In their introduction to Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, editors Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne express a concern over the transformation of economic, political, and cultural spheres and the way such transformation reflects on art production.Gielen Pascal and Paul De Bruyne, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Research Group in Arts in Society, Fontys College for the Arts), 10.[1] They point out that a shift has taken place in the 1970s with the beginning of the post-Fordist era. The era in question takes a form of relentless push of neo-liberal politics, post-productionDavid Harvey identifies post-Fordism as a dramatic shift in production, accumulation, and distribution of capital, as well as, the crisis of capitalist competitiveness post 1973, and the immediate period of energy crisis. Harvey argues that the era following 1973 was shaped by “flexible accumulation”, or accumulation of capital resting on offshore manufacturing, breaking labour movement, and a shift in operation of financial institutions which all contributed to a period of changing priorities that ultimately led to an increase in service sector jobs and ever-shrinking manufacturing that used to be one of the pillars of Fordist economy (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990):150-155; A similar argument is put forward by Paolo Virno in A Grammar of the Multitude, originally published in Italian in 2001, and in English in 2004.)[2] forms of capitalism based on elements of precariousness, language/communication, and finally spectaclePaolo Virno identifies the notion of the spectacle, first used by Guy Debord and Situationist International, as one of the primary components of the post-Fordist economy not only because it is literally the product of the culture industry, or entertainment, but also of all human communication. He states: “On one hand, spectacle is the specific product of a specific industry, the so-called culture industry, in fact. On the other hand, in the post-Ford era, human communication is also an essential ingredient of productive cooperation in general; thus, it is the reigning productive force, something that goes beyond the domain of its own sphere, pertaining, instead, to the industry as a whole, to poiesis in its totality. In the spectacle we find exhibited, in a separate and fetishized form, the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc.” (Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Conetmporary Forms of Life, (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e)): 60.[3] as primary forms of organizing meaning in the social sphere. Gielen and De Bruyne’s observations, however, are not new; theorists such as Virno, Hardt and Negri, as well as Lyotard and de Certeau have made similar observations in the past. What all of them have in common is that they recognize the ways in which capitalism in the twentieth and twenty first centuries has taken on specific managerial strategies that borrow from the ways in which creative labour functioned for many decades, especially in its emphasis on communication. Now, however, these strategies were implemented at all levels of social life. In A Grammar of the Multitude Paolo Virno explains:

On the other hand, in the post-Ford era, human communication is also an essential ingredient of productive cooperation in general; thus, it is the reigning productive force, something that goes beyond the domain of its own sphere, pertaining, instead, to the industry as a whole, to poiesis in its totality. In the spectacle we find exhibited, in a separate and fetishized form, the most relevant productive forces of society, those productive forces on which every contemporary work process must draw: linguistic competence, knowledge, imagination, etc.Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Conetmporary Forms of Life, 60.[4]

Although this transformation might seem progressive, due to its emphasis on individualism and creativity, and because it seemed similar to a genuine critique of Fordist economy by the labour movement of the 1970s, it is in fact an insidious capitalist model that strives towards growing insecurity as a form of management of all human labor, and life itself. In a recent article on the transformation of the American Universities, Noam Chomsky points out the twenty-year trajectory of the neo-liberal precarious management in the institutions of higher learning. Chomsky mentions Alan Greenspan’s 1997 testimony in front of the American Congress as a particularly worrisome example of prioritizing precariousness in which Greenspan overtly called for an increase in “greater worker insecurity” as a competitive, and even desirable form of management.quoted in Noam Chomsky, “How America’s Great University System is Getting Destroyed,” AlterNet Magazine, February, 28, 2014: 1. Accessed on March 14, 2014. http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/chomsky-how-americas-great-university-system-getting[5] Chomsky argues that the insecurity of the new labour force––the precariat—now extends to universities and colleges, historically critical spaces, closing the magic circle of the new capital’s transformation of the socio-political and economic structures.

Greenspan’s call for optimization of the corporate sector by turning all jobs into precarious jobs, and tapping into workers’ creativity and flexibility as ways to enhance corporate competitiveness echoes loudly in the sphere of cultural production, and is at the core of what Gielen and De Bruyne highlight in Being an Artist.Gielen Pascal and Paul De Bruyne, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, 10.[6] Two authors connect an increased celebration of the so-called ‘culture industry’ to its inherent instability––the fact that cultural workers have normally had to make do with the scanty resources they were given, often working without proper compensation, financial stability, job security, healthcare etc. The mythology behind what were perceived as bohemian, individualistic, flexible, and even glamorous characteristics of an artist’s work life, became some of the primary motifs behind its appeal as a way to organize the neo-liberal society anchored by the spectacle of the commodity object. Authors further suggest that one of the problems with culture in the age of post-Fordist production is that, increasingly, corporate managers in the new immaterial economy have adopted creativity, flexibility, individuality as approaches to managing, and even surveilling their workers. They write,

managers that started out directing collective production, steering it in the right direction from a safe distance, became transformed into so-called neo-managers who now addressed individual workers about their creativity and co-responsibility.Gielen Pascal and Paul De Bruyne, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times 9. [7]

Vitality, creativity, individuality and flexibility have therefore become raw material ready for extraction by the managerial class, used as a form of control; new capitalist workers (blue, white, and no collar alike) are expected to behave creatively in their workplaces and at home, and are made responsible for corporate failure without always sharing in benefits of the success. Workers are also expected to be ‘on’ at all times via the ubiquitous technologies that serve as forms of surveillance at a distance. The perceived glamorous qualities of freedom, individualism, and creativity of artistic life have become the very instruments of the new capitalism’s greatest success: its colonization of human life in its entirety. Riffing on Tiqqun, Colin Campbell, my colleague and the co-editor of this issue, argues that indeed metaphysics, or what once was a domain of cultural production or philosophy,

is no longer only the concern of philosophers in ivory towers, as was traditionally presumed; the music of the spheres has been brought down to earth, in the constant play of light and sound, in the information available to our ears and eyes and at our fingertips.Colin Campbell, “What is Tiqqun’s Critical Metaphysics?” KAPSULA Magazine, December (2014).[8]

Perhaps we could re-name today’s precarious management ‘metaphysical management,’ but also acknowledge that metaphysics has been damaged, shaped to fit the world of the corporation. This precarious metaphysics extends generally; as Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri write in their seminal text Empire,

in the biological context of Empire, however, the production of capital converges ever more with the production and reproduction of social life itself; it thus becomes ever more difficult to maintain distinctions among productive, reproductive, and unproductive labor. Labor—material or immaterial, intellectual or corporeal—produces and reproduces social life, and in the process is exploited by capital.Hardt and Negri, Empire, 402.[9]

Given its new central role in producing Empire, the question haunting contemporary culture/art is “what does it mean to be an artist in post-Fordist times?”Gielen Pascal and Paul De Bruyne, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, 10.[10] As Gielen and De Bruyne point out, although art has an elevated status in today’s rising creative industry, its status comes with a caveat—art’s key values of autonomy, creativity, vitality and flexibility are also used to spread insecurity. The challenge before the contemporary artistic community is how to mount a constructive search “for artistic spaces that fuel an artistic as well as ethical, political, and economic sense of possibilities.”Gielen Pascal and Paul De Bruyne, Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, 7.[11] But where can such spaces be found? The wayfinders of the past have proven shaky at best, or just plain wrong. Modernist and postmodernist aesthetic, political, cultural, and material wayfinders are confusing and misleading. The colonization of the artistic space of creativity by the capitalist machine is therefore an important question that haunts contemporary art and that demands answers. Some answers might be found in aesthetic practices that evade the laws of new capitalism, those that seek to propose ‘other worlds’ and other modes of being. The question we posed is, where are the wayfinders for this time of creative and productive overload? This Could be the Place starts from these observations. The six-day event, organized by Ivan Jurakic, director/curator of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery (UWAG) and Bojana Videkanic assistant professor in the Department Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo, took place on UWaterloo campus and engaged various participants in contemporary Canadian culture asking them to think about the ways in which art and culture could propose alternatives to the onslaught of new and insidious capitalist colonization. The choice of the title This Could be the Place deliberately points to something that today’s capitalism could not colonize, and that is art’s capacity to revel and flourish in complete confusion, to operate under misrepresentations, failures, and in dead-end streets, in short to be completely frivolous and unproductive (unproductive, that is, in terms of how capitalism understands ‘production’).

The title This Could be the Place (a statement as much as it is a question), poses a challenge to perhaps see if that which is such a large part of the process of creative labour (meaning failure, unpredictability, confusion, laziness, disorientation, aimlessness, and so on) could also be the way to propose spaces outside of our current predicament. Five days of performances and interventions by artists attempted to do this. Performances by Terrance Houle, Johannes Zits, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Lisa Birke, and Adrian Stimson, and installations/ interventions by Jessica Thomson and Adrian Blackwell can be read as attempts to find new wayfinders for our engagement with the world. In the case of abovementioned artists, these wayfinders take on a guise of performative actions and installations, or interventions in the here and now, proposing the ways in which artists open up possibilities of new modes of engaging with our reality. Their work—from Houle and Stimson’s performance of the politics of memory-as-potential, to the apparent futility of Lisa Birke’s Egg Stock, to the simple profundity of Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s raising of the tipi in the darkness and Jessica Thompson’s interactive sound suitcase—speaks to the ways that the unpredictable nature of art can pose a challenge to easy and superficial instrumentalization of culture. In addition, the one-day symposium which took also place at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery further addressed and expanded on precariousness and cultural work in contemporary Canadian society. A number of papers presented a variety of viewpoints on the state of precariousness of art and culture, from sociological studies of artist’s income, the state of education and the academy, to identity and indigenous culture in its relationship to precariousness of new capitalism.

This Could be the Place was also invested in examining and presenting performance art as one of the possible venues for effective artistic responses to precarity. Performance art in particular can serve as a useful model for evading post-Fordist precarity because of its inherent ephemerality and propensity for negating, or resisting all forms of institutionalization, as Johanna Householder argues in her text “Re]Production and the Precarity of Immaterial Culture”. For Householder, performance art, and especially feminist performance art, always rested on the idea of evasion as a strategy. She notices that the move in the recent decades towards archiving and re-performing performance art could be signs of performance art’s move into institutional paradigms, or maybe not:

Artists—especially perhaps feminist artists— in fact resisted or wanted to preempt the institutionalization of performance by corrupting the ‘authenticity’ of the original performance and replacing it with copies, and other versions, before it could be archived.Johanna Householder, “Re]Production and the Precarity of Immaterial Culture”[12]

Performance art’s inherent precarity and risk are also its greatest strengths, as many artists continually purposefully sabotage any attempts at instrumentalization of their work. This ability of not just performance art, but all art, is at the same time the key to answering the question of what should artists do in post-Fordist times. This of course is not an easy task as artists are dependent on socio-economic and political structures through which they sustain their practice. Grants, scholarships, residencies, and finally exhibitions/ festivals are the primary artistic networks that allow artists to share their work and exist. These networks are getting ever smaller and often artists are juggling not just writing of grant proposals, residency applications, exhibition packages, but are at the same time often working other and often odd jobs in order to survive. Precarity is evident on all levels of artistic existence as both Michael Maranda, in his “Waging Culture” research, and Basil ALZeri in his show “Work It” tell us. Evidently then, resistance to post-Fordist economy has to be made aesthetically and politically.

Concerns and theoretical observations posed by theories of precarious labor and culture take on a new meaning in the Canadian context as it involves not just questions of colonization of creativity, but also questions of actual colonization of Indigenous land and resources. Precariousness in Canada is therefore implicated in capitalist relationships to labour, and more broadly to natural resources, and to those who have rights to such resources (namely indigenous ancestral lands, treaty rights, and their ongoing battle for sovereignty, respect, dignity, or even simply survival as the ongoing humanitarian disaster still continues on some reserves). Recent political and cultural movements such as Idle no More speak to these concerns and open up a new field of possibility to create spaces outside of the overwhelming neo-liberal cultural, political and economic production. This Could be the Place also sought to address this particular moment in contemporary Canadian art by asking indigenous artists to speak to their view of precarity vis-à-vis indigenous identity, politics, and culture. Cheryl L’Hirondelle did this in her presentation The Lightness of Creating in the Dark by claiming the territory of the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, and the University itself, by raising a light tipi in the cavernous darkness of the gallery space. Listening to her calm voice speaking about experience of art-making, memory and precarity also made it clear that while her performance/presentation was temporal it was also there to stay, marking the space in memory and as potential, with the smell of the burning grass, and light of the tipi. Similarly, Terrance Houle’s powerful performance Friend of Foe seamlessly worked various threads of personal, political and cultural memory into a work that speaks to the ways we remember in general, and more specifically, the ways in which indigenous memory is shaped by the colonial settler narrative, or more precisely, violence. Finally, Adrian Stimson’s Buffalo Boy’s Chief Rogue took on a more directly political tone by speaking to a particular moment in the contemporary Canadian political milieu, the federal government’s education policies. Stimson’s Buffalo Boy takes on the government by banding together rogue chiefs chosen from the audience members.

In this follow-up volume in KAPSULA Magazine, the events of This Could be the Place are extended to present and document artists and academics’ works in a printed form, to be disseminated and hopefully spur on more discussions on the same topic. I am, however keeping in mind other artists, cultural workers and arts supporters who have dealt with these questions for some time. I am thinking of Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Adrian Blackwell, Allyson Mitchell, Christine Shaw, Greig de Peuter, Wanda Nanibush and many others who have been making work and have been intervening in Canada’s socio-economic and political structures. Perhaps there is life outside of the matrix!

My practice investigates spatial and social conditions within urban environments through interactive artworks situated at the intersection of sound, performance, and mobile technologies. The approach to both sound and media is greatly informed by my experience of walking in urban environments, which I consider to be a form of personal and spatial encoding. I began working with sound and technology simultaneously out of a desire to articulate the immediacy of walking while carving out a sense of place within the acoustic ecology of the city. Over the past decade, I have navigated these spaces through a gradual progression from headphone-based artworks to interactive pieces that integrate, through embodied interaction, the affordances of objects with the expressive potential of the body.

Swinging Suitcase generates and broadcasts the sound of a flock of house sparrows in response to movement. Vocalizations are constructed from source clips of house sparrows, which are arranged into responses that range from single chirps to social chatter to territorial scolding. House sparrows are small tan and brown birds found almost exclusively in urban environments. Variations are located in almost every part of the world due to a relative lack of enemies, high reproduction rates and their deliberate introduction into unpopulated areas by humans. The birds are generally located wherever there is human activity and at different points in history have been associated with rats, mice and other pests because of their tendency to also eat grain. During China’s Four Pests Campaign sparrows were eliminated in the hundreds of thousands.

In Noise, Jacques Attali historicizes economic development through sound, arguing that noise serves as a precursor to social and economic change. Conditions within cities are often revealed through sound, indicating territory, demographics or functionality, and politicizing urban space through its ability to invade the acoustic space of others and to affect behavior. One of the most significant encounters that informed how I think about broadcast occurred on the Queen streetcar in downtown Toronto. It was rush hour, and I was sitting towards the back of the streetcar. A few minutes later, a boy of about fifteen sat across the aisle from me and began to blast music from his headphones as loud as he could. As we approached the downtown core, the vehicle became crowded, however, instead of moving to the back of the streetcar, most passengers who were standing stayed towards the front. In the same way that house sparrows use scolding to ward off other animals, the distorted hip hop emanating from cheap ear buds had caused full grown adults to crowd together rather than sit down near us.

Broadcasting sound through the moving body, whether through the act of walking with a boom box or through interaction with and through artifacts, can transform public spaces into social spaces through nonverbal modes of communication. In Swinging Suitcase, anthropomorphized sound and gestural interaction combine to reflect and then confound the relationship between user and artwork. While we understand that objects do not have feelings, if an event occurs that triggers a deeply ingrained social behavior, we will automatically respond according to the social conventions that we know – for example, Pests Campaign in the late 1950s, sparrows wereif computers are programmed to display “human” qualities, we are more likely to treat them as we would another human. When the suitcase is swung, the “birds” begin to make noise, which calibrate to reflect the rate of swinging, accelerating and multiplying in response to the gesture of the user, and then confounding the interaction by abruptly changing when the gestures become repetitive and the “birds” become “bored.” If something we are swinging changes sound, our natural response is to change motion, which in turn changes the vocalization pattern. As the user continually learns and relearns the piece, the gestures become more complex, reflecting the cognitive process of the user and shifting exploratory gesture into the realm of performance. As you ‘play’ the birds, the birds ‘play’ you.

As our sense of place is continually shaped through private modes of listening, we become increasingly uncomfortable with the everyday noise and noisemaking of cities. By generating sound through the moving body, we are able to facilitate actions, contexts and situations that are not possible with the body alone, and to extend the edge of the body beyond our devices and into the realm of others. Sound, then, through its physicality, itinerancy and invasiveness, enables us to un-silence the social, re-connecting us with one and another and to the places we call home.

Egg Stock consists of a live performance and a performance- for-video created for This Could be the Place in which a businesswoman holds court on a driving range and a golf course, respectively. She caddies golf bag, briefcase, and two giant ovaries constructed out of canvas clothing bags covered in felt and lined with four hundred red velvet pockets.Women are born with approximately one to two million follicles. Of these around three to four hundred will reach maturity and be ovulated as eggs. (Columbia Health, “Go Ask Alice”, The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Feb. 04, 2000 (reviewed Jan. 19, 2007), http://goaskalice.columbia.edu/women-and-their-eggs-how-many-and-how-long.[1] Each pocket holds one of her eggs (raw chicken eggs) which she systematically depletes by date-stamping, tenderly placing them onto a tee and then swinging at them with an iron fist. The escalating mess chronicles the passing of each month of her paradoxical existence—business tycoon, earth mother, fashion icon. At once visceral and absurd, the work probes notions of gender and sexuality while revealing tropes and challenging the societal expectations placed upon women.

In considering This Could be the Place’s themes of labour, place, and misdirection/confusion from a perspective of subversion, I decided that a space of leisure—used for a respite from labour—was a suitable setting. Wanting to work with a traditionally gendered location, the gentleman’s club, or golf course, seemed a logical choice.

The golf green is a paradoxical beast: it is an environmentally questionable enterprise moonlighting as Nature dressed in a heavily manicured and image-conscious exterior. Rather than being an escape from the workplace, golf seems to subscribe to many of the linear, competitive and highly structured strategies of the corporate world. When playing the game there is little potential for deviating from the set course of the clearly numbered greens. Groups of golfers follow one another in a steady stream of motorized vehicles meandering on a single winding path; players stick to the high and narrow and avoid the pit falls at all costs. Golfers practise a studied form in stance and swing, wear a specific uniform and follow proper etiquette. The shoes they walk in are generally white. High heels are not a good choice as the heels sink into the grass causing balance and weight distribution issues. It was thus important that the heroine of Egg Stock be dressed to be on her game in open-for-business attire, wedges firmly planted.

The game of golf personifies an almost nihilistic existentialism in the absurdity of attempting to hit a tiny ball into a distant tiny hole while being confronted with one’s physical and psychological ‘dis-coordination’ with every swing. The game is less an escape from and more an entrapment in the everyday grind. Golf is thus an ironic symbol of what affluence, privilege and the subsequent leisure time afford. Despite my many grievances with the problematic signification embedded in the sport, it is its many contradictory elements that also make golf a particularly conceptually rich and appealing muse.

While having a clear beginning and end, the game of golf simultaneously embodies cyclical time. Curiously, one plays rounds and could (money permitting) continue playing into eternity. This is unlike the female cycle which has a definitive end. Once I substituted all the balls for eggs, in “Egg Stock” this cyclical drive seemed comically appropriate.

There are a number of things that happen when you play a round of golf with a raw egg. It becomes nearly impossible to get it into the hole and it gets rather messy. The futility, but also the pleasure, of the game is accentuated in the slimy residue of each eggy explosion; sexual innuendos are not lost here. As opposed to the traditional “hole-inone” the only way of reaching your goal, playing with an egg, is through lightly tapping or pushing it through the grass. The egg is not engineered to roll in a straight line and control is difficult. A large supply is thus warranted. Production and expenditure and the questions surrounding the ownership of the female reproductive potential became a central issue in the live performance of “Egg Stock”. The public was given the opportunity to smash some of the eggs with a selection of irons on the University of Waterloo campus performance site, creating an interesting and awkward interplay between the performer and participant. Power, violation, intimacy, abundance and waste all became topics for discussion.

Although a public gesture, the work is also a personal confrontation with my own life/work choices. The challenges of pursuing both a family and art career were clearly laid out to me early on in my art education by several of my female professors. These conversations have been omnipresent in my mind over the past twenty years. The negotiation— and my choice not to start a family up to this point—is boiling close to the surface now that I am slowly edging closer to the end of my own egg supply. The direct physical engagement with this reality during the performance allowed me to take symbolic ownership of what is often seen as the societally entropic loss of reproductive potential (and thus sexual desirability) of the aging female. The sheer physical labour and exertion of hitting four hundred eggs in close succession over the course of two hours is a physical testament to the agency, rather than the passivity, of women in the bedroom as well as in the labour force. This was both cathartic and empowering. The challenges in filming the performance-for-video were much different in nature from the live performance and the themes of the work came full circle as they were self-consciously played-out in real time. Although work on film allows for a certain amount of manipulation of time and space through the editing and the compositing process, the filming of several of the scenes meant that I was confronted with actual golfers on the golf course rather than by a public passing through a designated performance space. Along with other levels of physical discomfiture, I put up with comments by some elderly gentlemen who claimed that I was “the best thing to look at on the golf course they had seen in ages”. Suffice it to say that their vociferous bemusement quickly became a baffled and discomfited silence when I amiably answered their query of what was in the large bags hanging off the back of the golf cart—“my eggs”.

I presented Looking For Guides To An Alternative during the 2013 North-by-North East (NXNE) festival in June 2013, reworking it for another performance in Buffalo, New York, in September 2013, and finally for This Could be the Place event in June 2014. The first incarnation of this piece was done in January 2013 at the 8th Encuentro Symposium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, organized by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

For these performative actions, a long strip of cloth is woven out of the clothes I am wearing. Over the course of several days (usually for the duration of the particular event I perform at), a 20-40-foot piece is woven from the business suit I wear and sometimes from contributions from passers-by. These performances are as much about opening conversations, as they are about the object that is eventually woven. This work is a contemplation on materiality that confronts a symbol of power, the business suit, labour and invisibility of clothing production. Cutting up the garment, while I am wearing it, not only reveals the tailor’s skill, care and time but also drastically changes how my authority and status is perceived over the extent of the event.

As flexible, enterprising and self-sufficient, artists and cultural workers have become unofficial models of the neo-liberalized workforce. And yet there has been a surge of research attending to the dangerous and unsustainable labour conditions of this “model” capitalist employee.See, for example: Valuing Labor in the Arts, ed. Shannon Jackson. Art Practical 5.4 (April 2014), http://www.artpractical.com/issue/valuing-labor-in-the-arts/; Alberto López Cuenca, “Artistic Labour, Enclosure and the New Economy,” Afterall 30 (Summer 2012), http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.30/artistic-labour-enclosure-and-the-new-economy; Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25.7-8 (2008): 1-30.[1] Using the language of the “independent” rather than “precarious” worker has long misrepresented, glamourized and even made invisible the hazards of such work, masked by the misguided mantra that these workers are “doing what they love.”Miya Tokumitsu, “In the Name of Love,” Slate, January 16, 2014: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/do_what_you_love_love_what_you_do_an_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html[2] Lack of security and the normalization of (self-) exploitation are conditions that affect much of today’s cultural workforce and go hand-in-hand with the steadfast commodification and instrumentalization of culture, art and knowledge, which has resulted in a constant pressure to produce work that has economic value and is thus “useful.” Under these conditions the cultural worker has the “choice” to become a consummate entrepreneur, fashioning herself into a personal business by developing the ingenuity and tools to navigate the terrain of financial self-sustainability, and thus reflecting and embodying the expectations of the model neo-liberal worker. But as Michael Maranda shows, while these skills are allowing visual artists to thrive, despite or against all odds, this unheralded resourcefulness perpetuates rather than resolves the conditions of precarity. The essays included here offer ways of thinking about the labour of culture in today’s economy, and propose inroads—from activism to metaphysics—to help break the cycles, expectations and standards of precarious conditions.

Jessica Wyman examines her experience as an arts-sector professional and relates it to the new category of “urban workers.” Wyman frankly examines the contingencies and precariousness of her work: the financial necessity of doing work for pay outside her field; a working life defined by short-term contracts and a variety of unpaid obligations; the ongoing contradictions of developing an effective pedagogy to help up-and-coming cultural workers make their own way through a precarious environment. She concludes with reference to philosopher Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, drawing attention to how our action as agents is embedded in an intersubjective context that is immensely complex, and how any time we act on our interpretations of that context, we are necessarily privileging one way of seeing over others.

Indu Vashist’s review of Basil AlZeri’s You Do What You Love Because You Do One Two, and More Than Two tells a vivid story of a performance which highlights precisely what artists must do to make ends meet. AlZeri’s work draws closer attention to the meaning of the mundane question, “What do you do?” which usually means, “what do you do for money?” but which, for practicing artists, is always overlain with the “existential” question of what one is doing, or is expected to do, as an artist.

In “Waging Culture: A Report on the Socio-Economic Status of Canadian Visual Artists,” Maranda examines in detail the real financial conditions of the cultural worker. He reports on the findings of a survey he conducted on Canadian visual artists, the first of its kind since one conducted by Statistics Canada in 1993. Maranda quantifies the dire economies of artistic labour, noting that the typical artist is losing money in her practice. Showing the staggering, often absurd, discrepancy between revenue and expenses, and providing a variety of breakdowns on the kinds of funding available and received—including based on gender and age—the results paint a clear and troublesome picture of the feasibility—not to mention economic viability—of artistic work. And yet, despite these strained conditions Maranda notes that artists are succeeding, in so far as they are finding ways to pursue their practice, towing the line between creative ambitions and futures, and making choices based on their financial needs.

So how to think outside of the precarious models established by the current instrumentalization and commodification of art and culture? In “What is Tiqqun’s Critical Metaphysics” Colin Campbell turns to the writings of the French collective of activists and authors Tiqqun, who argued that a resistance to Empire must be understood as a metaphysical struggle. Here Campbell proposes a philosophical and political line of inquiry that subverts precarity in the fields of culture, and art particularly, through a transcendence of the metaphysics of commodification, offering instead a new model based on hope, self-revaluation and a re-coding of art’s value.

Finally, Kathy Kiloh turns our attention to the increasingly fragile conditions of the educational sector, both in terms of the precarious conditions of its workers and the disintegration of the criteria of knowledge and research. In “Teaching Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in 2014: Performativity and Precariousness in the Post-Secondary Sector,” Kiloh reviews the lessons of Lyotard’s influential text 30 years after its publication. Specifically, she turns to its assessment of academic research and pedagogy as being increasingly “terrorized” by the criterion of performativity, whereby knowledge becomes legitimated only when it can be commodified, instrumentalized, optimized and deemed “useful” to society. While Lyotard warned against it, these expectations have become folded into the standards of today’s neo-liberal higher-education “factories.” To resist and escape this judgment of performativity in research and the production of knowledge, and to again put value on creative and imaginative thinking, Kiloh proposes Lyotard’s turn to indeterminate judgments based on aesthetics and in particular the criterion of paralogy. Ironically, the current winds of “innovation” and “entrepreneurialism” would have much to learn from the DIY ingenuity, resilience and resourcefulness of the cultural worker. But these skills must be understood in the context of precarity and “de-glamourized” alongside the real but often invisible labour that goes into the production of cultural work. Only by exposing the undesirable and dangerous conditions of this “model” worker can the unsustainable standards and expectations of labour in today’s new economy begin to change.

It should be no surprise that unpaid interns abound in fields that are highly socially desirable, including fashion, media, and the arts. These industries have long been accustomed to masses of employees willing to work for social currency instead of actual wages, all in the name of love. Excluded from these opportunities, of course, is the overwhelming majority of the population: those who need to work for wages. This exclusion not only calcifies economic and professional immobility, but insulates these industries from the full diversity of voices society has to offer.Miya Tokumitsu, “In the Name of Love,” Jacobin https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/ Accessed 13-11-14 [1]

In Toronto, one of the first questions that one encounters when meeting someone new is “What do you do?” The question usually means “what do you do for paid work?” This question becomes complicated when you do more than one thing or when what you love to do doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. “What do you do?” becomes an existential question, it becomes a question of identity. Basil AlZeri’s You Do What You Love Because You Do One Two, and More Than Two in SAVAC’s (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) Work It. draws attention to new economic landscape in which artists make work. AlZeri asked 101 artists within the Toronto arts community to donate objects from their non-art practice work lives. The project addresses the economic plight of artists rather literally. In this new economic landscape jobs are precarious regardless of education or previous experience: intellectual labourers bounce from sessional instructor contract to contract, arts administrators’ work under looming budget cuts and austerity, many people willingly participate in the ‘sharing economy’ that undercut labour standards like minimum wage and workplace safety.

The display of objects—ranging from dirty disposable chopsticks to a mound of dirt; from shot glasses to a human molar; from an eyelash curler to a courier bag–make visible the networked economy of the arts community of Toronto. The call for participants for the project was disseminated among a loose community of artists and then amongst friends and collaborators of that community, creating a wider network. This project is an illustration of the ecology of a particular artist network and an investigation of its micro economy. For example, many of the artists are not just part of the same artistic milieu, but are also connected through their wage labour.

Many artists included in this show frequent the coffee shops and bars where some of the other artists work. The strength of the work is that it makes visible the ecology of a particular segment of Toronto’s art scene. The line between the public and private is crossed. The ‘other’ lives of the artists are exposed, an intimacy revealed. 101 artists were invited into AlZeri’s home to drop off the objects. Coffee was drunk, snacks were consumed and emails were exchanged among people whose relationships varied from being strangers, to cursory public engagement within the art world, to deep friendship and collaboration. The project broke the silence about what artists must do to do what they love. It also opened a dialogue about the ethics of collaboration and ownership within the arts. Some artists voiced reservations about labouring for a work that is credited to another artist. Others expressed internal confusion about which object best captures their non-art practice work life. The banalities of these paid jobs come through poignantly in the careful arrangement of these objects and with a sense of dark irony, these objects themselves become art. We always have, and do increasingly now, live in a world where expecting to get paid for doing what you love is seen as being ‘spoilt’ (for lack of a better term). AlZeri’s project drives home two points. First, that art too is work. To restrict work to that of materialistic production as portrayed within various avatars of the capitalist ethos stands challenged in this piece. It shows us all the ‘work’, in the sense of time and energy, that goes into making art. It breaks the myth of art-making being a walk in the clouds, a stroll through paradise, or a self-centered internal journey–a privilege that only few fortunate persons are allowed. Second, it reclaims the age-old and oft-forgotten profound truth of the artist’s responsibility to give a critical and creative voice at any given moment in human society. It brings to fore the realities of being forced to work in jobs that are under-paid and banal. It dryly presents that reality and adds to it the razzmatazz that is only possible through the vision of an artist who seeks to speak about realities, of his fellow artists, of people in general.

The twisted ironies embodied in this piece are its greatest strength. The nittigritties of the piece, much like the strained life of artists, are tedious yet fascinating. And together the objects create a kaleidoscope of patterns—not simply joyful, not simply banal, not only profound and not only sad. It is simple, complex, banal and profound all at the same time. You Do What You Love Because You Do One Two, and More Than Two stands as a testament to art practice in today’s day and age–the bare essentials of it. It opens up the everyday lives of artists to the audience and brings them together in a piece that is as much a comment as it is an archive of this situation.

Waging Culture is a multi-year study of socio-economic conditions of professional artists in Canada. The first Waging Culture survey was undertaken in 2008, and covered the 2007 calendar year. It was organized by Michael Maranda and was the most comprehensive study of artists in Canada since the Statistics Canada Canadian Cultural Labour Force survey of 1993.

Five years later Maranda returned to the work conducted in 2007 to gauge how artists are doing now (2012), and compare their situation to five years before. While the survey has retained many of the important questions regarding demographics and finances, the extended section on career benchmarks has been excised to streamline data collection. The survey data has been collected now, and Maranda is in the process of writing a comprehensive report of the findings of the new survey, as well as, in comparison to the one done five years ago. What we have here in the precarity issue of KAPSULA is a preliminary report presented by Maranda at This Could be the Place in June 2014. He has kindly agreed to share it with us as a document which speaks to many of the issues raised by other presenters at the symposium. You will find both a link to his preliminary 2012 report, but also to the 2007 full report on the website of the Art Gallery of York University.

For better comprehension we also provide Maranda’s key methodological points:

“Data collection began June 26th with the first wave of invitations. As responses come in, additional waves of invitations will go out. One of the key difficulties of measuring artists is that there is no central list of professional artists in Canada. Thus, to get a representative sample, we have to turn to a method newly developed by Douglas Heckathorn of Cornell University called Respondent Driven Sampling (see http://www.respondentdrivensampling.org for more information).

Following this system, participation in the survey is by invitation alone. After an initial set of invitations, respondents to the survey give a list of ten references of people whom they know in the field. These referrals are tracked, and the resulting cascading chain of invitations is used to establish the weighting that each respondent is given. Without this referral process, the sampling technique does not meet statistical relevance. Thus, if you are interested in participating, you have to wait to see if someone who has already participated invites you.”[1]