What to Unlearn from Art Organization (2018)
Essay for Annette Krauss’s work in Shapes of Knowledge exhibition publication for Monash University Museum of Art
Part 1: The Double Binds of Cleaning, from Collective Empowerment to a Form of Mobilised Labour
I would like to start this text by recalling a conversation that I had with friends and colleagues – including Antariksa, Brigitta Isabella and Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI, Yogyakarta), Binna Choi (Casco Art Institute, Utrecht) and Emily Pethick (then director of The Showroom, London) – at a public event in January 2015 at KUNCI’s office. The conversation was transcribed into a text entitled ‘Toilet Tissue and Other Formless Organisational Matters’. In this conversation, we were talking about the organisational practices of different institutions and their relations to common struggles, such as the fights against capitalism, patriarchy, normativeness and inequality, or the struggle for commons. As goofy as the title might seem, it came from my complaint about how often I had to buy toilet paper for the KUNCI office and how I wish I could have done more ‘productive’ work instead of buying toilet paper.
This event was announced publicly with the title ‘Curating Organisations (Without) Form’. For the announcement, we used an image of the Casco team emptying few buckets of dirty water in front of Casco office, as part of a collective exercise which the Casco team did with Annette Krauss as part of the project Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation). Later I would learn that this collective cleaning exercise is aiming to unlearn organisational practices, so that participants can see how reproductive labour is undervalued and the inequalities in the division of labour – including how reproductive labour is always the last priority in an institutional setting.
However, when I first saw this image my memory turned to my elementary school days. I went to an elementary public school in West Java, Indonesia. The total number of students, from first to sixth grade, was five hundred, yet the school had only nine classes, so we had to take turns in using the classroom by splitting the school into morning and afternoon classes. The morning classes were for first, second, and sixth graders, while the afternoon classes were for third, fourth, and fifth graders. It was the responsibility for the morning classes, especially the sixth graders, to clean the classrooms before school started. The teacher would always remind us that it was our duty as students to take care of the school, as much as we would take care our own houses. It was our shared responsibility to take care our house: the school. Another reason was that because the school could only employ one person as the school caretaker, we should help him as well.
In my assigned day to clean, I would come to the school early with two of my friends. We would clean our class before the lessons started. Sometimes I brought cleaning products from home to clean the class. After mopping the floor, we would throw the remaining dirty water in front of our classroom. The reason was because my school had an odd plumbing system. The school building was in a shape of a square with classrooms facing of each other, a garden in the centre and a gutter surrounding it. The dirty water from class-cleaning sessions would be disposed of in the gutter. Since the gutter was located in the centre of the building, everyone could see when someone had disposed of the dirty water.
Ever since I graduated from this elementary school, I have never done any cleaning task in school. I continued my study from middle to high school in a private Catholic education institution. This school was more expensive than my elementary school, and employed more than twenty workers to clean around thirty classes. The student’s task was only to study and to be polite with the school workers.
The maintenance of the school is the job of the workers, not the students. Without being aware of it, at that moment I entered an institutional setting where the division of labour was firmly implemented. Work is not only a definition of what we have done but becomes how we identify ourselves and each other. The social identification based on work even goes further – to spatial arrangements. The students could be easily seen everywhere around the school buildings, while the cleaners had their own areas. The cleaners tried to make themselves invisible. No one saw the cleaners while they were emptying the buckets of dirty water. Cleaning is work that is kept out of public eye.
Cleaning is part of the unlearning exercise which was developed by Annette Krauss and the team at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, a mid-scale contemporary art organisation in Utrecht, The Netherlands, for the project Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation). The project comes from the shared pursuit to unlearn institutional habits through an investigation into the schemes of productivity that drive art organisations.
As part of the exercise, every Monday the Casco team members clean the office together. From their reflection upon this exercise, the team felt the power of cleaning together as collective effort. It was important to do cleaning together, instead of delegating this labour to interns or outsourced labourers, as a way to study reproductive labour in an art institution setting.
In comparison, in my elementary school experience, cleaning was framed as part of the student responsibility partly because the school decided to employ only one person as the cleaner for the whole building. The student’s collective effort was mobilised and used by the school to avoid spending funds on an additional cleaner’s salary. To clean the school together was also framed as an exercise of gotong royong, a form of mobilising labour through discourse and collective work. Gotong royong, which can be translated as ‘mutual assistance’, was and still is being promoted as part of Indonesia’s identity. It takes many forms, from collective kitchens to self-organised processes of building houses, although, as anthropologist John R. Bowen has mentioned, in certain forms of gotong royong, the mutual assistance of members of the community can start to feel like unpaid labour. For example, the repairing of a drainage system in a neighbourhood could appear as ‘assistance’ but begins to resemble corvée when it is commandeered by a local official for the construction of a district road.
A few years ago, on a main road in Jogja, I saw a public-service billboard announcing: ‘Mari gotong royong membayar pajak untuk Indonesia’ (‘Let’s gotong royong in paying tax for Indonesia’). There is no mutual assistance in paying tax. The message was to bring people together to pay tax without using commanding words.
In Site for Unlearning (Art Organisation) the cleaning exercise is a form of study about how collectively we can empower each other by doing reproductive labour together. The definition of study that I would like to emphasise is an important concept in this project – study as something we do with others in order to escape while finding commonalities. Collective cleaning as study means that it is being done together as the participants look for connections with each other while taking refuge from the measuring of productivity in the workplace. This conception of study has resonance with what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) describe as ‘fugitive planning’– study as something you do with others while being fugitive from the dominant values.
Meanwhile, collective cleaning, along with other forms of communal reproductive work, can serve the purpose that it resists and become a means for control instead of empowerment. This is what happened with gotong royong in the Indonesian context. The mobilisation of gotong royong or any form of mutual assistance has become part of the way governing bodies establish harmony within the society to enable the power and control of the state.
Harmony and governance have a specific entanglement in the Indonesia context, related to the writings of early nationalist thinkers of Javanese cultural background. An Indonesia nationalist thinker, Soetomo (1888–1938), for example, wrote about the ‘gamelan society’, in which
… rakyat beruntung jika mereka bekerja sama secara serasi dalam memainkan gamelan, di mana bukan hanya mereka yang bersangkutan yang mesti tahu bagaimana memainkan dan menjadi mahir dalam suatu alat musik, mereka juga mesti manut (mengikuti) peraturan-peraturan dan menaati hukum.
… the society is fortunate if they work together in harmony in playing gamelan, when those who hold the instrument also know how to play it and become good at it, yet they also need to obey the rules and law.
This is one of the double-binds in collective reproductive work. While it offers a form of being and doing together that has been undervalued by the dominant capitalist logic through attribution of work according to gender, race, class, physical abilities and more, collectivity in all forms of work, both productive and reproductive, can also be mobilised and utilised to enable control by a specific group in power: state, employers or others. The double-bind could and will never be resolved, since we are living in a multiple condition full of contradictions. Yet what we can do is play the double-bind by composing different modes of governing ourselves that remain critical about what is considered ‘work’.
Part 2: New Modes of Governing Ourselves
I am part of KUNCI, as a member. Oftentimes I introduce myself as someone who works in KUNCI, although I do not define KUNCI as merely my workplace. It is also something else.
KUNCI was established in 1999, a year after the end of New Order era in Indonesia (the Soeharto era). Nuraini Juliastuti and Antariksa co-founded KUNCI in the spirit of producing critical knowledge through different platforms and activities. Both of them were involved in the student and civic movements which had succeeded in overthrowing Soeharto from his thirty-two years of dictatorship in 1998.
After 1998, other ‘alternative spaces’ emerged alongside with KUNCI, including ruangrupa (Jakarta, 2000), Forum Lenteng (Jakarta, 2003), Ruang MES 56 (Jogjakarta, 2002). ‘Alternative space’ is a particularly well-known phrase within the environment of art and cultural organisations in Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. Alternative spaces have been playing key roles in different cultural practices. Now, citizen initiatives in the cultural field suggested by ‘alternative space’ also flourish in other locations such as Surabaya, Jatiwangi, Aceh and Makassar, using new methodologies for cultural activities based on the communities in which they are located.
None of these spaces started in a formal institutional setting such as an office, museum, or gallery, but rather in home settings – either a shared house or a member’s house. KUNCI, including the library, moved from one member’s dormitory room to the living room of another member, to a publisher’s garage, to a shared house with Ruang MES 56, until finally it was able to rent a house in 2011.
When I started to come to KUNCI regularly, I didn’t consider it as part of my work. I was a volunteer for the library. My task was to open and close the library according to its public hours. There was no payment for my work. My ‘salary’ was to use the internet freely. As I was (and still am) an avid internet browser, this ‘salary’ was decent enough. After hanging around for some time, I started to come to the KUNCI library more often, even outside its public hours. I read, discussed, ate, cooked, and sometimes also slept in the library. KUNCI was slowly becoming my second home. Later on, my relationship with KUNCI was formalised when I received my first salary in 2010. Since then I have been working at KUNCI, yet I feel also at home there.
Ade Darmawan, co-founder of ruangrupa, has mentioned the domesticity of alternative spaces in Indonesia because of their house settings and the friendship networks. Although in early 2000 many art and other organisations started registering themselves legally and used the prescribed organisational structures – director, manager, accountant and board as required by the government to enable them to receive financial support from international funding agencies – within these formal bodies, the spirit of friendship and informality still exists.
KUNCI is still in a state in between. It was started as circle of friends. Then as we expanded our activities and they became larger and longer, we also got grants and funding that required us to be more formally accountable. So then we employed a director, a program manager, a finance person, and so on. But with this division of work, we also became more professionalised, with more specified functions for each person, so they do only the work that is assigned to them. The caring of the space became work for the cleaner, librarian and intern. Then, in 2013, we decided to get rid of the formal structure and make (almost) everyone a member of KUNCI. So today everyone is a co-director and everyone is a member. And it’s still a challenge to practice this form. Today we consist of nine members.
In the shared spirit of Site of Unlearning, by constantly challenging the way we work in our organisation we are trying to be more aware of the work of knowledge production and the kind of work that enables this knowledge production to take place. The kind of work which involves cleaning, buying toilet paper, listening to complaints, giving encouraging words. It is a work which serve life, not commodity production. It is a reproductive work, which also a terrain for political struggle. As activist and scholar Silvia Federici wrote, ‘On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker, and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation, and thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anti-capitalist struggle.’
By trying not to outsource this reproductive work to other women, interns and assistants, and by dividing the responsibilities equally among members (or friends), we become aware that we are indebted to each other for the work we’ve done. Defining (alternative) ways of organising and of becoming institutionalised is an important cultural project, which can serve as a site for knowledge production that is grounded in the political struggle.
Part 3: Exercising as the Refusal to Work
Annette Krauss and the team at Casco have been developing different exercises in order to unlearn institutional habits. Cleaning is only one part of the whole set of exercises. The other exercises are related to meeting, reading, care network, property, wage and well-being, authorship, time, passions and obstacles.
The ‘unlearning exercises’ take various amounts of time. For example, the ‘Off-Balancing Chairs’ exercise lasts according to how long the meeting participants can hold their positions in a set of wobbly chairs to unlearn meeting habits. The ‘Time Diary’ exercise requires everyone to record their day for a limited period of time – from a few days to weeks. Besides doing these exercises, the participants also need to work as usual, from replying to emails, writing and editing, to organising events. I wonder if doing these exercises adds more work to the already existing work for the team at Casco. Why would they do all of these exercises? Would it be more useful for team at Casco to spend time in writing text about reproductive works rather than cleaning?
I would argue that the strength of these exercises lies on how they successfully suspend the team members at Casco from their ‘real’ work. It creates ruptures in organisational work and this relates to the struggle against work. It is also a form of escaping while finding different connections. As feminist scholar Kathi Weeks puts it, the problem with work is that it dominates our lives and it shapes the way we connect with each other. Work become the source of our social identification, both in and out of workplace. We even introduce ourselves by name and profession.
The Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) is a space to identify the self and each other outside of work categories within an institutional setting. We are not valuing each other based on what the other is being paid to do, but on what is possibly coming out of our different forms of togetherness. It is a form of alternative world-building through collective practices, one exercise at a time.
Open Engagement, In Conversation: Pittsburgh 2015 – Place and Revolution, http://openengagement.info/curating-organisations-without-form/.
John R. Bowen, ‘On the Political Construction of Tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, May 1986, p.548.
Savitri Prastiti Scherer, Keselarasan dan Kejanggalan, translation from ‘Harmony and Dissonance; Early Nationalist Thought in Java’, MA thesis, Cornell University, 1975, Sinar Harapan, Jakarta, 1985, p.241.
Silvia Federici, ‘The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution’, 2009, paper for seminar The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/silvia-federici-the-reproduction-of-labour-power-in-the-global-economy-marxist-theory-and-the-unfinished-feminist-revolution/.
Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Works: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011.
