Infra Cultures

Category: policy

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

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

     

    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.

  • Non-rationalized Infrastructures, Martha Nussbaum, Charlotte Prodger and Contemporary Art

    Non-rationalized Infrastructures, Martha Nussbaum, Charlotte Prodger and Contemporary Art

    How to think beyond the rationalised / rationalising frame of infrastructures as they are generally characterised from systems perspectives?

    Speaking on the Talking Politics podcast (28 November 2018) about fear, faith, hope and religion, US philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes an important case for the importance of the non-rational when considering how institutions might structure the political and its boundaries, especially when considering forms of rationalisation such as policy.

    Discussing the question of faith in the future in situations where the widespread practicing of religion has become absent, particularly in Europe, the host David Runciman points out a view “from inside universities, particularly elite universities, [in which] there’s this view that the solution to these problems is better policy, there are kinds of intellectual, rational ways that human beings can get a grip over their fate again.” For Runciman this points to an inability for rationalised forms of future planning to create the space for faith in that future: “there is something about I think the overtly policy oriented or maybe rationalistic approach which misses that and is actually deeply alienating.” Here policy is taken as the rationalisation of the political — including things like fear; an attempt to define the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable fears and non-rational fears.

    For Nussbaum, it is religion’s role in providing a structure to fate in the form of the hope, and the material conditions to change it in the hear and now, shifts what might be seen as faith in the non-rational to the infrastructure of what is considered a liveable life — where the imaginary is central to the materialisation of the conditions of life.

    “I do think for many people who are isolated in society that’s the natural kind of group for them to turn to, and certainly in American society where people are so geographically isolated, where they don’t have other sources of social contact, particularly people who are aging, that is a particularly useful kind of group for them to form. I’m a member of a Jewish synagogue and I feel it’s a synagogue that’s not particularly theistic. It’s actually, like most reform Jews, we’re united by a desire to forward political justice. We have the largest food garden that produces fresh produce for the poor and so on. But, you know, being part of a group that’s doing those things is a lot better in many ways than trying to do them on your own. I also of course have a group of colleagues in the university and students, so I’m lucky in that respect. But I notice that people do get nourishment out of being a part of our group…

    I’m a convert [to Judaism] so I know about Christianity but I was never asked, ‘What do you have faith in?’ You asked what you’re going to do. And you just don’t bother sitting around having faith, you get to work. And so that’s my approach. But I guess it is true that my great hero King did talk about faith as well as hope because he needed to address the despair and isolation that people often have. … Now of course King didn’t ask people to hope for salvation in the other world. Absolutely not. So he’s with me and saying what we’ve got to do is work in the here and now.… if you go back and you look at the end of the “I Have A Dream” speech you see that what he asked people to have faith in was not something that was other-worldly or even utopian. It was something in the here and now…. I have a dream that one day right there in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words interposition and nullification, one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

    This is useful for the question of infrastructure in a number of ways. Firstly, when Nussbaum speaks of the importance of at least a consideration of the role religion plays in not only defining the boundaries of the political for many communities, but also in how it helps stitch them together spatially and temporally. That is in and around other institutions or infrastructures of culture and governance. This immediately begs the question of the infrastructural role activities such as religion play in society beyond the institution of moral codes, ritualised practices and certain kinds of subjectification.

    We can go further with this lens to explore how contemporary art might function as an infrastructure. The questions is whether it is as a rationalising or non-rationalising infrastructure. Drawing on Suhail Malik’s work on contemporary art as genre of approaches which include indeterminacy as a unifying style (see talk “Exit not escape – On The Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art“), we can perhaps begin to describe contemporary art as a rationalising infrastructure: in that it creates the conditions for the standardisation, interoperability and portability of any critical artistic gesture within itself. That is to say, pulling back to the curatorial-institutional perspective of a post-Globalisation geo-politics of contemporary art, we can propose contemporary art as genre as a stylistic infrastructure in which to produce and contain artistic outputs within the specific infrastructural expanse of the art world.

    The portability of contemporary art within its own and other infrastructures also relies on the ability for infrastructures to be layered, fragmentary, and though aspiring to totality, to be limited to their operating parameters and still happily function. This of course raises the possibility and indeed actuality of slotting one infrastructure (or the institutions and institutional instances it stacks together) into another: i.e. artistic or cultural infrastructure into the broader economic infrastructure.

    (Here we can compare and perhaps align the approaches of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission, tasked by HM Treasury with strategic planning of infrastructure spending and economies, and the Making Cultural Infrastructure report by Theatrum Mundi, which seeks to outline what the necessary conditions for artistic and cultural spending actually are; or simply consider the model of infrastructural import and connection offered by the international biennial or EU City of Culture model. The legacy of these time-specific events is clearly a pertinent question, and perhaps helps to frame the shift to thinking about infrastructure rather than globalisation. https://www.cultureliverpool.co.uk/liverpool-2018-legacies-of-the-european-capital-of-culture-10-years-on/; https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/impacts08/pdf/pdf/Creating_an_Impact_-_web.pdf; http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2013/513985/IPOL-CULT_ET(2013)513985_EN.pdf;)

    In this scenario, one could argue that contemporary art looses its broad cultural relevance beyond very specific parameters — i.e. as entertainment, within specific institutional frameworks; as ‘critical,’ again within specific institutional frameworks; as value object, likewise within specific institutional frameworks; as a career or personal investment, within specific institutional frameworks — exactly because it evacuates its potential as a non-rational infrastructure. Once, aesthetics or religion might have taken up this non-rationalised space; today it might be various forms of otherness — which however is treated as a sort of object in the rationality of institutional representation or indexing. Certainly this rationalisation opens up a gap, or dead end where critique (something with its own frame of belief) reaches a limit — as it can be neither functional nor symbolic enough for the rationalised, standardised, interoperable infrastructure of contemporary art as genre.

    However, contemporary art  cannot properly accommodate the non-rationalised either until what is yet to be rationalised is rendered as contemporary art; or the art institution is critiqued and re-instituted (see Boltanksi); or at all — thus the difficulty or lag in change. Ironically the intersection of institutional faith and faith in redeeming it — as seen in the attempts to close / visualise the bridge / gap between stated and actual aims — might actually be the non-rational imaginary of contemporary art itself.

    (Poster for Chicas 2000, written by Carmelita Tropicana, directed by Uzi Parnes; in “Latina Performance and Queer Worldmaking; or, Chusmería at the End of the Twentieth Century)

    From the perspective of how contemporary art might then be able to be a non-rationalised infrastructure we might begin by looking to a shift in temporality. Moving from an “enactment of a desire for power in and over the real,” (Marina Vishmidt, in Sheikh and Hlavajova (eds.) Former West, 2017, 267) to a reparative expansion of what constituted “the contemporary” in contemporaries past, as described by Catherine Grant (“A Time of Ones Own,” 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcw025); or the coterminous time made possible by the acts and structures of dis-identification proposed by José Esteban Muñoz in “Latina Performance and Queer Worldmaking; or, Chusmeria at the End of the Twentieth Century’” (https://doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/munoz-jose-esteban_latina-performance-and-queer-worldmaking-or-chusmeria-at-the-end-of-the-twentieth-century.pdf).

    Here, a calculable or at least indexible relationship to the present as acquired through the infrastructures of contemporary art (including the market, academic and arts press discourse, and increasingly its integration into the timelines of social media), is disrupted as a strictly causal and dependable relationship. This is not to say that what Grant or Munoz suggest is irrational, just that this version of thinking through the infrastructural dimensions of art does not exclude the possibility of the non-rationalized from how it proceeds to make its worlds.

    As I edit this I am thinking back to the final scene of Turner Prize winner Chralotte Prodger’s film BRIDGIT (2016) in which a rectilinear grid is overlaid onto a shot of a neolithic stone circle. The grid expands sideways, seemingly in attempt to encapsulate the shifting networks of relations and circumstance the stones coordinate. Its columns rush past the edges of the screen into meaninglessness, and a dog runs past the stone, its lead trailing behind it.