A Conversation Around Work
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What began as a conversation about failure and the art world has turned into multiple conversations. In these conversations, circuitous in nature, we keep folding back on the same themes: labour precarity and the material realities of failure; the affects of failure (i.e. the emotional/psychological affects of precarity); our experiences of the the Canadian granting system; access, inclusivity, and participation; competition; generosity, or the lack thereof; and the constant imperative to be productive. The more we’ve talked, the less concrete an argument we seem to be able to formulate—which is its own type of failure. Embracing this as a methodology our conversation resists a cogent structure (as conversations generally do), and as scholars invested in contemporary feminist practices, this kind of structural resistance strikes us as a productive mode worth exploring.
This conversation was recorded at The Common on Bloor and Dovercourt in Toronto, Canada on June 7th, 2017
Alize Ugh. Yeah we should.
A I’d love to talk about this without getting into an argument about the specifics of how the market is structured and operates. For the majority of folks who work in cultural production, we know the narrative of precarity, we know the facts around it, because we are all experiencing it. What interests me here is what it feels like to experience it. What is the embodied experience of living in current conditions of precarity? How does it impact our capacity to act and our ability to continue producing when our experience is one of continuous roadblocks?
A Yes!
A And about the structures in place that perpetuate this state of living in precarity.
A Yes, how do we persevere? How do we keep doing the work that a capitalist system values? This is a system in which you must be continually productive, either accumulating capital or social capital—where if for a minute you need some respite, or you need to work for capital, for survival, then you’re failing at the work of being an artist or a critic.
A Exhaustion.
A I know, because when you do articulate your own exhaustion, it can sound like you're whining or ranting.
¶
A I want to flag something here before we continue, which is the fact that we both occupy relatively privileged subject positions. I think it’s important to acknowledge that many people with less privileged positions than us struggle with precarity in much more acute ways. I guess I’m just so impressed by people who are able to persevere and continue to work and push themselves and their peers in light of their own precarity. Even in a privileged position, the challenges of life often feel insurmountable.
A Totally! How can we conscientiously engage in a conversation about precarity that accounts for our locations in a matrix of privileges and oppressions, without speaking for others?
A I also find myself thinking about the idea of gratitude—this idea that we should feel grateful for any of the opportunities that we get to participate in. I think about being employed at a major academic institution where I may or may not be employed in the coming semester, as is the nature of sessional contract work, and where I am one of the few of my peers in my cohort who are teaching at this level. And I’m sure that my identity is not 100% why I was hired, but I still feel like I should be extremely grateful for the privilege and opportunity of getting to teach. Meanwhile, though I am grateful for the opportunity and I love what I do, the work is so fucking precarious!
A I mean, I do. I feel very grateful to do what I do. As a thirty-five year-old woman, I have fulfilled the dream of my early twenties. It is happening for me, and that’s pretty amazing. At the same time, when I imagined this life as a woman in my early twenties, I had no idea how broke and how stressed with the realities of daily survival I would be, regardless of those achievements.
Recently a friend of mine who is a painter and professional installer for many galleries around the city was asking me whether she should get an MFA and try and teach. She wants to get out of a precarious sector and into something more stable and engaging. I was really honest with her. I said, in terms of the likelihood of getting hired with an MFA, okay sure, your chances will be better-- but then there’s the issue of wage. When I asked her if the wage she would be making was enough for her to support herself and her child—she’s a single mom—she said: “fuck no,” and laughed. She makes much more money installing than she would teaching, at least at the institution I work. But, you know, with installing it’s all contract work, there are no benefits, and she’s fairly certain that she’ll get injured on the job at some point. And yet, there are no benefits with teaching either, or security for that matter. Most of my cohort who are teaching at a post-secondary level work at multiple institutions, are juggling complex schedules, and have very little prep time. In the end, what I could send my friend away with was that I’m not sure it’s much better to have an MFA and be teaching.
A Here’s the thing, sorry to interrupt, but we’re supposed to be grateful for what teaching gives back to us, because it does give back to us, right? You get to watch the minds of students transform and expand, you get to impact students’ perceptions of the world, you get to invest in the future, and so on. All of this feeds into a particular narrative about the value of education and ideas, and the personal satisfaction involved in imparting knowledge as its own kind of reward. But is that enough? Can that sustain you?
A People outside the cultural field don’t necessarily understand that.
A It goes back to that adage: "Love what you do, do what you love." We’ve been sold this idea that doing what you love should be its own fulfillment; therefore, because you’re doing what you love, it shouldn’t feel like work. Or somehow it’s in a different category than work. But it’s labour all the same.
A The longer I am an artist, the more it feels like work. And the more work there is, the less pleasure I take in it. Honestly. Because, at times, the process of making art is actually such a small portion of my practice. There are periods, let’s say during the summer when I am “unemployed," when I have more time and spaciousness to work and to create. But often that time in the summer is eaten up by all the logistical and administrative labour of being an artist: applying for grants, writing proposals, pitching proposals to curators, correspondence, etc.
A Exactly! What if you don’t feel inspired, or are just like, fuck, I need to rest because I’m so exhausted from the labour that I do to pay my rent. I’m so exhausted by the demands of teaching that I need a whole month to recuperate. Or, I‘m occupied with hustling together something to support myself for the four months of “unemployment" that I don't have it in me to make work. Or, I don’t have the inspiration.
A Absolutely. I talk to my students a lot about failure. Our culture trains us to avoid failure as young people: we are told that there are consequences for failing. But as an artist, enlisting and incorporating failure is a crucial part of the creative process. You have to take risks, which means that sometimes, you will fail, and hopefully you will learn from it. I’m no Halberstam aficionado, but I want to take up this piece around recuperating failure from a queer perspective: there is a freeing aspect to embracing the ways in which we fail to perform heteronormative expectations correctly. It can be liberating to view failure as a really productive mode, not just for queers but as a radical gesture of rejecting the status quo for people more broadly. There is this conceptualization of failure which I think is sexy and alluring for radicals, myself included.
A So quickly. There is the radical liberatory conceptualization of failure, and then there is the reality of what failure means in terms of real material consequences: in terms of survival.
This is also wrapped up with middle class values. When trying to look at it from a class-based perspective, failure looks and feels different for people of different subject positions. For the middle class, failure is quantified by the accrual of recognition, accumulation of assets etc. However, if you’ve always lived outside that heteronormative expectation or structure, then failure looks and feels different to you; and the intellectual recuperation of failure is perhaps made even less relevant because of that.
A I really like how you identify that tension in the duality: that there’s this constant internal negotiation to accept your position and to be grateful for what you've got, while simultaneously pushing to move beyond that.
A While exercising all of your feminine characteristics.
A I want to pick up this thread around productivity again, and the ways in which we can engage with “productive labour.” Really, I’m thinking here about particular kinds of participation--for example, public participation-- in certain contexts and the ways in which different abilities and capacities impact it. Our various capacities and aptitudes shape the ways in which we can participate in (a) community building, (b) radical politics, and (c) physical production.
This affects me personally, as my chronic pain and fluctuating mental health effect my capacity to engage in particular types of labour and community-building in ways that do not align with a normative expectation of a streamlined workflow. My physical capacities and limitations also affect the work I produce; for example, I would love to make more sculpture, but (a) I can’t afford to have a studio to make sculpture in, and (b) my physical capacities limit my ability to do certain kinds of labour independently. And I have a lot of privilege in terms of my ability in comparison to other folks in my life who have more acute limitations.
¶
A If we can talk a little bit about funding structure: we are pretty privileged in Canada in terms of the granting system, but it isn’t a consistent source of funding. You could, let’s say, apply to have an assistant to help you in your studio, but you’re not going to get that grant every year or every time you apply. So you have these windows in which you might be able to meet the expectations of being a productive cultural worker: but the inconsistency of that funding source means that it is really challenging to maintain that level of productivity.
A Yes! And we need to move beyond a conception of participation as necessarily being a publicly visible act. This reminds me of the work I created for MICE Magazine, a video entitled labour for the horizon (2016). I made a video from my bed that was really a kind of document of the week where Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLMTO) was occupying the courtyard outside of the police headquarters in downtown Toronto; this was also the week Jian Ghomeshi got acquitted of all charges of sexual assault against him. I made a document of that week and my own inability to leave my bed, and this became labour for the horizon.
A Yeah, right. Thank you. That was a way that I could participate in movement building. I was one of the many people who fed people. But at the time I was experiencing a lot of physical pain and I couldn’t show up publicly. There are many reasons why people could not participate in an ongoing way there, and for me, it was chronic pain.
A And I mean, a lot of black people did not have the capacity to be there for many different reasons, including racism and the risks of arrest and racially-motivated violence that standing outside of police headquarters posed. Those are very real risks, and for people who are experiencing anti-black racism every day, all the fucking time, to not have the capacity to be there totally makes sense to me. It strikes me that BLMTO seem to do a good job at addressing accessibility in their movement. In general, I don’t think the art world does a very good job at that at all.
A And it’s really competitive.
A In the context of this labour economy that we’re a part of, this type of competition can be really damaging to how we build community. I’m thinking of this particular instance where a friend of mine who does not identify primarily as an artist was applying for an exhibition assistance grant and asked for my opinion and advice. She asked me to give her an estimate regarding a specific aspect of her exhibition: she was asking for my professional opinion, knowing that I have been successful with grants in the past. I remember feeling very protective of the labour she was asking me to do. I didn’t feel generous. I have been applying for grants for years, and I’ve failed a lot! It was going through these experiences of failure that I learned how you succeed in the process. And I just didn’t feel generous. I didn’t want to give her knowledge that I had accrued through years of labour, so that she could be awarded a grant that I was in fact simultaneously applying for. She didn’t realize the time it would take to address the details she was asking me to consider—or that these details are things I’ve been thinking and working through for several years now, and that’s how I have the knowledge I do. We had a debrief a couple of weeks later where I explained to her why I felt protective or possessive around my labour, that as an artist this is how I survive and exhibit and produce on a regular basis. I had to explain why I didn’t feel generous. I kept thinking: what are you doing getting into this pool?
A Yeah, yeah. I think it’s dual. On the one hand, I think I’ve earned the right to say “this is my labour and I’m not just giving it away for free," or to say, "this is my field. This is what I do and get your nose out." It doesn’t feel great to admit this, but the competitive nature of the granting system pits us against each other.
A Yeah, that would be different. I generally feel a generosity around mentoring, as others have mentored me over the years.
A I want an acknowledgment that this is labour that I am doing for them. I feel like this is something that we need to work on as a community: acknowledging unpaid labour and allowing time for that labour to unfold at the pace of the person that you’re asking the labour of.
A ...because you’re so tired. You’re working for every little penny. It makes it hard to feel generous. Going back to that example again: at the time, I was applying for a grant so I could get to Vancouver to do a performance that I’d been commissioned to create. The commission payment was $300. Fine. But that wasn’t going to get me there. I needed to get there, just so I could make the work. It’s not as if I was going to make any money. It was just so I could produce. To consistently produce and to show that I am engaged.
A We always find a way. But that means that we sacrifice other parts of our lives. I don’t have certain kinds of assets like savings or property; this is the result of the precarity of my employment but also my prioritizing opportunities that present themselves in my career and that require me to put forward capital.
A Absolutely.
A …despite the constraints that mitigate its unfolding.
Audio Clips
Zorlutuna, Alize, Raceviciute, Barbora, Conversation, June 7, 2017
Video Clips
Zorlutuna, Alize, Untitled, July 2017 (fingers rubbing together)
Zorlutuna, Alize, labour for the horizon, Mice Magazine Issue # 2: Healing Justice, 2016
Alize Zorlutuna
is an multidisciplinary artist who works with installation, video, performance, and material culture, to investigate themes concerning identity, queer sexuality, settler colonial relationships to land, culture and history, as well as labour, intimacy, and technology. Her work aims to activate interstices where seemingly incommensurate elements intersect. Drawing on archival as well as practice-based research, the body and its sensorial capacities are central to her work. Alize lives and works in Toronto.
Barbora Racevičiūtė
is a cultural worker and writer currently based in Toronto. Her recent work focuses on the topic of immigration in contemporary Canadian art, post-internet art as understood through the lens of object-oriented philosophies, and the imperatives and strategies for ethical contemporary curatorial practices. In 2015, Barbora was the recipient of a SSHRC scholarship. She graduated from the Criticism and Curatorial Practice program at OCAD University in 2016 receiving the University Medal for her exhibition Ways of Being Here. She is currently part of the 8eleven Gallery collective.