Back to the Program
16-May-06
this is meant to be a brief little thing - to get people posting again.
The art life has had some feisty comments wars about the non maquarification of East Sydney Teach- and so maybe that’s where the steam from this forum is going?
maybe?
or is everyone hunkering down to the onerous tedium of scrabbling on the edges of the culture industry and knowledge economy….shows, marking, proposals, aquittals, teaching etc…..?
I am interested in the condition of precarity as generative of creativity, of ideas, of activity. where threat is a source of interesting things.
the millis show - was a nice reminder of this - how the sixties communities of service economy fringe workers plus ‘emerging’ artists, and ye olde grande working class, were a soruce of really amazing social ferment……
so different to the isolate pockets of latterday warehouse squatters, occupying discrete not yet colonised zones of real estate in bland bourgeois suburbs like balmain and pyrmont……. or not?
but i segue.
in my own little corner of the sandstone academy. hell i don’t even have a corner, it’s a space i pass through on occasion - a series of tracks and encounters, but lets call it a corner anyway…
….I’m acutely aware of the current precarity of research,teaching study in arts. Academic merit is a fraught and weak justification for continuing to fund schools of research. Universities are meant to be cash generating corporate cows.
in some circles, i’ve heard phD students describe their research practice as ‘a job’, with people actually saying ‘I treat it as a job, I go to work and I achieve outcomes.’ as if introjecting this neoliberalist bullshit will save them from the cold nasty fact that intellecutal endeavour is NOT valued in our society, and is constantly under threat.
I’m sorry if I incite moans all round by citing Walter Benjamin, but his view of the present, of making hisotyr, of acting in the present as a historical moment but I really believ ethat this sense of CRISIS is what makes any work really CRITICAL.
I woke up today and thought ‘what if I found out that I was going to die in the next 6 months?’, and I realised that I would keep doing what I’m doing. that this matters to me that much, and that this is my ‘life work’ - in the beuyssian sense. I would define ‘life-work’ as that activity that we continue in the face of the immanence of death, with an immense sense of the precarity and fragility of our activity and our life, and of something that we give ourselves to in that moment of accepting the precarity of life, the terror of death and the awareness of its inevitability.
I believe that art is any activity which encompasses this ‘life work’. It includes writing, teaching and social interventions of play, encounter and community building. I think any institution, grouping, porject which wants to attch itsllef to ‘art form’, must somehow embody this form of life work, and a strong sense of the precarity and precioussness of what this means.
In relation to my former art school, I’m aware of the rich sense of community I gained by attending it, but this is one that has largely flourished outside of its walls. so I’m wondering what will happen to this commuity as the art school is faced with its own collapse or transformation.
I went to a very odd meeting at the sandstone pillar yesteday. Amidst gargoyles, desks and the fusty murmures of atrophied adolescent neuroticism, there was a subtext of the immense fragility of our endeavour. The university is an institution which begrudgingly supports academic research or intellectual endeavour, and teaching and research are primarily forms of cash generation. Art departments, even arts departments are under threat. the activity of researhc has to be concealed, disguised, somehow fudged beneath the requisite administrative parameters of KEY PERFMRANCE NDICATORS. (like levels of coursework enrollments, or timely phD completions) Within this i’m intrigued to see how people behave. Intrigued to see who bury themselves further into their little burrows of books, words, dreams. Waiting out their tenure, while counting their superannuation, acting the cynic. their dusty gloom, barely aleviated by catty snipes at other academics researchers. Playing dead. Immense adolescent impotence, that evokes images of Casuauban from eliots middlemarch. Insipid dreams of the morally dead. However other profs, chat, move, respond. Still talk, form links, still teach. find new activites, new entres, new endeavours, new exchanges. Universities are still immsensely privileged sites of encounter, of words, books, bodies, classrooms, access to absorbing, circulating and creating ideas, and community.
i’d stilll say the main benefit of the institutions i’ve attended has been access to social networks. Art school, enabled me to learn the rules in order socially negotiate ‘the art scene’, and university did much the same. Hell so did squatting. In fact most of the people I know now - are through networks of squatting or study! (even internet networks usually feed into or feed off real world connections in these other spheres) Why is that?
is it the precarity? the limited time? the proximity of physical and idealised community? is it the site?
or is the activity?
this question is going to make me sound horribly elitist and privileged, but, WHAT DO WORKERs DO? How do people, stuck together spending vast amounts of time collectively living a form of psychic death (and don’t EVER try to tell me that work, the labouring monkey suit, flouro gear, rubber gloves hourly rate watch the clock shit is ANYTHING but psychic death) actuallly create honest and meaninglful relationships? OK there’s always the pub later, but spending 8-10 hours a day, lying to yourself and lying to other people cannot be washed away wiht a few cold schooners.. And most sydney pubs suck. How do people survive in the burbs? I’ve only lived in country towns or around newtown, so I don’t know. Apart from life modelling, none of the jobs I’ve had have offered even the remotest connection to rich social networks. How do people cope?
I’m asking these questions here, because whatever we mean by open source, does need to consider the social geopgraphies of what we’d like to promote in our walless pedagogical project. I’m also painfully aware of my own extremely limited experience in creating comunities and wonder how that impacts on what I’d be able to constribute to such a project.
what do other people think?
