The 4,523,619,693rd person in the world.

[surplusperson]

#breadislife

[surplusperson]

#breadislife

[surplusperson]

BEFORE MARKET VALUE, THERE WAS MEANING ©®

Is this statement correct? Is it a slogan I can screenprint onto a t-shirt, and sell? If so, let me slap a © on it. And just in case, an ®. Artwork and it's market value is a strange phenomenon.Through the market, I learn to associate an artist with a specific type of visual practice. Pamela Rozenkrantz = light person skin tones. Magali Reus = familiar industrially made objects with an unfathomable twist. Jesse Darling = unlikely objects hanging from unlikely railings. Artists produce meaning, or they find it and channel it. They create cultural value. Galleries, collectors and institutions create market and cultural value. It's my opinion that somewhere in the early 20th century, the meaning and market value of artworks have become inextricably entwined, and the only people who can see the difference between the two are artists themselves and non-collecting art viewers. There happens to be a big overlap between these two demographics.

[surplusperson]

Adam Curtis on the Dangers of Self-Expression

BBC journalist and the documentarian behind HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis, discusses art, individualism, power, myth, and the complications of self-expression.

Adam Curtis, the amazing filmmaker, wrote an article about self expression being dangerous, because it’s a tool of capitalism and is a form of conformism. I beg to differ. Collaboration and groupings of artists in my city (Den Haag, NL) have exhausted me. I have been a part of at least 3 different organizations in my city who wanted to offer something to to the city in the way of contemporary art. The first grouping I affiliated with was a couple who wanted to start a discussion forum for unfinished works accompanied by dinner. Super nice idea. At first I hosted the meetings in my freezing studio, and they invited the artists. Later, the idea turned from discussion and dinner into a reading group for contemporary scientific and art related texts, I was in charge of getting the peanuts for the group to snack on during discussions. I became disillusioned. I had no ideas for who to invite to the table. The writers, teachers and philosophers all came from the arsenal of the couple. This was their calling and they were very talented. I was just a logistical fly on the wall. What was I doing with this group? The reading of the texts was exciting at first but later became tedious, and in all probability I just couldn’t keep up intellectually. I only have two bachelor’s degrees after all. At the same time I had a studio in an old school building with an assortment of artists, many of whom are my good friends. The municipality started putting pressure on the group because they wanted to demolish the school and rebuild it. The threat of being displaced from our cheap and precarious our studio spaces made us jump to action. This demanded a lot of meetings to decide what our mission statement was going to be, the kind of work we were going engage in and the kinds of collaborators we would invite in from abroad to make ourselves more visible to “the public.” A mission statement fueled by the need for proper real estate and artistic visibility. Founding the non-profit and strategizing to be seen in a positive light by the municipality became a priority over making artwork, at least for me. This would make it easier to maintain our place and more importantly, to ask for funds. But what about making work? And what about the people who are more or less crap at organizing (me), and leadership (me)? I wasn’t feeling any of it. We had bi-weekly dinners at our building during the winter. There were a few electric heaters and we almost always had to wear our coats indoors. Maybe in 20 years I’ll be able to romanticize these conditions. The dinners were cozy, but it did feel like having signed up to a club whose common interest (artmaking) was on a backburner to becoming a non-profit. Tensions rose, particularly between a neighbor who had made himself the super useful handyman of building, and several of the artists who thought he was pushing too hard. In their eyes, he settled to quickly for any mission statement so the whole non-profit thing could get on its feet and start planning events and applying for funding. The artists in turn wanted to take more time to whittle down their vision to a proper mission statement, which infuriated the handy neighbor. He cursed us all out for being idiots, and put himself down to being the only one of the group to have any vision. Topsy turvy world. Eventually I relinquished my studio (after being offered a 3 month residency with BAR in Barcelona) and never looked back. That was one of the least artistically prolific times in my life, and when I got to the residency I exploded with content. There was so much I could make in this environment of supported solitude, as opposed to the paralysis I felt when at the old school building. I’m happy to say that the non-profit is up and running, and according to the mission statement of the artists who stuck together and made their vision as explicit as they could. The place turned around. The non profit is no longer a move toward self-preservation in the face of the real estate market which is always on the prowl for old buildings to knock down and price up. Still, it didn’t feel like my fight. When I returned from the residency I started to scout for another studio. There was a complex close to my home looking for new artist members. I went to look but expected nothing. I placed my name on the list, but because some of the older tenants said that this building was also scheduled to be demolished there was a limited time to be there, so I didn’t get my hopes up. I was offered a studio, and shared it with 2 other people. This meant rent was cheap and I had a place to work nearby. I did my best to utilize the studio. My studio mates both had different schedules than I did so it was easy to find solitude. I made some good friends there and even managed to make a short video and install a small exhibition together with a friend. But then the atmosphere started to change at the building. There was a schism between a group of artists who had been there 10 years and the rest. They had been applying for funding in the name of the association, which was also a non profit, but had hidden that from the rest of the tenants. There were some shady dealings to do with the finances of the association. No one had any insight, and one of the tenants became so outraged that she enlisted outside organizations to investigate the matter. This killed my drive to work there. Every time I walked through the door I prayed that I wouldn’t be stopped along the way for a chat about the state of affairs, or asked to take sides. I clamped down and became reluctant to interact with either of the two groups. There was such a limited time in which I could do any work at all, and it was all being wasted on this group dynamics disaster. I began to stay away from the building altogether, avoiding meetings, and ignoring fired up chains of emails. I know that what was being fought over here was a just cause. The outraged tenant literally saved the association, stopped all the shady financial dealings and tried to find new tenants when the old tenants up and left for a for a more permanent setup in another neighborhood that wasn’t scheduled for demolition. In our municipality, established groups of artists (i.e. groups that have a paper signed by a notary stating they are a non-profit foundation or association) are prioritized to be matched with breeding grounds; cheap buildings are offered to artists so they can develop community and offer something new to the neighborhood, and of course continue their own work. Is it a sign that I am too individualistic because I cannot in good faith commit to these kinds of groups ? Is my absence and my unwillingness to formalize my responsibilities and commitment to these groups one of the many causes of my own scarce artistic production? I have a patron now. A friend of mine has been living in a building in downtown for 20 years. He only uses the top floor. The first floor, where my studio is, has served as a storage space for countless friends and their possessions as their life situations change. It is cold and damp and the sun never shines on this side of the building, but you know what? I don’t have to fit into the municipality’s criteria of being a legitimate artist. There are no studio mates, and apart from my friend, no other tenants. I’m here while he is at work. I work part time job in the evenings, just as he comes home. This is the space I need to fall in love with art again.

[surplusperson]

Walking around downtown Den Haag I noticed a number of job vacancies advertised on shop windows, printed out on A4 paper. Retail work has a high employee turnover. People come and go, often retail is a great summer job for students or young people in transition, but also a lifelong career for others. Is there anything in these job postings I would go for? Considering I’m living on a salary equivalent to a Dutch state welfare cheque for a 24 hour work week, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take on a second job to make ends meet. I currently work in the administrative side of the cultural world, and similarly to retail, cultural admin takes place on evenings and weekends. Three hours here, nine there, hopefully adding up to 24 eventually, with no guarantees on a 0 hour per week flexible contract. The week fills up spottily with morning and evening shifts; a weird dead space in the middle of the afternoon where returning home would be a waste of time.

[oldfilmsflicker]

movie #217 - Suffragette

[happynewfears-deactivated201701]

white women suck.

[somethingratchet]

boy if they Deltas aren’t depicted at that march, I want everything to burn.

[steeple333]

[phdelicious]

Hi - I’m pretty sure this movie is about the British Suffragette movement so I’m not sure why you’re bringing up an American march. If the Delta’s were also important to the British movement I’d be interested to hear about it.

[kehinki]

I’m pretty sure Britain had many prominent Indian and other Asian suffragettes, so it doesn’t excuse the fact that this movie is 100% white. So, to reiterate:

white women suck.

[medievalpoc]

Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh, was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. She campaigned for votes for women nationally as well as locally in Richmond and Kingston-upon-Thames. She was often seen selling the newspaper The Suffragette outside Hampton Court Palace where she lived - her father had been close to Queen Victoria, and the family were given the use of the Palace’s apartment rooms.On 18 November 1910, known as ‘Black Friday’, she led a 400-strong demonstration to parliament together with Mrs Pankhurst. As clashes broke out between the police and protestors, over 150 women were physically assaulted.

Sophia was not the only Indian suffragette. An Indian women’s group took part in the 1911 coronation procession of 60,000 suffragettes.

Sophia also belonged to the Women’s Tax Resistance League, whose slogan was ‘No Vote, No Tax’. Her refusal to pay tax led to her prosecution several times and some of her valuable possessions were impounded.

[source]

See also: Decolonizing Higher Education: Black Feminism and the Intersectionality of Race and Gender by Heidi Safia Mirza (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

I’m gonna go ahead and say that Indian and Black British Suffragettes are important, tenhoursinthelab.

[surplusperson]

It's a small "NO," but a "NO" nonetheless.

[surplusperson]

On the way up to Montjuïc I saw a broken street sign from the bus. I decided to walk back down the hill to take a closer look. On one side the sign said what you see on the picture, and on the other side was a different street name altogether. Which street name is the right one? What does Google maps say? I took a chunk of it home and will be giving it a special treatment.

[craigslistmirrors]

[surplusperson]

could have sworn this was art.

[surplusperson]

Letter To A Young Artist # 1 Penny Arcade

Performance artist Penny Arcade's letter to younger artists who are more media and market conscious.

[surplusperson]

Aw yeah.

[surplusperson]

I need this.

[surplusperson]

Dutch journalist Hans Den Hartog Jager (DHJ) published an article titled “Politically Engaged Artists: The World Isn’t Listening.” (Download the reader here.) There were so many reactions to his article that the KNAW in Amsterdam decided to host a debate evening, with 5 main speakers and an open invitation for the public to participate. The debate was titled “It’s Very Political,” and though the reactions to DHJ’s article varied from knee-jerk to nuanced, everyone in the room was essentially against DHJ’s depiction of politically engaged art. To be that one person in a room full of naysayers is uncomfortable and takes courage.

I admit that when I read the article I cringed a little, because some of his criticisms are spot on. I consider myself a socially engaged artist. I was aware that “The World Isn’t Listening,” because the only people who attend this kind of event are engaged artists, engaged critics, engaged journalists, engaged philosophers etc. We’re preaching to the choir. DHJ’s criticism that most of us come from a leftist background is true. Our point of view drives us into a tedious clichéd approach of illustrating some version of the “us against them” scenario, what Alana Jelinek would call a binary. DHJ’s complaint is that an artists knowledge doesn’t go far enough, that our methods aren’t thorough enough, that our voices aren’t trained enough in any other discipline to take it on as a subject for work.

DJH also tries to describe the true function of art in this way: “Of art one can expect new, unfamiliar images, insights, ideas and emotions that aren’t able to find place in the other societal pillars. Good art mediates novelty, disarrangement and unpredictability, beauty and surprise – attributes that are still largely found in the work of the ‘normal’ artists.” The issue with this description of art is that it falls into the ambiguous territory of artspeak. The terms used by DHJ have been appropriated by artists and critics in order to justify the existence of art practices without using reason.

However untrained we may be any other disciplines that are not arbitrary taste, we as artists have never not been part of wider society. Whenever the world goes through a shift, we are moved by it as much as the next person. We process and react and our reactions can become artworks. I see the politically engaged artist as someone who is experiencing a shift of some magnitude, and takes the time to react because the change affects them directly. The more precise a reaction, the more effective. On this point I agree with DHJ, that our reactions could use more nuance and less binary.

Anyway, in the holiday spirit, I want to share an advent calendar that describes dilemmas commonly experienced by artists and artworld workers, which could be food for thought. Click on the image to read it!

[surplusperson]

A few weeks later and I'm barely past chapter 3 in Piketty's Capital in the 21st century. I was right in estimating my shaky capability in imagining formulas for national income and bell curves illustrating inflation, as in, its bloody difficult. However, Piketty's refreshing technique of using authors such as Austen and Balzac to bring past economic circumstances and concerns to life REALLY REALLY work! In other instances he uses films (Django Unchained 2012, Titanic 1997, 12 Years a Slave 2013) as examples to show how members of society related to each other through their own financial situations. The combination of actual mathematical formulas with pop culture and examples from history work to strengthen the written material for a reader who doesn't have a strong knowledge of economics. I'm grateful for a writing technique that is able to bring an academic subject of such depth to a broader audience such as myself. Developments in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are as follows: It has become my bed time reading since almost nothing puts me to sleep faster, except alcohol. Funny thing though, I'm reading Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art alongside Atlas Shrugged, and both authors have exactly the same complaints, with the exception that the blame is placed on a different segment of society depending on which author you read. Rand's complaint is that limiting free market capital is the same as limiting the human spirit, and that this limitation results in a vapid monoculture of mediocrity. Jelinek's complaint is that neoliberal free market capitalism is the cause of a vapid monoculture and mediocrity because any creative act is limited by its ability to sell, which in turn limits the human spirit. LOL!

[surplusperson]

Non fiction books about the economy are a bit of a long shot for me to read. I'm not familiar with much of the terminology or formulas used to illustrate the basic principles and ideas. Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty (2013) is a book that tries to bring the human experience into the theoretical world of economics, and to show that the two are inextricably related. My own attempt as an artist and a citizen is to try to digest this book and understand its central points. Reading such a book will probably leave me baffled, so I'm going for the audiobook version. At the same time, I'm reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957) as a way to counterbalance the effect of "preaching to the choir." So far, Piketty's book doesn't hammer on the ethical malpractices brought on by free market capitalism, but it does affirm the relationship between free market capitalism and extreme poverty in countries who have such huge debts they are basically owned by other countries, and seen as investments instead of sovereign states. I can get down with that. Rand's novel on the other hand, is rife with trite characters: good-looking magnate/ingenues trying to excel in their field but being held back by seedy, ugly humanitarian parasites, while "the public" is referred to as a big dumb and blind animal that doesn't know its own interest. I kinda can't get down with that but the other perspective is important to know. Anyway, I'm sure all the left-wing trash talk I've heard for years on Rand's work is coloring my experience of the book.

[surplusperson]

Toffee Nose Protects European from Economic Devastation!

Tegenlicht is a Dutch television program that concerns itself with the evils of the world and how the human spirit can overcome such contemporary ailments as mass consumption, globalization, technology addiction and ecological crises. The 50 minute program suffers from some TED talk symptoms, in which featured innovative thinkers shed light on alternative practices that circumvent negative global practices. Aided by the speaker's infographics, we the general public become informed of how innovative solutions are already trending in pockets of our world as serious alternatives for the ailments produced by the negative global trend in question. One main difference between the two programs is that Tegenlicht is made for public television, and TED talks are sponsored by Rolex and other prestigious companies. Financing aside, both programs are concerned with entertaining the idea of Utopia as reality. In last weeks program, titled "European Taste as a Weapon," Tegenlicht invited Belgian writer Jonathan Holslag to make a case for the qualities of Europe as a former world power struggling to keep up against economic competition from China and Russia. For me, this is where the cringe fest begins. Holslag makes a plea for old fashioned craftsmanship and locally made products that maybe cost a little more but last a lifetime. We hear about the well crafted copper rooftops of Linz (Austria), we see a luthier carving out the delicate shape of a violin's neck out of quality wood, and we are shown a thundering flash mob performance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". Holslag tells us that luxury should be the new standard of normalcy in Europe, that only by abiding to high standards of production and consumption can we keep our position of power in the world economy by turning our nose up at cheap goods from China and bad labor conditions in Bangladesh. The issue with his plea is that he is preaching to a choir of Europeans who already shop organic, already own environmentally friendly vehicles and already earn a good enough salary to permit themselves to buy the eternally sharp knife instead of the crappy ikea version most of us have in our drawers. Holslag's great omission is the condition of a normal person's salary in Europe. The Netherlands is country of shop clerks, customer service employees, waiters, street cleaners, mail carriers and car mechanics. The Netherlands is also a country of historians, juridical employees, hydrotechnical engineers and politicians. The Netherlands also has its fair share of artists, writers and musicians. Who are the ones buying the copper rooftops, the razor sharp kitchen knives and the finely crafted violins? It's not me. For the sake of statistics I volunteer myself as the mail carrier/artist segment of society. I know OF the fancy sharp knife. I know OF the luthiers craft. But my salary does not allow to make such choices. Instead, I run to the cheap goods store to get more plural for my euro, more bang for my buck. Despite my concern with an ethical lifestyle, my purse will not lend itself to more. Holslag compares the precarious situation of Europe in the world economy today to China's position against England during the 19th century Opium Wars. During the Opium Wars England forced China to trade tea not only for silver, which was the desired currency of the Chinese, but opium as well. Forcing opium into the Chinese economy devastated Chinese society and gave England control of the market. This is the position Holslag thinks Europe is in against the cheap consumer goods produced by countries like China today, and his solution to fight this position is "European Taste." My guess is that in the 19th century Lin Zexu was a bit of a baller when it came to taste and refinement, being a scholar and an official of the Qing dynasty. His vehement opposition to English advances made no difference to the outcome of the wars. I wonder if our European tastebuds will prove as effective a shield against the evils of the free market, if our pockets can not measure up to our toffee noses. I guess I'm watching The Opium Wars tonight.

[cripticismoliteral-blog]