Hello? Yeah. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Kojo. Extraordinary. I'm going to try and read my notes. Lots in there. but we'll unpick it. We've been extraordinarily efficient given that in a sense there's something underneath Kojo's manifesto that would demand a kind of inefficiency, I guess. But we've been very efficient so we have more time to talk.
Sorry, but I'm sure that'll be fine. It gives us an opportunity to open up or give more time to you to join the conversation. I presume there are mics available at that point I'm looking into the dark here Yes there are, cool, brilliant But we'll begin with the conversation together then open it up And just another point to say is that Cody and I have both referred to Sarah Thalwell's Size Matters paper in our discussions today and Charlotte's familiar with it as well And Sarah's in the audience. So, Sarah, not now. I'm just going to... I can't see you. Where are you? Hello, Sarah. Welcome. In a while, maybe you would want to respond
to some of the things that have been said, if you feel like it. I might ask you to do it in a bit, if you feel like it. But you can always say, no, I don't want to. Okay. Right. So, what I'd like to try and do now is make some connections between the things that you've said, which is really difficult. I mean, we could use the connective tissue of Jonathan Jones, perhaps, but maybe that wouldn't be quite the right way to start. Why not? Yes, we could pull him apart. He's the useful idiot of the British art world. Yes, he is. Well, I would agree. Charlotte will probably have to remain neutral on this. Okay. So what I want to take up is the idea of care at work
that you suggested at the end. And then, of course, we need to come back, very importantly, to this concept of interpretive communities because I think it's something we can use. And remember what we're doing is looking for tools and strategies. So I wonder if we can make connections between the idea of care at work and, Charlotte, what you talked about in the beginning of your paper or at the beginning of the introduction of your paper around broadcasting, because of course broadcasting is also something that has a kind of sonic capacity that is shared across both of your talks. But the idea of a citizenry holding arts in common, which you talked about. I wonder if there's a connection between this very complex way
in which you move towards care at work, which isn't simple, and the idea of citizenry holding arts in common that you brought out of the discussion on broadcasting, which you said was something we've now lost, effectively. And I wondered if we could just start talking about those different ways of caring, in a sense. One, a state-driven form of care that produces the citizenry that holds the arts in common. and the other a subterfugal, an underground version of care. And it would seem to me that in your papers you've suggested
both that the small-scale arts should hold the arts, be the place where the citizenry can hold the arts in common, and what you've suggested is that small-scale arts organisations should be places where that state-driven version of citizenry is disbanded in some way. So I wondered if we could talk about those two different ideas. It's quite complicated because the papers were both very complicated. Shall I kick off and then Kojo can complicate it in a more interesting way? I suppose what I was trying to guess at or trying to think about was that... OK, so the other day I read up about the UKIP, culture spokesman who is
there is one who is someone called you may be familiar with him, he's called Peter Whittle and he runs the new culture forum, is it called that? It's a sort of right wing think tank and as I understand it what he believes is that the right of centre, the right wing has won nearly every argument in British society in that we're all paid up neoliberals and we believe in the market. That's what he believes. Except in the realm of culture where there is still this sort of atavistic, left of centre, statist kind of agreement
to which, you know, because I'm a writer for The Guardian, what do you expect me to say? I say, yay. that that's a bit of the world that even though it's endangered and besieged is a place that we still where the argument he feels that that's a place that he's got to conquer, everything else has been conquered so I was thinking about the idea of early broadcasting as being this public realm and yes it was statist but it was also in a limited way independent and it struggled, it struggled with governments and it fought governments and thinking about our arts world
as a fragmented version of that that involves the tape, that involves the showroom, that involves a small theatre in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne or wherever it is and that that is a kind of space that we can all enter together But that's hopelessly, you know, this is all infected by these very optimistic outpourings of ideology that I read that were produced in the 1920s. And we live in a very different time. So maybe it's over to Kojo to complicate that. I mean, last week, I think Emily and I went to see Chris Krause at the London View of Books.
and then after Chris Krause's kind of virtuosic reading, we went to a nearby pub and we were talking about this event and how it would go. And Emily started talking about care as a kind of attribute, which small-scale organizations hold and how they operate and a way of distinguishing what they do, which exceeds the question of hierarchy and exceeds the question of quantity and goes beyond the question of footprint. And I thought about it and it made a lot of sense and it seemed to make sense to extend that
beyond the moments when that care seemed foregrounded. So there were particular projects which are self-evidently about care. Projects that seem community-oriented or youth-oriented or education-oriented. It doesn't take a large stretch of the imagination to see those as curatorial in that etymological sense of caring. But what I wanted to do was extend that to other areas in which you wouldn't normally understand as exhibiting those qualities. and it seemed to me that showrooms' ability to work with theorists who have no specific... who don't come through an art school background,
who have no connection to the commercial gallery world, who have an interest in cherishing concepts and vocabularies and building communities around those, it seemed to me that those theorists cared for concepts and that in extending, in opening the showroom so that those theorists could then work with the showroom to make those concepts shareable and public, it seemed to me that that was also an act of caring and that something would be gained if we could say that, if we could say out loud that Mark Fisher cares for concepts and that he is something like a mother or a midwife for concepts.
That seemed to be something to gain. It didn't seem to take away from the other meanings of it. It just simply added that. And it's something that means a lot to me because I'm one of those figures. I'm somebody who came from theory into art and who struggled to make that transition. But once they did it, found the showroom to be a home for that understanding. So there wasn't a kind of test that I had to pass to demonstrate my capacities. The showroom could be a space that would accept my incapacities and work with those. And so having worked with the showroom in 2009, then a trust is built up,
which then allows the Otterle Collective to then act as a bridge to Mark Fisher and Barton and Justin Barton. And it seemed necessary to be able to articulate that because those kind of linkages tend not to get articulated as such. And then it seemed to extend further and further. And I wanted to enunciate that because it seemed to matter. Once I found that quotation by Silvio Federici, in which he has a really kind of expanded and profound notion of care as a kind of fundamental basis of the reproduction for life, that then seemed to allow me to make that move. So that's what's at stake, an extension of care.
And I wonder, I think, if that conversation were to be extended into, say, the world of performance, the theatre world of performance, that would ring lots of bells because the virtue of the small in theatre, you generally don't have a theatre to look after, you don't have a kind of formally prescriptive space to fill, and there is this sense of people from different traditions, different ways of making stuff that can be accommodated uniquely by the small, by the non-empire builders because they don't have to look after the ladies lose. You know, that's something, I think, that we can argue strongly for. Sorry, it's a bit...
I think this is very productive, but I want to add into it, because I know many of my colleagues in the room would maybe also be thinking it, is that actually we shouldn't forego or reject, in a sense, It's the practice of artists who also have concepts that are the carers of concepts and ideas, and the carers of concepts and ideas that might produce a painting rather than a sonic space. So we need to be sure to extend these across those forms as well, although I understand the use of sound is a provocative example of this. It helps us think it through.
So how can we use this idea to... How can we communicate this idea? Maybe, Charlotte, I would ask you. Sorry, I know it's a very difficult question. But given the state of funding, given the simplifying mechanisms that most people have to go through, and I'm sure many people in the room have to go through in order to write their grant applications and renew or have rejected the renewal of their national portfolio organization bids, and we have to be very clear, we're in a situation of crisis here where many people have had their funding completely withdrawn or substantially cut to the point where it's almost impossible to go forward. How can we communicate to that body of simplifiers these concepts
so that they can help people, they can be helped to understand what is necessary, these spaces of care, these spaces that don't want to empire build or necessarily have the kind of limelighted recognition that oversimplifies the production that's going on in the space. That seems to be a very big leap. I wonder if Charlotte... I'm only pointing... Because you work for The Guardian, so it's a space that could be used for communication. It certainly could, yeah. This is always terribly difficult for me because I'm almost blinded to...
I guess, you know, working for a newspaper is a fact of my life so deeply internalised that I can't necessarily step outside it and say, this is how you communicate your stuff to this forum. And The Guardian is, you know, as we know, like any media organisation, it is an ideology. and it has very narrow templates for what constitutes stuff that's worthy of being in it. And, you know, my job, I often see my job as smuggling, I'm a smuggler of information into those narrow templates, and I guess that's what you have to be too,
because the, you know, newspapers, organs of truth, you know, part of our democracy, We know all that. But also show business. They are show business. And they want to tell stories. They are about narrative. And narrative may not always be the thing that you're doing. It may be a very post-narrative situation here. But newspapers are in the business of telling stories. I mean, I suppose the good news is maybe that they're in the business of telling stories in all sorts of new and interesting ways. And actually the kind of linear text-based storytelling has been broken completely open. And in my office now over the road,
there's a whole kind of cadre of people from completely different disciplines of filmmaking, of audio making, of data visualisation, of animation. I mean, there are skills that one, for a long time, There's one guy who works in one who's just had a film he made nominated for the BAFTAs. I mean, in a sense, there's a very kind of fertile sort of cadre of people who are coming into these organisations who you may find can be kind of exploited, I mean, or kind of met with or used. They can be our allies. Yeah, exactly. Exploited is perhaps the wrong word. But they can be allies in ways that we haven't yet discovered. But there are people there who want to tell stories in completely different ways.
and, you know, we are... You know, organisations are open to that in a way that they haven't been before. I mean, we made a series of short films with the Royal Court Theatre, and I couldn't believe... I mean, I had nothing to do with it. All I did was make the introduction between the Royal Court and the Guardian. And, you know, it's just macroeconomics described through the medium of interpretive dance in a newspaper. You know, that's sort of unbelievable in a way. So in a sense, maybe we should be optimistic because there are things that media organisations are doing that they've just never done before, and there are possibilities. Great. So I'm going to ask one more question and then open it up.
But I wanted to come back to the question of value, partly because of the question of value creation being understood simply fiscally by many people, private and public funders, disguised in other terms, obviously, but also because, Kojo, you made an important point about a kind of prefigurative value. You said that value precedes making and that there are forms of value that precede making that are to do with the interpretive community. And I wondered if you could just expand upon that, make clearer what those forms of value are, if that's possible. Okay, but also just to answer your previous point, I certainly don't want what I said to be understood as being at the expense of other artists.
Part of the project is to somehow undo a zero-sum logic whereby if I praise Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, therefore I'm criticising someone else. I'm not. That's the first thing. And then the second, the question of crisis is crucial. It's why I quoted Voltaire on the Lisbon earthquake. because I think, and Mark Carling, because there's a certain sense of staring pessimism in the face every day and existing and inhabiting from inside it. The reason I talked about interpretive communities as building value around the kind of incorporation of theories
and living with them is because, you know, there's a certain sense which that's supposed to happen inside universities and that's what universities are for they're like kind of holding chambers quarantine centers for concepts that's where concepts go that's where they are as soon as you leave that zone that protective zone then they are in some sense endangered. And I'm struck by the kind of... What I described is this fluctuation between indifference and antipathy towards concepts, the kind of critical reflex of dismissiveness. And I think it takes a certain courage and commitment
to stand for certain concepts and to devote a lot of your work to building value around that because it's done in the knowledge that it's its own reward to a certain extent. In other words, there's a kind of imminent politics there which is not going to cash out into... It's not going to be possible to monetize it in any way soon and the effort and the struggle to find ways to take a concept to market and to make it pay off is a difficult one. And I think it's somewhat of a...
It's a job in itself which many have tried and which defeats and exhausts many people. And this is why community is important because several people bonding around a certain idea, whether that's accelerationism or speculative realism or hauntology, whatever the concept is and however it's libidinized, that can in a way both compensate for its lack of monetary value and it gives it a certain kind of ethical sense of being able to intervene.
The concept can do things in the world because it doesn't have to care about its monetary value. This is why I said that to me, theorists have theories have a kind of negative value it's not just that they're undervalued they are negatively valued um this is why marketers are mortally fearful of naming theories because they know very well that certain theories have an anti-Midas touch so we hear all the time we hear we hear continually about recuperation and instrumentalization but i know many concepts that couldn't sell out if they wanted. And this is their value, that they have an anti-recruparative effect. In Britain, nobody will touch them.
And this is a good thing, because in the penumbra of this hostility, there is something like an inverted fear of what this concept can do, of its contagious capacities, of its capacities to form both material and idealistic bonding capacities. And I see them as subcultures. Subcultures are not just the grand panoply of mods and rockers that we've grown up with. I see them as bonded around ideas too. because you have to face up to the scorn
and the indifference of this country. And that's part of what defines a subculture, somebody who knows that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. And you can see that functioning. And I think it takes a courage to live up to a theory and it takes courage to affirm that. and the spaces the small scale spaces that can join with that are also taking a stand because they take that stand in the knowledge that their market is whispering, saying oh you know what if we use that term, we'll go straight to Sue's Corner and you know how bad that is, but actually
that's a badge of honour and it's important to insist on that because it feels specific to our little island. It feels something like a particular form of disciplining and punishment, which is to do with a kind of, you know, a certain kind of, you know, the kind of ongoing crisis of Englishness that was diagnosed by Tom Nairn, by Stuart Hall in Policing the Crisis. It's to do with a kind of unfinished revolution, which targets those who don't know their station and who don't know their place. There is a kind of desire to return people to their proper station and their proper place.
So Sue's Corner is a joke, but it's a joke that carries with it the iron fist of hierarchy. It's a violent joke. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I've been in Sue's Corner too. Maybe we could fall in... And we've all been in this corner. Yay. Right. God, what are we? Right. Let's open up to that. At this point, I think it would be great to open up. Is it possible to have some lights on the audience? Is that possible? Somebody, I can't. Is it possible? Yeah, it's possible. Okay, we're getting lights on the audience. Yes, we are. Thanks very much. So whether this is specific to the UK or not,
maybe our international guests will be able to talk about. I know we have people here who come from distant shores, and so it would be interesting to see also whether this violent kind of mimicry or this violent mimicry is something specifically British or something that many other people have to tackle. Okay, but any points that have been made this morning any additions, any experiences that you've had or contentions to what's been discussed this morning, we'd love to hear now. If you put your hand up, then a microphone will come. I can't see anybody down here. Ah, yes, yes, absolutely. Lady in the third row. Woman in the third row. We don't have any ladies here.
Hello. Yasmin Canvin from a very small organisation. to freelancers, Firmin Woods. I think the notion of caring is a really... Sorry, what's the name of your organisation? Firmin Woods. Firmin Woods, thank you. The notion of care is a really interesting one and has taken me by surprise, I suppose, coming here after reading the papers. A very positive surprise. I've been on the board of larger arts organisations and have seen how they have cared. But I'm wondering if the question is around who does the caring. and what their roles are within the organisation. So, for example, is it an education officer, is it a curator who then has a whole hierarchy above them,
and that the person who directs the organisation and steers it is not the person responsible for that level of caring of artists and of audiences in the way that you've been referring to? And on the way down, I was thinking about recuperation and for me that would mean commodifying an artist that I've worked with and so I would make the strategic decision not to do that. I know that's different to maybe others but there's that direct link of care and position or role and I was wondering what thoughts the panel have around that. Sorry, before you hand the microphone back, I wondered if you could give us a little bit more detail on, for instance, a moment where you've decided not to work with an artist in a certain way
to avoid forms of recuperation? We tend to commission artists. We don't have a gallery space, so we work with artists in residence, and most of the time they produce artwork, but our contract would not include any remit to recompense us for any of the time or costs or anything in the production of that work, and its future sales or display. Thank you. Has anybody got a response to that? Is this one strategy, for instance, that we could... I mean, I think many galleries that I work with will struggle with that because they're reliant on that income stream through particular forms of fiscal recuperation. Of course, there are many other forms of recuperation,
cultural recuperation, other forms of value recuperation, but this particular form would be difficult. However, it could be a strategy. that we might want to assert, which is that, I can imagine people that I know, you know, kind of quivering at the thought, but saying, actually, no, we're not going to, we're not going to take financial recuperation from this. This is a form of caring. So that might be one thing to respond to, but also the idea of a hierarchy of care within an organisation. Okay. Sarah do you want to respond to that sorry it's Kojo that suggested it not me no I can't see she's not you not specifically on that okay we'll come back to you
no can you respond to it or could you have you got anything I mean it might just be an idea that we and we go on to something else let's take another question and then we'll gather things together So there's one, two up here. If you could say your name, three up here. If we could say your name and if you come from an organisation, etc. Thanks. Hello, it's Anna Harding from Space. I think caring professions are a really fantastic thing and really should be celebrated across our culture generally. But I have to say that they aren't. As we all know, carers and nurses are some of the poorly treated and poorly appreciated people in our culture, which is a disgrace.
And I think a lot of small-scale arts organisations are run by women. Isn't that strange? And we're very caring. I think we have a huge problem that we're falling into. and maybe there's a language shift or position. I think it's great we're collectively caring, but I think this is probably sometimes you suffer from that. Exhaustion, bad backs, heavy lifting, lack of training, antisocial hours, all those kind of things.
Shift work, night work, working with vulnerable people sometimes. All sorts of things that are caring issues. Just one other point I wanted to add. When you were talking earlier, I thought of something that Andrew Renton, my ex-colleague at Goldsmiths, used to say, which was that he likened curating to holding a lift door open as long as possible. And I think that's always stuck in my mind as a really good kind of way of thinking about what some of us try to do. Thank you, Anna. Maybe we'll come back to the lift door. There's somebody in front of you. My name is Maria Lind.
I just have a comment in relation to the caring and the theorists entering the small-scale visual arts organizations. It seems to be a very gender-divided phenomenon. As far as I'm aware, accelerationism, speculative realism, hauntology, is a fairly male-dominated affair. and the visual arts organizations as has already been mentioned are most of the time run by women so how do we think about this, Kodjo? I mean
I think the from my perspective the masculinity of the theorist doesn't protect them from slings and arrows. Certainly not in this country. Quite the opposite, actually. It's the first point of attack and the last, usually. I think the question of gender always has to be articulated and undone as much as it can be. and I think in most cases it's not the relation between the two the antagonism is not a gendered antagonism there are multiple antagonisms falling
that complicate the question of gender I don't have to name them all but I wouldn't I wouldn't characterise gender as the primary antagonistic division that structures the relation between theorists and institutions. I'd say it's one critical, but not the main one for my purposes. Because from how I see it, the theorists are not... their masculinity doesn't protect them and it doesn't confer as many... It doesn't confer a kind of...
It doesn't protect them and it doesn't confer a superiority on them. It doesn't protect them from... It doesn't effectively consign them to a hierarchical superiority over the female institution holders. In fact, under certain circumstances, the situation can be reversed or it can oscillate. I can think of several cases in the past where it's like that. But I accept that it could be different in other situations. I'd like to add to that, actually. I think there are female theorists working in collaboration with institutions all over the place. I'm one of them. And I think that we maybe have different modes of affiliation.
I would not necessarily want to criticise the accelerationist for being all male, although I would recognise it. And there are women round the edges, as there always are. But I think there are different modes. I think this idea of the conceptualist, maybe we should say, rather than the theorist, that COJO's brought to the table is something that we need to understand is shared across artists and other collaboration, people that are collaborating with institutions. I know, Maria, for yourself, you often collaborate with thinkers that are women and men. And so, you know, let's open that up. But let's be certain to keep the question of gender on the table because I think it's really important. Charlotte?
Is there a slight problem that a lot of large organisations are run by men, in fact? Which sets, you know... No, there are men at the top and then lots and lots of women underneath. Well, quite. Yeah. But that does set up a bit of a problem, doesn't it? I mean, in a sense, it's a problem besides the idea of the handmaidens in the small arts organisations. And then these large organisations are somehow neither caring, at least at the very top, nor female. And I don't know. It's troubling. It's slightly troubling. Yes, I agree. Okay, let's move on to another question or comment. There's somebody down here, Ben, somebody, but I thought there was somebody up here before. Yeah, there's somebody's pointing right up there,
and then we'll come to Ben. Sorry, I'm not... I wonder if there are different dimensions and nuances. Could you say who you are? I'm Amanda Rivetz from Manchester School of Art. so I was thinking about this idea of interpretive communities and wondering if the place where you ended up Kojo was something that might be described as an inoperative community which is Nancy's term for a different way of coming together, a different way of relating where what is shared is a kind of blankness and a kind of lack between people and that in a sense is where we can be autonomous where we can actually understand autonomy and yet
have some sort of relationship and I wonder if value actually is something that just doesn't fit very well with that so how do we, why are we using the language of value, I know why we are politically but to talk about something that at some points in the kind of care that you're talking about and I think that overlaps with the other kinds of care that we've been talking about. It's not about I'm giving something to you and you're giving something to me. It's not about that kind of instrumentalisation of our human relationships. It's about something else, which aligns very well with much of how we might understand the experience of encountering art.
So why are we talking about value? what are the other metaphors that we can use to think about relationships because I think what we're grappling with here is relationships between small arts organisations and larger ones, individuals and communities, private and public, all those things. We have a very limited language for talking about these things that's based in 18th century, the notion of the possessive individual. We're units, we come together as groups and so on. So I think we need a whole different kind of conceptual underpinning to this discussion. Can I hijack the mic as it's passing me? Sarah Thalwall. I'm really interested by what you're saying about the language of this.
Because a lot of the language around organisations, value, etc. is based on the notion of a limited company. and the way that we measure value in these trackable entities and the linearity of that. So we can talk about things that start in, simplistically, as I have put it, the exhibition in a space and they go on to these bigger things, but that linearity doesn't reflect all of the stuff that happens around it as Kodi was saying, both before and after. So our language is hampering our ability to reflect this holistic,
which I would attach to that as a word that might go with the caring notion, as opposed to the sort of incubating of ideas in an entrepreneurship sense that is often very linear. So I think I'd just underscore your point. Thanks Ben Cook from Lux I just wanted to return to the question of care again in relation to the nuance of the small scale because I've often found myself in situations talking about the kind of stuff we're talking about today with large organisations
and I've never found and I've always struggled to articulate a specific around this that would be distinct from the way that they would see themselves because to be honest with you if you ask any large organisation about care I think they would also associate with that as well so I think that's the first thing I wanted to say about this kind of how do we break through that kind of rhetorical level of which I feel like instinctually I understand but I feel like it needs really a kind of closer analysis and in relation to that thinking about the kind of traffic between the large and the small and I was thinking about a kind of infamous moment of this which was
a few years ago Take Modern hosted an event called No Soul For Sale which became a kind of infamous they basically hosted a weekend of artist run initiatives in the turbine hall, which I think they may have thought is an act of kind of caregiving for... You know, I mean, it's like maybe an example of this question of, like, what larger organisations can do for small organisations. And this, on the surface, maybe seemed to be a positive thing, that they kind of made space for these organisations in this massive, amazingly kind of traffic space. But, you know, I mean, I think that's widely kind of understood as highly problematic, that initiative now, and I've even heard Chris Durkhan talk about it.
He recognises it was sort of a problematic, maybe more of an act of appropriation in some way, but I actually see this as something that I'm seeing more and more in our larger-scale organisations as well, that they are also inhabiting ways of working at different scales and kind of fracturing their program in different ways that I recognize as some of the kind of practice of organizations at my level. So I just wanted to kind of introduce that. Any other thoughts or questions before we respond? Yes, there's one. There's somebody behind Alessio on the second row. I don't know who to go to first.
Somebody behind, somebody at the very top. Sorry. Don't worry, we will get round to everybody. It's just a question of seeing. Anybody got the microphone? Yep. Ian Hunter, Rural Cultural Forum. This talk of care makes me slightly nervous because, of course, you have at the other end of the spectrum the tyranny of empathy. But the point I'd like to really raise with Quoto is he referred to, I think, new forms of disappointment.
A couple of years ago, T.J. Clark gave an interesting lecture at Iniva. I think it was Redefining Terminology, and it was about the left. And he said the problem with the collapse of the left was its addiction to optimism, and he was advocating a tactical pessimism. Is that the same thing that you're talking about? Not exactly, no. No. The pessimism that I was referencing was drawing quite heavily on my re-reading of Stuart Hall and Gramsci,
these figures from this moment in the 80s where there's this attempt to stare Thatcherism in the face. Whereas T.J. Clark's, from what I understand, it's a kind of renewed melancholia. It feels slightly different. Thank you. A short answer. Maybe you can talk about it at lunch. Thank you, Ian. Just while we're waiting for... Sorry, I can see you've got the microphone, but I just wanted to respond myself
and I don't know whether anybody else wanted to respond to the very important comment that was made about possessive individualism and the history of possessive individualism because I think this is really important I think what we're trying to do in this first session is to recognise the rhetorical problematic and find ways to use terms like value in different ways so that would be one strategy but I think you're right, we also have the option of just rejecting this language completely of saying actually we're not going to use the language of value and its relationship to individualism and a certain form of autonomy that is pervasive within the arts and the structure of the arts, we can decide not to use it at all. So just to mark that I think what you said was really important. So thank you. I don't know if anybody else has anything to say about the questions that have already been...
Charlotte? Possibly. I feel like I've been in a lot of rooms that have tried to think about different vocabulary in different language to express what you're all doing. I don't think anyone's ever really figured that out, have they? And clearly value is a square peg in a round hole for culture. But I suppose there's a question there about whether you just have to use the language that the funders are using, as depressing as that may be. I don't know. I did think, it sounded from the description, I didn't see this thing in Tate Modern but it sounded like there was a kind of exchange of cool they were getting the cool people in and kind of owning the cool stuff which sounds a bit grisly
I know that there are better ways but large organisations work with small organisations and there must be dozens of interesting things that can be done I was thinking of live theatre in Newcastle upon time which is actually quite a small theatre which and struggles with a lot of the questions that have been raised here about is its own value going to be judged entirely on footfall and audience numbers, it has huge pressure on whether it does small and deep education projects which the Arts Council pressurises them to get more people through but is that as valuable etc etc but it works very beautifully I think with
artists in their 20s and every year supports a new young theatre collective and gives them a kind of umbrella for six months and then advises them and helps them and gives them connection. There are many more kind of collaborative dreadful word but you know careful and pleasing ways in which the large and the small can coexist in the constellation and there must be things that can be done. Hi, I'm Dominique Delight from Creative Future. We're a small arts charity with three part-time workers who specialise in supporting marginalised and disabled artists and writers. And I think our value comes from the beauty of being small over large
because we can provide more care and compassion for those we work with because they are our main focus rather than being a smaller part of a greater arts programme where the more mainstream arts organisations, marginalised and disabled artists, can get lost through the gaps and can feel intimidated by those large organisations. In terms of language and reusing our language, I like to think of us as the arts as an ecosystem where the small organisations are the compost, creating a rich, fertile soil full of new ideas that can then be fed onto the larger organisations to help them grow and to produce bigger flowers, as it were. And maybe the theorists are the worms that come in
and aerate the soil, wriggling around, creating confusion and thought-provoking ideas in that compost. Maybe that's because I'm a gardener that I like to think in those ways. So those are my ideas on that. But what I would also like to ask is, so here we are caring for the artists and providing them with support but who is caring for us so that's come back to the original question about work and conditions of people in small arts organisations because I don't know about you but I always feel completely overwhelmed and beyond our capacity for the work that we have to do and I certainly don't feel like we're getting enough support Caroline from After All
yes I do like the worms of the deer very much I just wanted to come up on this idea of vocabulary that we're not trying to reinvent language simply to remember words that can be used in the face of the funding words actually that we should resist I think Charlotte there is always a pressure to develop no wonder we try to empire build and I've certainly spent the last six months unbuilding the little empire that is after all and trying to focus on a word that is just as familiar as care and caretaking in terms of the curator, which is one of maintenance. It's not very sexy, but it is interesting from the point of view of having different genders. There is an interesting history behind it
with the Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969 by, I can't pronounce anything, Merle Lederman Ukeles. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to Google because I just did it to check that I would not say it completely wrong. But this idea of maintenance, I think, is really interesting because it works both ways in terms of how you manage your organisation, how you care for the people that come in and work because you're maintaining their ambitions. It is not caring or small in the infantile sense. It's maintaining a sense of ambition and your own importance and understanding your true capacity. I have written a 33 page business plan most of which is insisting on doing not an awful lot more
than I've been doing for the last decade for after all because I think what we do is important and I don't want to keep changing it That's a really beautiful way of putting it and I do, I suppose I was trying my stupid way to guess at that bit with the idea of the small organisation that doesn't empire build and I think just linking in with that the ecology metaphor sometimes slightly troubles me because it slightly suggests that the compost is only useful in so far as it produces a trellis of flowers of some sort rather than your work I've forgotten your name I'm afraid, forgive me
being a kind of end point in itself and not necessarily, as it were, just being the material in which something else can grow. So, I mean, yes, it can do that too, but, I mean, I think there's a sort of... linking into this idea of developing, I think it's kind of important to resist the idea that small always has to develop to the big, and that is my worry, although I can see how useful the war horse explanation explanation has been to politicians as a way of sort of pointing out that these small organizations kind of feed into this greater structure. I think it's important to try and find a way of expressing that, you know, small can be small and remain small and it's still of value.
It's still a good thing. yeah I also like the notion of maintenance it chimes with some of Celine Condrelli's research on support structures and on friendship because even though I polemically stated it as a position of theorists entering the art world actually the theorists that I like are also artists so there's certain And there's clearly a tradition of that that we know, in which the writing either functions in parallel to the art, or the writing in some way elaborates and extends on the art and vice versa. Whichever way the dialectic or the valence of art and writing go, they tend to go together.
So, and that I think is clearly a question of maintenance and a question of a certain kind of calculated symbiosis that's functioning. and maybe my last point is that the the reliance on care was at least as much because in a certain way I wanted to insist on caring for people so that their work doesn't have to do the caring so it's not that the notion of care then implies something about the kind of work that's been made. The work could then express its hostility
and can in fact be quite antisocial or it can be quite hermetic or it can be quite interior. There's a kind of strange sliding that tends to take place whereby the initial presupposition of care then somehow seems to prescribe the kind of work that gets made as if the work then is also about caring or in some way elucidates that, where actually the work can be quite... The work itself can be quite hostile or can be quite indifferent. The work can exhibit all kinds of tendencies. And I just wanted to touch on that. Thank you.
OK, any other thoughts or questions? Yes, one here. Thank you. I am Felipe Castablanco. I'm an artist, resident artist at the Royal Academy Schools. Also, I guess as a one-man show, I run a project called the Parasite School and many, many more things. But I guess I wanted to ask a question slash comment on that notion of value. and to me it has to do with maybe calling it what it is which is value, price, cost so in a way for something to legitimize and raise this value I think we also have to think about this economy that something creates this value means that something is appreciated by someone else
and there is a cost and it falls down into this economy I think all we're here also talking about how to survive how to make it, how to fund things there is this paradox talking to a curator friend in Rotterdam she was telling me that the reaction that artists had after the government started cutting down the funding which was really I understand it was quite good so the reaction was to organize themselves and think of a protest or something they can do to just have a public voice and complain or protest this changes. So they thought about doing some kind of mobilization. So let's go out in the streets and march.
Let's have something. Let's have a parade. And their immediate reaction was to go and apply for funding to support this project. So the paradox came in the way that, okay, we have to come up with a proposal, so this looks interesting. The city canceled. So they turned this into a more kind of pompous parade, a more festive celebration. So in the end, it's this problem of value again. How can we call this attention while we, at the same time, compromise? There's a cost to what artists do, curators, to organizers. So I guess, I don't know if you know any structures. I see all these platforms popping up everywhere in the U.S., in South America, I imagine here in the U.K., but they don't sustain
because the few spaces that don't compromise are short-lived, tend to just die because there is no disinstitutional support that can happen because maybe they compromise too quickly. They try to validate ideas and then it seems like a one-time experiment. Thank you. Any other comments? Thoughts? Yes, thank you. Hi, Kwong Lee from Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. I was just thinking two things. This comparison or analogy with care I'm not familiar with and not quite sure because care in NHS and hospitals
is so much more in-depth that I feel like that as a sector I don't think we can give holistic, sometimes I use these words holistic, integrated, meaning we try to give knowledge, skills, as well as opportunities for platform, which I think is more holistic than, say, the larger institutions. They're so audience-focused that they can't do both. So that's one point. The other point is I was thinking about differentiation between the large and small organizations, and to be quite crude about it in a sense, I think the larger institutions are quite competitive with each other. They have to be for funding, for audiences, for attention, for press. all these things whereas the small through one way another we are much more networked by that i
mean we there's a kind of sense that we look out for each other in some sense in um in their strength in that kind of numbers but also um at castle we like to support smaller emerging uh new artists led and for me that's the strength of the small arts organization we we kind of know where we come from in a sense. A lot of them are artists initiated or a group of people with common interests coming together, almost like a club that begins to be more formalised. So I just wonder with the largest lost touch with that grassroots, but the small still has connections. And I think there's something to be said about differentiation in making
the argument. Okay, thanks, Kiong. Maybe I could respond to that. I wonder whether that's actually true. I recognize that the large institutions are in competition with each other, but I would think that the small-scale institutions are also in competition with each other, aren't they? There's a small pot of funding. Not everybody gets it, as we know, to the costs of many very good organizations that have recently lost their National portfolio organisation funding. So I think the networking is complicated. I think this is maybe one of the things that will be opened up in the breakout groups after lunch. But, I mean, just to put a slightly less optimistic
kind of gloss on what you've said, because obviously one of the things that we're trying to do here is find ways of making that network productive laterally in many of the ways that I think that Charlotte and Kojo have described this morning, using different languages and different terms. But one of the things, and I think we're almost running out of time. Yes, it's nearly time for lunch. So I'm just going to raise a few of the things that have been spoken about this morning in view to thinking about them throughout the day. But whilst I do that, we've got five minutes left, so if there's anybody by my clock, I'm just looking at... Yes, that's right. if there's anybody that wants to say anything else
then there is a bit more time but it seems to me yeah I've got you it seems to me that one of the things that has emerged throughout this morning's discussion so far is around the idea of I think it was also put very well by the woman from Manchester I'm really sorry I've forgotten your name is around the instrumental the non-instrumentalisation of human relationships In a way, I think that's what we've all been talking about. So how do we claim, to use the term, a value to that that can be provided by a group of organisations that might identify as small-scale arts organisations who proceed through the commissioning of artists and worms
working together and who develop forms of production in all shapes and sizes that are not interested in instrumentalising either that production or the people that come and see that production in terms that are overtly humanist and individualising. So we're producing spaces or providing spaces that do different things. And that might be a show of paintings and that might be a work that is made collaboratively with a whole group of people in a different way. So it's not actually to do with the form, but it's to do with the concept of non-instrumentalisation. And that's what we mean by care, because, of course, care is also a very instrumentalised concept as well.
And we see the current coalition government caring through concepts like the big society, and so we need to also differentiate between the ways in which we're talking about care. Final comment from over here, or there might be somebody else as well. Could we have a microphone over here? Where's the mic? Thank you. Is there anybody else that wants to say something before we break for lunch? Yes? Somebody here? And you guys, do you want to say anything? Oh, okay. Thank you, yes. Hi, Matthew DePoolford from Limbo. It's not really a comment. It's a question. I wanted to take something that Ben said and return it as a question, because I think it's worth asking.
It's this point about care exceeding hierarchy. What Ben said was larger organizations are in some ways taking on what might be seen as the methodologies of smaller organizations in terms of care perhaps. I know that the definition of care we're working with is slightly elusive. I suppose what I would like to find out from Kojo is how this care is coupled specifically to the smaller organization.
What is the essence of that point? Well, in a sense, I offered a case study in this particular instance, and to generalise from that case study would be problematic, clearly. So I could reiterate my point in greater detail, but I'm not sure that's necessarily helpful. we can talk in the break but my point was that in this particular case there was a certain quite complex
mode of operation which went beyond its overt signs so the key was to look for care in places you don't recognise it there were cases where it's quite evident there are cases where the instrumentalization of it is quite evident and everybody here is all too familiar with that my point was in a certain way to displace the self-evidentness of those moments towards other moments which wouldn't necessarily announce themselves as such but which can be seen in that light once you take on board Silva Federici's thinking about care in terms of reproduction
in that broad sense of the word. So that's part of what I was arguing for. Just regarding this idea of instrument... Sorry, I'm Lester, and I'm from an organisation called Assembly House in Leeds. Regarding this idea of instrumentalisation, I think it's important to recognise that it's not just a thing that occurs within the arts, it's within all of society. And when we advocate what we're doing, I think we need to recognise the other areas that this is affecting for us to gain the support of wider society for our needs. Could you just elaborate on when you say other areas that we're affecting?
In terms of our social relations to each other as individuals, there's a lack of recognition of the things we do in our individual personal lives that support one another in society and it happens within the arts but it also happens caregiving outside of kind of institutional forms, people care for their relatives and it's also in terms of the type of work that you do all work has a form of care but when it begins to become instrumentalised it loses a lot of its kind of value. Hi, sorry.
I'm Azar Mahmoudi and I'm from Tehran. We have a very, very, very small project space called CAF. Now I know you're talking about England here and like the whole infrastructure. Maybe it's too far, but I just wanted to add another kind of setting to the whole discussion because I thought maybe like some of the discussions are somehow universalized, the whole settings. And I wanted to add in like different, there could be different settings in certain other parts of the world when the big institutions are totally ideological run or very, very much close to the state.
So announcing yourself as a small alternative project space actually brings you much, much more attention than... I mean, the value over there is much more for you rather than working in a kind of state-based or like state institution or like big institution. So especially when it comes to the kind of international attention to certain like different parts, I think this kind of ethical stand that you're talking about could be totally different.
These small spaces could be very competitive, could be very harsh towards each other, and they're not gatherings because we are careful of what's going on in our art scene, so we are unified in such kind of gatherings. Exactly because there's so much attention from the outside to know what's going on behind the blocked doors or what's going on beneath the underground of the Tehran art scene. So I think that's what brings another kind of relationship. So when you talk of human relationships, I think it's a very happy kind of thing you're counting on.
It could be different in different places. well thank you very much for reminding us of the privilege of our context I think you know given you know the struggle to maintain a small scale arts organisation in Tehran I can yeah that's it's a very important point for us to end on so thank you very much I think that I'm it's lunchtime I'd like to thank our speakers Charlotte Higgins and Kojo Eshin for stimulating a very thought-provoking morning. Lunch is, I'm looking at Carla to make sure that I'm saying the right thing. Lunch is in the foyer and then after lunch there will be ushers that will direct you to the
locations of the breakout sessions. So thank you very much. Thanks for great questions already. Let's keep it up for the rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you.