CBTV @ Les Rencontres d’Arles
~~~ http://collaborate.tv/ ~~~
Dear friend,
You reached out to me on Facebook, after nearly two years of no communication. ‘Hey, you.’, your message started. ‘What do you need?’, I replied.
We met in a bar built upon wooden piles overlooking het IJ. A summer storm had just devoured a weeklong heat wave. The whimsical waters of het IJ swirled and twirled, rain was raging past the glass. You got caught in a cloudburst. I ordered beer and dumplings.
‘I’m done with the art world’, you said. You told me you were being forced into collaborations you didn’t want to collaborate in, and that there’s never any financial reward for art. We complained about the proposals we both so often got:
‘I have a great offer to make’ ‘For a beginning artist like you’ ‘It’s good exposure’ ‘It’ll look great on your resume’ ‘You’ll meet the right people’ ‘… a chance to gain some work experience’ ‘This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I would take it if I were you’
We spoke about cost-benefit-models and how as an artist, you always sacrifice something. I contemplated out loud if maybe these offers represented a kind of modern day version of the Exploitation Theory. Marx said that value is intrinsic in a product according to the amount of labour spent on producing the product. Surplus valueoccurs when the capitalist is able to pay the worker less than the value that is produced by his labour. In this process, the worker becomes alienated from his work.
We ordered another round of beer, smoked two hand-rolled cigarettes. The rain had stopped. The storm had not. There are no words to describe the smell just after a summer’s rain. I told you that I do believe in collaborations, because sometimes words don’t cover a feeling, an image or a smell just right. You smiled, stubbed out your cigarette and said:
‘I want to ask you something.’
We spoke about your new project for hours. It was a mockumentary on forced collaborations. You wondered if in (a) collaboration people were helping each other, or exploiting each other. It seemed like a cool project, you needed a writer to contribute.
When I finished my sixth beer you said in a soft voice: ‘… well, there’s no money, of course.’
(How to kill an artist: make living expensive and art something not worth paying for.)
Alienation: the process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his labour. When the worker is exploited insofar as he works in order to obtain means of life he can only achieve by selling his labour to a capitalist for a wage, the worker is alienated from his labour. The worker does not own the product any longer. The product now belongs to the capitalist, the businessman, the institute, who has purchased the workingman’s labour-power in exchange for exclusive ownership over the products and all profit accrued by the sale of those products in order to extract the maximum amount of surplus value from the worker.
We took the ferry back to the mainland. The storm had died down. You sighed and said: ‘I don’t get it.’ ‘What?’ I asked. ‘The people making us those proposals, they once were beginning artists, too, right?’ ‘I guess so’, I replied. ‘So how could they do this to us?’, you asked, ‘Exploit us, I mean.’ ‘I don’t know’, I said.
I forgot to ask you.
(text: Sanne Pieters)
