|
> We have an actual
intern! Meet Bettina below.
Extra Practice
Newsletter
|
|
Fig 1. Ben and Kirsten prepping The Pool exhibition.
I feel like I just lose motivation when it
becomes a task.1
Were our lunch talks always about money?2
I just don't want it to feel too much like an office.3
Do we really need to import this
official language of contracts?4
If you have to hold each other's hands, how
can you still do handstands?5
If we want to organise with other spaces, will
there even be time left for our own practice?6
Maybe it's a response to maturing, maybe it was always there, this fear of
Organisation. "Thanks for coordinating," someone responds to an email draft I
sent in the XP group chat. Discomfort follows. It's nice when work is
acknowledged but also throws me back to when my side job was coordinating the
MA Critical Inquiry Lab, and it felt like Organising ate up way too much brain
and heart space to do self-initiated work.
As a frequent "responsible one (...) who puts on the lifeguard vest"7 of organisation, I want to believe that there is no conflict here, that organisation is just what makes Art possible, that it maybe even can be a form of art. And then a newsletter poses as a journal article. But I also fear this might be a myth that keeps me and others from making actual work.
It has been quite a pattern lately, so in this newsletter I'll weave a (long) thread through some experiences and events, looking for ways that Organising and Art can relate happily. Who knows, maybe I'll convince myself and comfort my inner organiser (and yours). Afterwards you can also read snippets of the lessons we wish we had learned in school and had to self-organise after. But first, let's look the danger in the eyes.
1) XP member in monthly meeting,
2024
2) XP member during lunch, 2025
3) XP member when rearranging the space, 2022-2025
4) XP member during radio chat on income-pooling, 2025
5) Intern Bettina's response to our maturing efforts, 2025
6) XP member during radio chat on organising, 2025
7) From Pools of Conviviality in Are.na Annual,
forthcoming
|
|
I. Pushing it, or The Organisation of Art
|
Fig 2. The start and endings of the Big Flowchart.
You might know us as artists or designers, but as a group we're mostly known as professional moderators. At least based on the jobs we get offered as XP. This spring, a question if we would like to moderate a panel on the role of institutes, at a new design biennale opening event of 180 euro a ticket.
We were invited by art collective TAMI (The Actual Main Institute) who are exploring what it would mean to have institutes cater to artist needs rather than the other way around. You know, that shapeshifting for funding applications and open calls to appease or fool the Gatekeeper to let you into the Institutional world of Art and Design.
This is my fear when Organising at XP. That by setting meeting agendas, drafting funding proposals, dividing responsibilities, I become the curator that turns desire into task, that kills joy, play, and art.
When Jack was working on the task of making slides for the panel, diagramming the influence blowing from policy to institutions to curators to artists, for some reason it looked a bit flatulent. Maybe it was the ticket price, maybe our boyishness, but we decided to lean into it:
|
Fig 3. Slide of the F.A.R.T illustrated by Jack
As the moderator I was tasked to deliver the theory, to introduce the conversation. It seemed like about half of the audience was in on the joke. Perhaps those who raised their hand for: who identifies as a freelance cultural worker? And for: who got a free ticket?
Freee! Isn't this why we went freelancing? To not have to squeeze our work into the frame of a manager? To choose what we work on? To escape Organisation?
In the 20min power-panel, with Maren Bang from TAMI, Amanda Pinatih from Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Delany Boutkan from Nieuwe Instituut, we shared anecdotes of shapeshifting artists, but also speculated on ways to reverse the flow of power by having institutes cater to artists.
How to enter from the exit? reads the title of an exhibition on institutions by befriended artists8, perhaps staying with the metabolic, you know, a bottom-up model. In one work, Noam Youngrak Son tries to become the smallest institution possible. If a cultural institution is what turns work into value, what about a vending machine selling their memes as postcards? Then they told me they realised that basically is what freelancing is: being your own institution.
Emancipatory or doom? Is freelance self-reliance an escape from the Organisation of Art, or its ultimate manifestation?
I'm afraid it's more the latter. Maybe it's the 'lancer' part that casts us already in a field of competition, and its accompanying structure of survival feelings. Being our own boss, we're tasked with Organising our art/hard work into market value, recognised by the orgs, grants, companies we rely on.
|
Fig 4. Meme by Yuri Veerman, seen in Sepp Eckenhausen
I want to believe there is an alternative to the individualist 'becoming the product' response to top-down organisation of art. During the panel we were trying to picture this power inversion happening within current institutes. It wasn't easy to imagine catering-to-artist being funded. But later I realised, isn't that exactly what artist-run spaces are doing? What we are trying with Extra Practice? Lately we refer to ourselves less as moderators than as "prototyping support structures for cultural freelancers."
8) How to enter from the exit is still on till Dec 21 at Onomatopee, Eindhoven.
|
|
II. Self-instituting, or The Art of Organisation
When was it that you felt free to make art? When you were a kid? When you were studying? When you were on that residency? Few places more organised than the institution of a school, residency, or nuclear family. The organisation of an artificial womb, walls that temporarily keep out the World and Work and the demand for organising your mode of survival yourself.
I then get the sense that anti-organisation sentiment is misguided. Directed at the symptom, the bureaucratic messengers and gatekeepers, rather than what the organisation organises towards. 'Let's not think about boring business stuff' is only possible when you don't have to. 'Death to institutions' only when you have an alternative support structure. Ignoring organisation then just imports the current structures unquestioned, as Jo Freeman reminds us in The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
|
Fig 5. Detail from the Big Flowchart.
If we look at Organisation more as sedimented collective agreements, it shows its promise – collectivity, aka if we all agree it means we can realise more together – and its trap – power centralisation, aka did everyone really agree? Maybe the Art of Organisation is less about the separation into organs with tasks, and more about how those organs relate, attune, and become an organism together.
How to Organise? read the title of an event Varia invited us to, as if they knew what we were muddling through. We gathered with about 10 collectives, with Ben, Kirsten and me representing XP. Everyone shared tools, like the ever-feeding feminist soup (Feministas Rotterdam), a 5-15% collectivity fee added to invoices (Hackers & Designers, Varia), and sharing work principles in an online editable doc (HumDrumPress). Our tool was the spreadsheet to draft income-pooling that Jack and Emma shared in an earlier newsletter, as a way of collectivising financial experimentation (which turned out to first require breaking the taboo of financial transparency, and then made us share personal survival tactics).
I left feeling excited about admin and all. It suddenly felt empowering, as the invisible spatial design of the organism we're in. Instead of importing the conditions of the market and letting them determine our roles, could self-organising be a way of counter-structuring, to care for the conditions of our work? Could we self-institute ourselves into a womb for art, and could this whole practice then become Art?
|
|
III. Support structures, or Organisation for Art
Headphones hang from mics on stands around a table filled with cables, a mixer, and a laptop. By now I'm quite familiar with how this radio setup makes space for a particular kind of conversation. It's informal, because not fully scripted, while you also want to make sense together. First for the people around you and then the people who might be tuning in. An improvisational collective jam. All from this messy table.
|
Fig 6. One of the Poolside Chats during The Pool exhibition.
It was my first time in Topolò this summer. Robida's Summer School was about radio, but I feel they also were a kind of radio. An infrastructure for emergence, a soil for art-making. Each participant was also host, by leading a session and cooking, but this was only possible with the care infrastructure that the Robida members Organised. This started from the conceptual framing and funding behind the open call, but continued with arranging places to sleep, the kitchen, the radio, the website, all the support every participant got to work out how their idea might actually take place in and around the village.
The curator who is a caretaker creates a space for making art, without knowing what art will be made. (...) a caretaking of a space for art-making as the making of social forms, of modes of making together that form value itself, that invent value as an experiment made in care, under the watch of the caretaker, the accomplice. Under this watch, art-making can suspend whatever value tries to plot, and invent a practice of valuing for itself, with others, a conspiracy of value for itself, in space of caretaking, in complicit love, write Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney.9
I like how it sketches out a way of organising while also linking to the Radio Alice motto that Jack had sewn onto the walkie talkie bags.
|
Fig 7. Conspire/breathe together10 photo by Antônio Frederico Lasalvia
Instead of top-down or freelance Organising of Art for Value, the caretaker would organise to "suspend whatever value tries to plot." This is the kind of organising I want at XP. Not rules to tie play to usefulness, but creating the conditions that allow for play, for desire, for pursuing meaning. To be our own summer school. Maybe this is what I need to learn, organising more conditions for process and less result.
It was the reason why, earlier this year, we decided to focus our collective 'XP maturing' efforts on things that would directly help our individual practices. If some are stressed for money or work it limits our space for collective play, so how could we help each other? One main lesson from these sessions: that Organising our labour conditions aka project management is not something we had learned. Uncertainty on deliverables and plannings makes it way too easy for existential doubts to creep in. When is my work good enough? Do really I deserve this invoice? I was quite amazed how with one good email to a client, Kirsten turned from a week of stress to a week of play.