistics nr.1
2006/2007
(sequel of a field journal, started in the months before the triennial-006)
Pula, 22.08.2007
A call Tina-S and the question how we are progressing with the text for the exhibition. We forgot. Or as the case may be, with the framing of two new translations we brought the whole thing to an end too quickly. After Ljubljana and Skopje the “statistics nr.1” or else the project of collecting donations for the payments for the artists at the triennial of contemporary Slovenian art will now be presented in Zagreb. And what can we today, in some 500 characters write about the project? In one of the recent debates we received a compliment on how much money was collected and so the artists at the group exhibition in Moderna Galerija were paid but also the allegation on why we didn\’t expose how the whole budget of the triennial was used. Is the artist\’s collecting money for their co-exhibitors in the main public institution really not enough?
Tina Smrekar
Artist SUR*VIVER
2006 – , cheat booklet
The project is a work in progress, the result of an on-going collection of interviews, conducted with visual artists from around the world since 2006. The selected artists’ individual experiences with ‘the real world’ of everyday survival and production are presented as condensed excerpts of non-recorded interviews. Each artist has the decision of revealing his name or not.
x References = Value of Artwork
wall drawing, 2007
The state of things. As it is more simple.
Spell capital. Spell ratings. Or running meter.
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Production: No History – Contemporary Arts Institute, Ljubljana, and Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
g-mk | galerija miroslav kraljević is an independent and non-profit contemporary art center and gallery in Zagreb, Croatia. Its program (includig exhibitions, lectures, workshops, residency program) supports projects that investigate a variety of phenomena of contemporary culture and society.
The program of Galerija Miroslav Kraljević is suported by: City of Zagreb – City Office for Education, Culture and Sport, Republic of Croatia – Ministry of Culture, INA – Industrija nafte d.d.
