Hordaland Kunstsenter

Introduction - Bare life
In his video Them from 2007, Polish artist Artur Żmijewski arranges what might tongue in cheek be called a multidisciplinary workshop where representatives of four sections of Polish society with widely different agendas get together to battle with visual means. Young nationalists, old ultra-Catholic ladies, young LGTB-activists and Jewish youngsters begin gently, painting their respective symbols on large sheets of paper, later to be painted over and edited by the other groups. It all develops at a great speed as the nationalists and the ultra-Catholics unite against the LGTB activists and the Jewish youngsters. Having started as a naivist presentation of symbols, it morphs into a battle of insults, destruction and scuffles, only interrupted when a fire alarm is sounded.

In his essay, Game Theory[1], Jan Verwoert points out how Żmijewski time and again exposes the protagonists of his films to situations where reality as they know it is suspended and replaced by a precarious situation, parallel to what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as bare life.[2]

By demonstrating how little it takes to isolate people in the position of bare life, Żmijewski identifies this state as a condition that impinges on contemporary society at a subcutaneous level.

This somewhat speculative comparison may be an exaggeration of the drama experienced by the participants of CRR. However, one might argue that the participants, artists, curators, writers and academics alike, are subjected to a parallel, albeit not equally pointed, experience: for four weeks a group of three cultural workers gather at one of the host institutions to immerse themselves in a predetermined area of research. The situation may end in success, the outcome may be a catastrophe, or it may all come to nothing. Thus, the unpredictability of the outcome – which the institutions have anticipated and expected – is the very core of the project, and whether activating this risk constitutes a productive platform, is the crux of the matter and the point of departure of this text.

It may be worth noting that the concept “research” is not limited to a methodological framework, but is close to a common-sense understanding of the concept, in which an area or theme becomes the object of wide-ranging investigation with a view to gathering knowledge. Rather than predetermining the research parameters, a context is created by the research situation itself. Also, CRR doesn’t require any kind of output, be that articles, exhibitions, publications or seminars. From this point of view, CRR is a framework for an institutionalised reaction to the demands of production residencies.

This kind of project involves risks at several levels, even if the participants have formulated the theme of their research ahead of time. Because the insistence on productivity, which pervades the rest of society, is absent, the experiential basis for the participants’ practice is, potentially, suspended. Whatever the outcome, the situation is fraught with risk, not least socially, but also in other, more far-reaching respects. The practice of CRR delays the concept “results” in a radical way, focusing on the situation and its ramifications, rather than a material or knowledge-based end-product.

Productivity and risk
This essay is an attempt at a reflection on certain opportunities and challenges that might emerge when defining a new mode of artistic practice as assumed by Collaborative Research Residency. Any structure, whether institutional, legal or social, contributes to the shaping of the landscape it is a part of. It is equally important how relations are formed by a structure, which regulates the relationships between people. As a structure, CRR regulates the relationship between the participating artists and their practice by introducing them to a collective/collaborative situation shaped by political, economic and intellectual limits. A major point of concern in this text is the investigation of whether CRR may be considered a template for a kind of institution representing a type of freedom, which is threatened in the present political climate, and specifically how the concept of autonomy may be linked to that of risk.

The open model established by CRR distributes the risk involved in the project between participants, host institutions and sponsors.[3] Using Żmijewski’s video as an introductory example illustrates the risk of instrumentalising which the participants are subjected to. They become part of a game whose rules are defined by a framework that is the result of structural conditions. One might argue that participation in CRR maximizes what might be termed creative risk because the temporary organisation CRR shields them from the immediate effects of a political agenda.

CRR is an organisational model in which the insistence on productivity and production is absorbed by the organization. The model pre-supposes that the further removed one is from the sponsor, the greater one’s freedom, and hence the risk. The crux of the matter is to what extent this model produces a sufficiently strong buffer and whether the creative freedom is, in practice, maximised.

Productivity and freedom
The paradigm of productivity is all-pervasive in classical capitalist theory as well as in neoliberal economic thought, and in practically all political rhetoric. This is the paradigm in which art is subjected to most pressure, as it is by all accounts obvious that the aim of any economic or political act (and what acts are not, in the final analysis, politically or economically motivated?) must be the creation and accumulation of some kind of value. One proposition which needs to be tested is whether CRR is based on freedom from such a productivity paradigm by providing for what might be termed unproductive time. The concept of unproductive time is a synthesis of Georges Bataille’s critique of Weber’s protestant work ethic and Jacques Rancière’s focus on how a specific mode of sensibility in art gets to the core of societal and political development. Bataille draws attention to the way in which the productivity paradigm of Western capitalist culture has distanced us from the irrational – religious and sexual transcendence – as the starting point of artistic activity. Rancière links politics and art by pointing to this parallel, that both insist somebody make their time available with no other goal in view than that of making something visible to the community that has previously not been visible. Unproductivity is opposed to economic and political instrumentality, also within artistic and cultural practices. Following Rancière and Bataille’s criticism of the paradigm of productivity, it is interesting to approach the specific residency concept produced by CRR from what may appear to be a surprising angle, that of an economic theory proposed by liberalist guru George Gilder back in the nineteen eighties.

Rhetoric
CRR may be considered a piece of political rhetoric, designed not merely to create a situation where actors from a wide section of the art field can get together to collaborate. The political (and by implication economic) situation CRR reacts against is the rhetoric underlying the instrumentalisation of the art scene whose driving force is the Bologna process.[4] It might seem as if the Bologna process and CRR share a common goal: To create a situation (structure) in which research is viewed as the new engine of artistic development.[5] However, CRR and the Bologna process pursue radically different ideological paths. Whereas the new paradigm for art education creates an efficient rhetoric focused on the demand for verifiability according to predetermined assessment criteria, CRR does the opposite.

CRR reclaims an important model derived from modernist/modern thinking about art: that free play engaged in by artists, writers and curators. Where the Bologna process and the instrumentalisation of art take leave of the enlightenment motto of exploration through dialogue and the production of knowledge based on an educational ideal, CRR reclaims what might, in slightly tabloid terms, be called “artistic freedom”, based on the absence of an insistence on immediate utility in exchange for a particular kind of risk.

Liberalism as the defence of “free” art
Using George Gilder’s ideas to criticise neo-liberal developments in society’s response to the freedom manifested in art may seem paradoxical. Even so, it may be instructive as an attempt at an alternative analysis, since Gilder himself makes exemplary use of the rhetoric of ideological opponents to expand the field of his own agenda.

In his economic theory, George Gilder performed a Copernican turnaround, attempting to legitimise the neo-liberalist economic thought of the eighties. In his book, Wealth & Poverty[6] Gilder turns Marxist analysis of capitalism, where demand is in the driving seat rather than supply, on its head. In Marxist economic theory, popular demand initiates the production of goods, which in turn paves the way for demand. Gilder, however, designates supply as the driving force of capitalism. To Gilder, supply generates demand, and somewhat surprisingly, this is what he terms the “vital impulse” of capitalism. In a surprising turnaround, he finds the impulse of capitalism in an extension of the gift economy, as practiced by tribal societies:

Contrary to the notions of Mauss and Levi-Strauss, the giving impulse in modem capitalism is no less prevalent and important - no less central to all creative and productive activity; no less crucial to the mutuality of culture and trust - than in a primitive tribe. The unending offering of entrepreneurs, investing jobs, accumulating inventories - all long before any return is received, all without any assurance that the enterprise will not fail - constitute a pattern of giving that dwarfs in extent and in essential generosity any primitive rite of exchange. Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism. (Gilder, 30)

Here, Gilder places the “moral center” of capitalism somewhere radically different from the bourgeoisie creed of accumulation, savings and moderation. On the one hand, one might say that Gilder anticipates the highly charged consumer capitalism that characterised the eighties, but more importantly, he describes capitalism as a creative activity at the core of which is generosity and the spirit of sacrifice. According to French philosopher and economics critic Jean-Joseph Goux, in legitimising neoliberalism Gilder presents a postmodern critique of classic capitalism:

That capitalism legitimates itself today in a postmodern version, and could not do otherwise, not only profoundly illuminates its present nature, but also permits us apparently to decipher the socio-historical meaning of postmodernism's philosophical (and aesthetic) manifestations.[7]

The question is, might Gilder’s rhetorical turnaround and criticism of classic bourgeois capitalism be used as a possible starting point for a criticism of an ever increasing instrumentalisation of the art scene, and, by implication, as a possible defence of structures emphasizing free play, dialogue and collaboration exempt from the insistence on productivity. One thing Gilder does teach us, is not to get tied down to accustomed ways of thinking. His ideas are radical, not just for classic capitalists (he is not above labelling former generations of economists boring old men), but also for opponents of neoliberal dominance.

Instrumentalisation
In the description of the purpose of CRR, reference is made to the ever growing importance of collaboration and research for artistic work:

The project takes as its starting point the upsurge within the contemporary art field of collaborative artistic practices, and the increased emphasis on research in the development of artistic work.[8]

CRR absorbs an existing tendency within the art scene, creating a situation that welcomes the needs and desires of its actors to develop their individual and collaborative practice according to this situation. On the one hand, CRR adapts to requests within the art scene for arenas that provide new conditions for artistic production, as well as knowledge production. On the other hand, this may also be thought of as the host institutions trying to legitimise their own practice to a changing art scene. This aspect is not specifically articulated in CRR’s presentations, but one may fairly suppose that this kind of institution-building gains its legitimacy as an extension of other, comparable international projects. In other words, the discursive turnaround of the art scene may also have an instrumentalising or instructive effect on new institutions wishing to make their mark in the emerging rhetorical landscapes. It is also worth considering that the CRR host institutions have a need to legitimise their own practice to their sponsors. CRR’s main source of income is the transnational fund provided by the Nordic Council of Ministers, which also has specific agendas governing their priorities as to who and what they will sponsor.

The politicisation of collaboration
The crux of the matter is the way in which projects presented with instrumental demands are shaped by such demands, but also how and through what strategies they circumvent these demands. The Nordic Council of Ministers' demand for the transnational is an unavoidable part of their evaluation criteria. To a large extent, this political condition governs which groups may be considered, and not least, which groups must be excluded from consideration. It is difficult to determine the actual consequences of this policy, but the ideological notions behind it are based on a rigid understanding of the inherent value of cultural cooperation across Nordic and Baltic borders. At any rate, through the Nordic Council of Ministers, CRR has adopted an ideological framework, which, through individual residencies, exhibitions, seminars etc., has little to do with the international focus of the host institutions. This kind of problem may easily be dismissed as a minor inconvenience, something requiring a pragmatic approach, and something the host institutions would have to consider if it were to have serious implications for the quality and catchment area of the project.

CRR is entering a different and more obscure quasi-ideological machinery, hardly an ideology in the fullest sense of the word, but one which gathers relevance and substance from areas within contemporary social developments. The focus on research and collaboration in the project’s position statement (and its name) derives its ideas, not just from the Bologna process’s academisation of art education, but also from the notions that are basic to the idea of cultural workers being part of a new class of workers who take the temporary jobs that are on offer and adapt flexibly to new situations, networks and contexts. In the contemporary art scene, these are interwoven and, as Ina Blom says with reference to Boltanski and Ciappello: “... lend each other shape to the extent that they can no longer be distinguished from each other.”[9] The phenomenon of residencies may be the most striking example of a machinery providing for a neoliberal ideology in which cultural workers legitimise the development of new ways of working and temporary employment conditions. Even if CRR represents a rethinking of the conventional residency format, it still does not represent a departure from the neoliberal credo of mobility and flexibility as a basic condition of the new creative class.

The Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage has discussed this in his article Minimum Presence,[10] where he concluded that artists are forced to operate on the fringes, involuntarily, because this is where capital is provided that – in the name of regional development – should be reinvested locally and regionally through a legitimisation of the cultural capital of the place. The question remains whether Lesage’s analysis is sufficiently precise: does the movement of artists across national borders constitute a redistribution and development of creative risk capital, or are cultural workers a precariate that is moved around involuntarily within a network governed by an idea of regional productivity and artistic constraint. In his article, Lesage steered clear of the question of reciprocity. Rather than consider the residency community as an exploitation of the precarious situation of cultural workers, it should be recognised that artists and residency institutions enjoy a mutually symbiotic relationship. Together they make up a potentially parasitic organism, living off the host organism, be this the nation-state, regional, or transnational structures. By investigating the creative risk upon which the art scene is based, they can attempt to reduce and subvert the legitimacy of the sluggish, fossilized structures they depend on. Before this happens, they must make sure to grow sufficiently deep rhetorical roots in order to sustain themselves.

And so, in order to answer the question of whether, and if so, in which way, CRR circumvents the instrumentalisation and maintenance of the negative consequences of “the neoliberalising” of the working lives of cultural workers, we need to ask a few tentative questions. Can CRR be considered an attempt to establish an artistically collaborative practice as an alternative to the academising of art education in the wake of the Bologna process? It is difficult to test this hypothesis as CRR uses precisely (or at least apparently so) the same language as that which underlies the establishment of academic method within art education. Central to the Bologna process is the attempt to establish assessment criteria for artistic output. This is a paradox, as Dieter Lesage points out in his essay Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic research output.[11]He says  that historically academies of art have aimed to promote art that is less academic and that “academic” art has been considered inadequate and characteristic of art that is lacking in artistic quality. He also points to the mismatch between the obvious potential of artistic research and the problem of evaluating artistic output using academic assessment criteria.

Creative risk
As stated in the CRR position statement: “...the project is focused on the research phase, the goal is to encourage new relationships, the testing of new ideas and the taking of creative risk.”[12] How should the concept “creative risk” be interpreted? This is where Gilder may point the way to an answer with his use of the antithesis of risk and safety, and by viewing them in the light of freedom and regulation. Placing capitalism at the extension of ethnologist Marcel Mauss’ description of the gift economy of primitive civilisations, potlatch[13], Gilder situates his economic politics in the same landscape as George Bataille’s general economics[14], which describes the inevitable tendency of our world to unproductively consume and waste our accumulated wealth without thought of profit. As far as Bataille is concerned, wars, sexual perversions and art are naturalised phenomena, a part of our nature that neither can nor should be suppressed, but rather seen as expressions of conditions of life. This puts human nature in opposition to any rational Weberian understanding of economics as the accumulation and safeguarding of wealth. When we, like Bataille, look at the precarious experience, not as a state of emergency, but rather as the condition of creativity and development, new light is shed on Agamben’s bare life. As Gilder puts it: “...a society ruled by risk and freedom rather than by rational calculus, a society open to the future rather than planning it, can call forth an endless stream of invention, enterprise, and art”. Jean-Joseph Goux, who has analysed the relationship of Gilder and Bataille, has put it precisely:

When it is a matter of giving a theology to capitalism, of infusing it with a grandeur that even its most brilliant defenders generally do not recognize, there is no route but the one Bataille has already mapped out, as if the singularity of capitalism could only be upheld by connecting it, despite everything, with an unchanging, anthropological base, most clearly revealed by primitive societies: the gift alone creates the glory and the grandeur. Therefore, from the start, Gilder is obliged to position himself on the terrain that Bataille has cultivated.[15]

Thus Goux demonstrates quite elegantly how small the distance is between radical, if not surreal, criticism of the hegemony of capitalism and a defence of it. Gilder formulates his legitimisation as a defence of the game of chance, of the irrational within capitalism. This is exactly what appears to be missing from an instrumental understanding of cultural production where rationalist and positivist values are allowed to dominated art’s demand for the free play of ideas, materials and experiences. Gilder also says:

The most dire and fatal hubris for any leader is to cut off his people from providence, from the miraculous prodigality of chance by substituting a closed system of human planning. (Gilder, 156)

Goux points to the paradox that neither Mauss nor Bataille is capable of seeing capitalism as an extension of potlatch, while Gilder in 1980 has no qualms about appealing to ethnology as his moral guarantor. It is in just this kind of movement, the upturning of neoliberal ideology and instrumentalisation, that we must measure the worth of the “creative risk” which underlies CRR. The question is whether the left wing hegemony, which is hell-bent on repeating its own Marxist notions, can borrow ideas from a neoliberal vocabulary in order to legitimise its demand for freedom.

Moral hazard
Still, in Gilder’s view, both risk and safety are essential to capitalism. The concept of moral hazard is derived from economic theory, characterising a situation where the absence of risk leads to unpredictable behaviour. “In economic theory, moral hazard is a situation in which a party insulated from risk behaves differently from how it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.”[16] The classic example of moral hazard in research is the one where the certainty of being insured, and hence protected from risk, results in more fires, consciously and unconsciously. In economic theory, moral hazard is an exclusively negative phenomenon because it upsets the balance, giving individuals undeserved returns without any investment of wealth or risk. In art, on the other hand, moral hazard may be considered a basic, productive strategy, precisely because the destabilisation of accustomed forms of interaction between humans and the unpredictable is a necessary part of the ongoing exploration of art, man and society.

In future, the question to be answered is whether CRR is a structure that can activate the potential of creative and moral risk and produce a refuge between the pressures of instrumentalisation and neoliberal currents of political reality, now and in the future.

Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Fredheim.