Documentation of: “A working session on Art and Policy,” 2–4pm, Friday 20th July 2018, workshop, Goldsmiths PhD Art, Installation Series 2018 | 18.01.2019

 

Policy, Intervention and Art

Documentation of: “A working session on Art and Policy,” 2–4pm, Friday 20th July 2018, workshop, Goldsmiths PhD Art, Installation Series 2018

 

Participants:

  • Tom Clark – Workshop Convener (Goldsmiths, Dept. Art)
  • Susannah Haslam (RCA / Independent researcher)
  • Lucy Lopez (BCU / Eastside Projects / Grand Union)
  • Claire Louise Staunton (RCA)
  • Edgar Schmitz (Goldsmiths, Dept. Art)

 

What have art and policy to do with one another?

Policy is the instruction book for how the image of the institution is brought into being; policy defines the conditions of participation and the parameters of its function.

Policy pronounces some as incorrect.

Policy says what we will do with what have.

Policy makes aspirations the edges of its reality.

Policy operates at scales ranging from the massive to the intimate, jointing them.

It functions like an infrastructure.

 

Aims

In this workshop on art and policy I wanted to explore some of the preliminary as well as more sustained experiences, difficulties and commonalities of in working between art and policy, policy and art, and policy for art. How can we understand the scales of interaction between policy and art? Could policy be treated as an object, a site, a mechanism and also a specific context? As something that can be worked on in a more active mode than through representation and negation through critique?

Already there are some examples of this coming together,

 

In this workshop then, I hoped to extend these existing examples, and draw upon the invited participants’ diverse work, which in one way or another intersected policy as object, site, or its results. (Lucy has co-curated Policy Show at Eastside Projects in Birmingham and whose research covers the possibility of institutional care; Susannah, who researches models of education in the arts and worked on local arts policy planning; Claire who is researching the possibility of artistic and curatorial interventions into housing policy and schemes; and Edgar whose work concerns the choreographic, organizational practices of infrastructural and institutional forms.)

While we each had a relationship to art that would ground this conversation, I was also keen that this session would also allow us to push the specific question of artistic intervention more generally. Where art might provide some space or methods for intervention into the objects and practice of policy. Or how we might discuss how art responds to the changing conditions of possibility shaping artistic production and display as define by current policies (from a variety of sources). Exploring how these might have changed to the extent that intervention into these conditions is considered urgent and necessary.

In the context of my research, this workshop was also conceived in order test out what I am calling an “infrastructural” dimension of practice, audience, site and so on. Here models rather than representations, approaches that are systemic, interoperable, reproductive, communicative, tacit, etc., are developed with and in distinction to purely artistic work. Similarly, this mapping workshop sought — among other things — to ask, if the question of strategic policy-making done outside of government has in many cases been taken up as a design problem: what happens when the same is done in practices of art? Not only seeking to provoke some of the habits of the arts with the solutions-oriented outlook of design, this was also an attempt to explore what policy-related practices could be already said to be immanent to the arts.

However, if one of the problems of this infrastructural approach is getting bogged down in describing all of the objects, processes and rules that are captured in the orbit of the term “infrastructure,” looking at policy is an attempt to draw the edges of infrastructure through traces of its actions. In this case, it specifically included attempted to discuss the non-physical infrastructures that condition the field of art. Could policy be described, like infrastructure as scalable or situated — a form that can be cracked open to think about and change the repetition and reproduction of conditions and distribution of the possible?

Returning to the question of intervention, this was also an opportunity to flesh out an idea of infrastructural and institutional actors: who are these? What do they do in these terms? And if infrastructure is not simply a set of objects, but organizational principles and imaginaries: to what extent does an infrastructural lens necessitate an intervention or creation of forms through which to give body and conditions to see and therefore work on infrastructure in the first place?

Of course this was also posing the question of policy as a problem. As Edgar Schmitz put it, paraphrasing Irit Rogoff, the question could also be asked like this: “Why are we suddenly employing the terms which we are usually vehemently against; tool of the ‘others’.” As many have made clear, including Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons, the problem of policy precedes its entry into the discourse of art. Not to mention that it might already be considered as an urgent problem.

Policy is also defined in this sense by shaping the very possibilities of life through how it differentiates life. Important for this discussion was the grinding continuity to policy — like many other things — that does not sit easily with institutional disposition towards evacuating the contingency and possibility of various subjects as the institution (of art) re-thinks itself. The problem of policy cannot be solved by its incorporation into and purification through a discourse of critique; nor can this be done through the movement away from one institutional shape or space into another. This was also why to think of policy in infrastructural terms, of reproduction and repetition, opens out to the Moten and Harney’s depiction of policy as the continuous capture of contingency, risk and flexibility; and to perhaps rejecting a sense that moving into another space means we can leave behind what is with us now. (Likewise, without Judith Butler’s conception of infrastructure as that which situates the individual as socially contingent, this idea of possibility of life, and indeed of appearing in it, are crucial here.[1])

It must be said then, that to focus on policy as a space which comprises the conditions of production and thus as one in which it might be possible to intervene was not necessarily to affirm it, but to put it forward as a possible surface of artistic work, making and use. Since this workshop aimed, at minimum, to understand where the question of policy currently sits in the arts, this conversation sought more than anything to articulate a starting point. This, it was hoped, would allow us to deal with the frustrations, differing scales, locations and arms-length operations of actual policy-making.

 

This was essentially a closed working session, which included participants discussing work in formation, and so I can only summarize what we said. However, some of the key questions to take forward included:

  • Does the infrastructural / organizational turn have to do with how power exceeds the institution; the effects and how this read has changed, surfaced differently, consistently?
  • This could be located by the question of how users of infrastructures differ to citizens or audience members, where policy sets conditions of appearance, not simply engagement.
  • The discussion drew on histories APG; feminist organising; housing struggles — which all exceeded the institution, and the participant’s research into them.
  • How can arts organizations navigate their own scale and problems through policy; seeing moments of disruption as moments in which to consider how they will act in the future.
  • Whether a focus on policy is focused inwards or outwards.
  • The challenges of generalizing policy in a space of individual and collective practice, power and agency such as in the arts.
  • How artists have historically attempted to navigate these dynamics, specifically in relation to housing policy, working as or with policy makers, and how artists might be instrumentalized in the process of implementing policy — whether creating the sense of democratization in decision-making, or easing structural transformation or gentrification.
  • How artists and artistic practice might be better placed to resist policy than to engage with it as a productive site. How curatorial and arts-organizational methods might learn something from this.
  • We questioned to what extent this focus on policy represented a methodological shift or just a form of house-keeping of ideas on forms of domination.
  • Does this represent an over-identification with bureaucracy, as has already been practiced in art?
  • Could policy be re-positioned within the scope of language games.
    • As a material contract; a language performance; a linguistic object?
    • Is this the curse of art: to frame it as such?
  • Or can we see this as a practice of finding access points to that which is usually kept at bay?
  • Is this question even appropriate within the arts? Is it a mis-identificaiton or over-identification? An attempt to distort?
  • How might we frame this as part of a Participatory Turn or so-called ‘Consultational’ Turn? What sort of expertise does this presume and deploy? — Is this even what an artist should be asked to do?
  • What competencies we perform as artists; Can we weaponise competency; following the post-autonomist models of subsumptions; reproducing the possibilities of neoliberal conditions; how can we weaponise this differently?
  • If policy is at odds with the terms of planning, as posed in The Undercommons, what else can be done with the performativity of this language?
    • Make it shimmer?
    • Con-figuration as the creation of partial objects and subjects? (Suchman)
  • Modelling is the necessary fiction that permits an intervention into infrastructure; to what extent should these models be formalised?
  • How does this work in the context of institutions of power?

 

 

 

 

Extended Context

Policy is at once impactful yet difficult to account for. It is murky and fractal. Omnipresent and growing. The aim of policy is to set a course or principle of action, to be undertaken by one organization or another — structuring it through ways of doing. In this way it offers an infrastructure of sorts that might be readable across many situations.

A deeply instrumental and instructive tool of governance, however. Though policies for the arts, often focus on investment or its institutions, or, as with Jennie Lee’s 1965 white paper “A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps,” (necessarily) on supporting provision and widening access for the cultural practices, policy could be seen as being at odds with (or at best somewhere else to) the notionally autonomous sites and open-ended processes and aspirations of contemporary art.

However, considering policy as entanglement of language, function, and actors, it is impossible to separate the represented from the representation as the conventional procedures of art’s making and consumption would have it — as a discourse if nothing else. Out of necessity or practicality, policy is often becoming the site of intervention for a number of artists and curators, researchers and designers: offering in this way a prospect of not only re-modeling organizations, but creating new kinds of organization all together. Here policy takes on odd shapes and sizes or sees art practitioners move into unexpected spaces. Beyond maintain its identifiable, if vague, position of value within policy (that the arts posses a special quality), it appears that there is a current tendency to ask what the arts have to contribute to policy itself.

Here we can look to the description of policy in Fred Moten and Stafano Harney’s 2013 book, The Undercommons as that which takes place of hope, its conversion into a system of expectation and policing. “What we are calling policy is the new form of command as command takes hold.… Moreover what we are calling policy comes into view not because management has failed in the workplace, where it proliferates as never before, but because economic management cannot win the battle that rages in the realm of social reproduction.” (74)

As a weapon against “self-sufficiency at the social level,” (76), what Moten and Harney refer to in distinction, “planning,” policy is the “pronouncing [of] others as incorrect.” (76) Policy works against “those who plan,” they go on, to enmesh social reproduction in the dynamics of change. Set as “contingency, risk, flexibility, and adaptability,” policy conforms to the “groundless ground of the hollow capitalist subject.” Like this, it “both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.” (Ibid.)

The policing of ‘care,’ is a useful example, not least because it is often a site in which policy-making in the arts is judged necessary. For Dutch cultural critic Egbert Alejandro Martina, policy excludes through the granularity of its “promise to improve the ‘quality of life’.” It makes this promise not only by shaping “the material conditions in which people live and that make “living” possible, but also desire.” Crucially however, policy is motivated by the idea that these conditions are contingent on full social participation. This for Martina, pitches policies of care as means of surveillance, which Black people are specifically “positioned in relation to [this] ‘good life’.”

“Care is a policing power that rarely registers as such.” Couched like this, Dutch policies of care, allow the “‘the Dutch tradition of paternalism,’” to as function “‘a mode of production that secures civic [and racial] relations.’” That is to say: policy and “good governance is designed to shape how citizens affectively identify with and become invested in the ‘national interest’” as a moral concept. This positions certain practices “as favourable, while others as detrimental to the flourishing of the nation.”

Grounded like this, care, the policing of the conditions of the good life, are quickly and easily set in relation to immigration by those looking to curb it — often citing the need to curb the influx of those with “poor life chances.” The polices of care Martina cites, bridge a will to protect the Netherlands as offering “a better life,” for those “young single mothers of Antillean decent (read: Black),” who “are often ‘economically and socially weak’,” and targeting their children as those more likely “to end up as criminals,” having defined them as “’more at risk.’”

In this way policy is an instrument of exclusion as well as definition.

Policy is a powerful multiplier in this sense. (Easterling) It extends the work of the institution to all areas and instances of life it can be translated into. However, there are many examples in which this multiplication effect is being put forward in the question of how to effect changes against the powerful infrastructural conditions of possibility (created in part by policy). These interventions attempt to steer the performative nature of planning and languaging that policy often incorporates towards more plural aims.

We might find an examples by way of comparison in Andrea Phillips’ 2017 lecture on management, “Museum as Social Condenser,” (Contemporary Art Society, “Museum as Battlefield,” British Museum, 2 May 2017). In it Phillips problematizes the separation of management and curatorial work done in museums, which is based a “presumption that the aesthetic and performative achievements of the institution — its programme — is where innovation lies,” but which ultimately also undermines the possibility of changing how institutions are managed.

Phillips goes on to suggest that the museums might follow the Soviet social condenser building model, “developed by constructivist practitioners in the early 1920s in the USSR.” As an alternative to the forms of management of economic and psychological rationales that define the institution today, these form soviet forms of “managed living,” where life and work patterns are guided by co-produced living, for Phillips “might transform the modes through which we understand the arts institution.” But it is the incorporation of the tools of managing this co-inhabitation and production that is ultimately key.

Similarly, for Ned Rossiter, the current impasse in organisational transformation comes about from a separation of organisational management and knowledge production — something that is especially heightened by networked and infrastructural forms of organisation, such as in the growing separation between management and the managed.

For both Phillips and Rossiter it is key to at least engage with the practice and tools of managing as one that has been avoided by critique, and in this we can include policy. Yet as the frame of Rogoff’s implies, tools of management are also those which require and initiate vehement critique.

However if policy is taken as an object in the ongoing question of how to organize, to plan, for the infrastructures of shared art practice, some level of critical engagement is unavoidable. For instance:

  • The increasingly lack of the arts within primary and secondary education policy, and measuring of its value in tertiary education through metrics that cannot understand it (link)
  • The desire and need for policies internal to arts organizations, whether on diversity, labour and payment practices and so on
  • Question of value, structural distribution, and languages through which culture is expressed and experienced today: all call attention to how arts are provisioned, sustained, and represent a future and set of possibilities within it.

In the end the for the working group it remain open as to what can the interfacing between art and policy do? Even if art should be put to work like this? The hope is that through a shared dialogue we can map out some of the textures and directions of these practices.

 

 

 

[1] Butler, Judith. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.

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