Distributing Dependency: Reconditioning Institutional Production for Artists

di Mason Leaver-Yap

Sharing their experiences in working within artists’ moving image, Mason Leaver-Yap problematises neoliberal practices of production while offering counter-tactics of care.

Onyeka Igwe, A So-Called Archive, 2020, video, 20’. Courtesy of the artist, and KW Production Series. Co-commission by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Mercer Union, Toronto; with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Nasrin Himada, Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England

At the end of 2020, Alessandro Rabottini wrote to me with an invitation to contribute a text that would seek to articulate “the paradigms of care you operate in your curatorial practice.” Having worked in the field of artists’ moving image since 2006 – independently and institutionally; curating, commissioning, collecting, and distributing – I was intrigued but also vexed by the task of producing such a confessional. Trying to precisely articulate practices of “curatorial care” can present difficulties in a publicly-available text such as this, especially since such support sometimes requires a refusal to broadcast the details by which the structures of bureaucracy, administration, and institutional power are exercised over individuals. This refusal does not represent a fear of exposing exploitation, since exploitation is ubiquitous and, more often than not, hiding in plain sight. Instead the fear is of betraying useful routes that might offer precarious cultural workers protection against, and independence from, restrictive conditions, risky contracts, and harmful work environments. In writing so openly, there is always the risk that these gathered defensive tactics may inform extractive organisations on the particular ways in which artists and other cultural producers continue to resist mechanisms meant to limit their creative and financial control and, in so doing, render such defences obsolete.

The other challenge lies in avoiding the reduction of this increasingly overused (or misused) word ‘care’ to a model or manifesto, and rather trying to be attendant to the specific environmental conditions through which care, by its very nature, is carefully applied. Conditions of production are just that: conditional, and this is nowhere more so than within artists’ moving image. The reason? Artists’ moving image is perhaps one of the most intrinsically networked mediums in contemporary art. It is relationally and interdependently peopled by those with specialist production knowledge that often tessellates cast, crew, and exhibitors in unorthodox ways. For moving image to be successful (by which I mean seen, remembered, and deployed in learning environments), it requires an understanding of dissemination and distribution that is attentive to in-person audiences, as well as geographically dispersed viewers. It requires a material understanding of format preservation, restoration, interchange, duplication, and security, as well as an understanding of display methods. This is a medium that demands fluency in various languages–visual, technical, accessible, and legal–as well as continual renovation and expansion of how these languages might productively relate to one another.

In short, there are many variables and few models, which means that the methods of protecting producers from coercive labour practices, exploitative commissioning and collecting, and the potential harm of display, must be specialised in order to be effective. There is no one paradigm to be written. There are, however, experiences that can usefully be described and shared as exemplars. Just as the distribution of production roles in artists’ moving image introduces interdependency, so too can the burden of risks be subject to more equitable distribution. What follows here is a number of situations, conditions, and incomplete frustrations that require more time and space in which to learn and practice the kind of support that might lead to beneficial, emotionally-attentive, and generative production experiences. My interpretation is personal and partisan. Partial too is my level of detail. In what follows, anonymity, or a lack of description, are not intended to be vague by omission, but protective of the subjects.

Onyeka Igwe, A So-Called Archive, 2020, video, 20’. Courtesy of the artist, and KW Production Series. Co-commission by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Mercer Union, Toronto; with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland. Additional support from Nasrin Himada, Adam Pugh and Tess Denman-Cleaver. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England

One of the most basic methods for distributing dependency and sharing risk is spreading production work, not only across makers and producers, but also between institutions and collections, both public and private.

While the commercial and industrial sectors of film and television have historically been defined as spaces of co-production, and often benefit from national government funding and support, I first began noticing mixed income co-commissioning emerging specific to artists’ moving image production during the global financial crisis of 2007-08. In London at that time, smaller artist-run-spaces and non-profit galleries were facing cuts in public funding, and commercial enterprises were struggling to sell much beyond painting. Collaborations began to proliferate between these spaces in spontaneous and occasionally uncritical ways, going beyond mere survival and setting new precedents that were preoccupied with visibility.

As an audience member speaking at the end of ‘Independent spaces and emerging forms of connectivity,’ a 2008 salon discussion held at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts where I worked, the writer and moving image curator Ian White sharply commented that “the importance of visibility is precisely about the relationship between a cultural economy and a financial economy… It seems everyone is painting quite a rosy picture of an idea of collaboration and working together and knowledge-sharing. And it seems to me that within a cultural economy, right now, there’s actually quite a fierce competition.”¹ That the compromises and competitions within and between these two economies have not been more clearly laid out since White’s comment indicates the complexity and increasing enmeshment of what neoliberal parlance might term and endorse as ‘diversified income strands’ between various ‘stakeholders’ for the purposes of increased visibility, where visibility is value. The ways in which these institutions were collaborating then, and continue now to find new forms of working together, was and are far from conspicuous.

Jamie Crewe, Sketchbook photocopies, installation view of the exhibition KW Production Series, KW Institute for Contemporary Art at Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, 2018. Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy of the artist and KW Production Series. Co-commission by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Tramway, Glasgow; with support from Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Germany_Switzerland

The collaboration of co-commissioning work is not naturally ‘better’ than singularly-financed commissions (which is itself now increasingly rare). Neither is it neutral. It begins from a pragmatic attempt to build a more ambitious production budget that will widen the scope and possibilities of the work, potentially improving anything from the duration of research to the duration of the work itself. But as co-commissioning has become commonplace, caring for artists’ production has increasingly required detailed knowledge of the motivations and structures of the organisations involved, and their representative figureheads. On a basic level, these players could comprise, for example, a curator, a producer, a museum collector, and a private collector, though these roles regularly blur and cross-contaminate. Vetting the political and financial investments of these players is key, and can render collaborations unworkable and/or unethical either to the project, to the artist (I am thinking here of the financial backgrounds of private collectors and sponsorship or boardroom ties of non-profits, especially).

While it is important to understand the capabilities of these various actors and what they bring to the field of production, it is similarly useful to pay close attention to their rigidities and redundancies (which may themselves allow for other flexibilities, workarounds and freedoms to take place). In practical terms, this might mean that a private institution is able to leverage cash at the beginning of a project but has no ongoing support; a non-profit has no starting budget and can only propose match-funding; another might have no finances but be able to offer material production support; while a collection may not be able to commission but houses opportunities for display, distribution and archival preservation. It is the unevenness, not the equality, of the players that gives rise to specific conditions of production, and the creative work that can take place therein.

Although sometimes practically or financially advantageous, the entanglement of multiple structures of administration is, on the whole, an inhospitable environment for an artist to think and make. Consequently, my work has often been focused on building up relationships and dependencies between organisations that (sometimes unbeknownst to each other) have mutual goals, and then on steering them to completion over longer periods of time than are commonly allowed within the independently-produced realm of ‘contemporary culture’, a culture traditionally characterised by the treadmill cycle of relentlessly temporary display and newness. The other side of this work is using the resources of these parties to build out enough time and space for the artist to navigate through these idiosyncratic structures, without getting mired down by the administrative burdens of institutional fundraising, reporting, and updating.²

Rachel O’Reilly, INFRACTIONS, 2019, 63’. Courtesy of the artist and KW Production Series. Co-production by Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Contemporary Art Fund in support of KW Production Series, with additional support from the Australia Council and Museum Abteiberg

Counter to the usual capacities of a single institution, the production projects I am most attracted to, or try to set the conditions for, often extend over a year or longer, alongside the knowledge that short but regular moments of public visibility for which institutions already have in-built capacity (talks, panel discussions, performances, and screenings) can, over the calendar of production, create more spaces where the artist has the opportunity to think of and with a public, and feed those insights back into the making of the work. Entwined with this desire for communal dialogue and critical rigor, I attend to accenting an artist’s project to ensure their completed work lands within a productive exhibition context that can bear witness, unpack, and respond to the motivations and content of that work. Priming a public to upcoming presentations reduces barriers to accessing the work, alerts the artist to the context in which their work will later appear, and seeks to establish better interfaces and accountability between artists and the individuals working within the institutions during lower pressure moments. (I’m mindful in particular of how artists work with an institution’s technicians, finance departments, and exhibition assistants, and how these are often more enjoyable relationships when they are not solely based on urgency or need, but rather on ongoing exchanges that can be thoughtful, curious, and anticipatory, instead of just-in-time–a terribly contemporary mode that contains manifold compromises and sacrifices.)

To be clear: this production mode has an opportunistic attitude that functions within neoliberal cultural structures. It reconditions and occasionally side-steps institutional ways of working, rather than wholly remaking those power structures. However, I believe that it does so in a way that prioritises the production of artists’ moving image work whose content might speak otherwise to those very structures, and might even provide resistance to or expose the hypocrisy of an institutional structure and, in so doing, break down questionable protocols.³ Moreover, the multiple nature of these varied production processes refuses to be bound by the conventions of a single institution. I don’t claim it to be particularly radical work (in fact, at worst, this approach could be said to be parasitic, since it requires participation with these institutions, rather than divesting from them altogether), but it is nonetheless available to those who can see the boundaries of institutional control through and around which an artist or producer must manoeuvre, rather than obediently staying within those bounds. This manner of working does have the capacity to produce sustainable depth, criticality, and engagement.

Rachel O’Reilly, INFRACTIONS, 2019, 63’. Courtesy of the artist and KW Production Series. Co-production by Julia Stoschek Collection and Outset Contemporary Art Fund in support of KW Production Series, with additional support from the Australia Council and Museum Abteiberg

Some basic examples of this in practice: with one artist, the production budget contributed by some of the co-commissioners did not accurately reflect the amount of labour and materials of the artist’s project, although the production conditions and exhibition opportunity were ideal and time-sensitive. As a solution, we split the proposed film in two, which allowed the artist to work at a more manageable pace and with ongoing support. I asked the syndicate of organisations to support the first work, while simultaneously setting up an on-ramp for the collectors to purchase a second film–one that would not only complement the first collected piece, but enable ongoing dialogue with the artist for future exhibitions of work in relation to the collection.

In another context, a non-profit institution was, due to the nature of their government funding, unable to co-commission an artist’s film alongside the participation of a privately-funded collector. To support the project instead, the artist and I worked with the non-profit to produce, pay for, and stage a number of public dialogues throughout the production calendar, where educators and activists were commissioned to present their research, and thus feed into the inquiry of the film, while also building up local engagement through successive audiences that later became the primary viewers at the film’s premiere.

Dispersed production is rarely seamless and often reveals the extractive, exhausting, and sacrificial aspects of cultural work. But this type of work is also invested in the building of relationships that not only witness different perspectives on work and working conditions, but also have the capacity to respond to them. In several instances, I have seen institutional partners suddenly force the resignation of staff members that have been crucial to an artist’s co-commissioning process. Given the long-term nature of these co-commissioning projects and the invested relationships therein, I have seen the other co-commissioning partners absorb those unemployed workers into their own organisational structures as contributors, independent curators, and guest producers, shifting institutional credit to personal credit, as was due, and sustaining partnerships that redefined initially templated contractual obligations.

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It is likely a surprise to no one that institutional positions are often in conflict with personal positions. Institutions traditionally set up ownership around the development of intellectual property and consolidate possession of creative relationships within bounded structures–structures where power is directionally funnelled from artist, to exhibition assistant, to assistant curator, to curator, and towards a director whose name is, by dint of a typically apex-oriented structure, synonymous with the institution’s. The boundary markers of these property claims have varying levels of visibility–from logos on email blasts, to contracts with stipulations that the contents of those very contracts remain private to external parties, and from the carefully-worded disclaimers under the signatures of institutional emails, to the hosting of both email correspondence and authored texts on institutional web domains and servers that outlast the employment of those authors. To recall Richard Birkett’s articulation in a recent conversation at the School of Visual Art, this is a “dispossessive setup” between work and workers.⁴

WHILE SOME ARTISTS AND PRODUCERS EFFECTIVELY FORM (OR CANNILY PERFORM) INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES AS A WAY OF BUFFERING OR CONTESTING THE POWER OF THE ORGANISATIONS THAT TRY TO EXTRACT THEIR LABOUR, THERE IS MUCH TO BE SAID FOR USING CO-COMMISSIONING AS A METHOD OF FORCING INSTITUTIONAL FLEXIBILITY AS A CONDITION OF PRODUCTION.

While some artists and producers effectively form (or cannily perform) institutional structures as a way of buffering or contesting the power of the organisations that try to extract their labour, there is much to be said for using co-commissioning as a method of forcing institutional flexibility as a condition of production. And although I do not wish to paint a “rosy picture” of such collaborations, it is clear that keeping production within single institutions rarely serves guest cultural workers. Solo and siloed working structures are not formed around the particularities or requirements of a single production, but precede it with a host of outdated institutional protocols that are imposed upon the work in unthinking ways, and where institutional negligence is only witnessed and/or experienced by the guest artist or producer, thus (wearingly) requiring complaint as the mechanism of its renovation. Working across organisations, however, enables selective and specific engagements in relationships that are materially, structurally, and emotionally particular to the work being undertaken, and are defined and formed by the workers that gather, albeit temporarily, around a shared intention and desire.