Letters to the Art System

The map of the Curator

"Spring and I"

Quando, Onde e Como

Sheila Leiner

Correspondence with Ricardo Ramalho

Letter from Ricardo Ramalho

23/03/2004

The rescue of Ana Amorim

Ana Amorim is looking for water. She dug a deep well, very deep.

She wants a lot of water. And she keeps on digging and digging, but the artist forgot to bring a ladder!

She can’t come up from the whole. Lucky for her, we know where she is, we can hear her call. I am going to throw a Gerdau cable to her, offer Evian water and Johnson & Johnson band-aid.

While a GMC truck doesn’t come we will send her a Lycra top and a pack of Nabisco biscuits.

Criticism

Letter sent to Tadeu Chiarelli

You mentioned people who criticise the radical nature of my views (or very naive for some).
We live in a Society of Control where great part of the means of communication among human beings, which are ultimately responsible for creating our collective images, are under the control of large interests. I am not saying anything that people don't already know, quite the opposite. I believe that the people who criticise me understand very well the control mechanisms that are behind civil institutions. But these same people believe that the persistent capitalist mechanism of social appropriation will persistently restore its control and there is nothing we can do, besides trying to do the best we can within those given conditions.

When they say that I am radical they are admitting that there is no way to resist this appropriation. Given this scenario I ask myself, what are the alternatives for us artists to stop the growing appropriation of the arts by economic groups with definite agendas where the artwork enters as a background for a bold project of social domination and control?

My proposal at the moment is to develop alternatives where artists can start debating and elaborating a vision of a new art system "from people to people" without the mediation of corporate interest.

-- If the people who criticise me work for art institutions it is understandable that their reaction is of apathy and despondency, since it seems to me that for art institutions to grow and keep pace with an international art market in expansion they must become more and more dependent on capital and the conditions it imposes for sponsorship of the various art spaces and events.
Again it is important to remember that the conditions imposed become conditioning factors for a way of thinking and art making which in its turn must fit within certain pre determined frames.

--Now if the people who criticise me are behind sponsoring institutions being their immediate beneficiaries, its logical and expected for them not to be interested in debating about a new art system inasmuch as this system is already working in the best possible way for them or it might just require from time to time a few adjustments in art institutions, such as replacing artists and art historians by bureaucrats in tune with corporate thinking.

In both cases we have a situation of co-operation and acceptance of a system that do not aim at human beings but privileged groups.
Criticism then becomes very beneficial and revealing because it favours debate which if well guided will attract more and more artists and intellectuals who already feel the need for change and for a concerted effort to find alternative ways of thinking and making art.

Correspondence with Brian Holmes

First letter to Brian Holmes
Hi Brian,

I apologize for writing directly to you. A couple of days ago I emailed Richard Barbrook telling him about my current project and he forwarded me your text "Artistic autonomy and the communication society". I decided then to write to you.

I am an artist, living in Brazil and my work for the last 10 years has focused on the issues that involve the distribution of art works.

I have drafted a "contract" which I send to art contests, galleries, residencies, open submissions and so on along with a regular "art portfolio". To do that I used an actual contract that was sent to me by a Bank's Art Foundation( they are springing all over the place in Brazil! ) and rewrote it including "my conditions".

Art Contract
No Logo Statement
I need to clarify a few very important points about my art project A characteristic element of my work is the non-credit/signature for the production of the evidence of my being alive. It means that nobody signs the work I produce. That implies that no organization/individual or any of its sponsors can use their corporate logo when any of my concepts and/or images are exhibited, including lectures, since this would be a breach of the concept of the work.
Thus, if any organization/individual /space or any of its sponsors were to use their corporate logo in association with the registers of my being alive, that would imply that this organization/individual/space were the "author" of these registers, receiving credit for its production.
Therefore an organization/individual/space or any of its sponsors can make my data available exclusively for cultural purposes in the media, press providing nobody uses their corporate logo or any of their sponsor's corporate logos to do so, and at the same time the media and press cannot use their corporate logos or any of their sponsor's corporate logos when promoting my work for the reasons stated above. An organization/individual or any of their sponsors can make the details of my biography and curriculum available for catalogues and text information for exhibition pieces, providing that these catalogues and entries do not contain their corporate logo or any of their sponsor's corporate logos.
My artistic production can be made available on the Internet for promotion of events and exhibitions, in the press and electronic media providing no corporate logo or any sponsor's corporate logos are used to do so. Finally my work can be exhibited publicly providing the corporate logo of the space or any of their sponsor's corporate logos not be present in the exhibition space, as well as the facade of the space.
Further I would like to emphasise that my work is always distributed freely. I do not sell my registers and the evidence of my daily movements and since 1994 I refuse to present the work where fees are charged. The work also cannot be exhibited in spaces that aim towards the commercialisation of the concepts/objects presented.
This work can be freely reproduced, adapted even without mentioning the source providing no profit is earned or corporate image promoted from doing so.

In this contract I tried to comment on biopolitical power and the "impossibility" of the arts to exist independently in a corporate sponsored world. In the current scene artists and non artists have been left with the only option of being people and never multitude.
I have also just applied for an art grant here. The project is to study the route of the money they would give me. This is the last issue of this grant . They will stop giving grants in south america. The story of the money is very interesting. A German Jew starts working mines to obtain magnesite needed for WWI. At the end of the war he emigrates to Chile then Bolivia and "discovers that the slag heaps left by the Spanish were skimmings, with over 60% lead, and fairly rich in silver. In a few years time he becomes "dollar rich"... that is just the beginning of the story. My chances of getting the actual grant are very small. But I think the story of the work is very important for artists. I believe it is more important for artists to focus on a method of analysis and study of the institutions and the interests that lie behind "art works" than in the art itself.

If you don't mind I would like to know more about the work you do.

Thank you.
Ana Amorim

Second letter to Brian Holmes

FRAMES

Hi Brian,

Yes, unfortunately, when everything is so conditioned by the frames in which it is presented, then there isn't much interest beyond critique. I get tired of those frames.

Me too, unfotunatelly I am not disciplined enough to write critique so I write letters. Letters to the Art System.
In "Maps for the Outside" you mention Alexandra Riera. I met her in Brazil - we have tried to exchange information a few times - unfortunately it was pretty hard since I do not speak French and she does not speak English or Portuguese.
Last year Catherine David - the curator, organised an event called S?o Paulo SA, basically she invited a few foreign artists to work in S?o Paulo. She is very interested in the stage of metropolis S?o Paulo is going through. Alexandra was one of the artists invited.
Alexandra wanted to talk to me after I mentioned my contract to an audience.
I am also familiar with Archives du Capitalisme, I think it was Derek Holzer the first person to talk about it here. I like this double use of the art work it is a maze and at the same time people can use it as reference for actions.
The concept of direct action has been quite a powerful one for me.
In "Maps for the Outside" you stated:...an idea or phrase arising in one locality (for instance, "Our Resistance is as Transnational as Capital") becomes a geographically distributed political performance (the "Global Street Parties" against the annual G8 reunions). In perfect accord with Lawrence Weiner's famous dictums, the work could be carried out by the initial authors of the ideas, realized by others, or not done at all – something like a taste of planetary exchange, where the "art" is "totally free."
I have been using terms not only from activism but also from the IMF (Structural Adjustment Programmes).
My work has been split into two actions: I collect daily evidences of being alive, and I work on the method of distribution. I do not show these evidences anymore. I tell people about them. So they can do their own work.
I am enclosing a list of the projects I have developed. It is a summary but I can tell you more if you are interested. Most of my material is in Portuguese, just some of the letters are in English. About my "one way" dialog with the art system you can read some letters (badly translated ) in http://inquireinto.blogspot.com/ - The first article is not mine.

I would like very much corresponding with you. Your work is very interesting.
I am sort of bad news/ or lets say a joke over here since I do not accept working for or with the wealthy.

All the best
Ana

Third letter to Brian Holmes

Hi Brian,
I am really glad you read some of my letters and found them interesting.
I think art can only happen among people. It cannot be mediated. Something essential gets lost during a mediation. Each artist can only communicate with a few people. Then we could have many artists communicating with many people.
About this fundamental question: How to operate in a post-capitalist system?
If we do not start developing a vision of the future we want to get to we will not be able to know how to get there. I learned that from Michael Albert - "Participatory Economics - Parecon". Do you know him? About this quest for a vision I have attached a text that I recently "exhibited" in a logo free space.

That contract I have sent you asks - How to operate in a post-capitalist system? Not only from the "audience" but from me too. I think that contract is the best art piece I have ever produced. It has trapped me. Now if I decided to sell out, it will be public. Which in itself would just show the impossibility of a world without corporate mediation.
About this impossibility there's something I really like from Society of Spectacle: As a negative movement which seeks the supersession of art in a historical society where history is not yet lived, art in the epoch of its dissolution is simultaneously an art of change and the pure expression of impossible change. The more grandiose its reach, the more its true realisation is beyond it. This art is peforce avant-garde, and it is not. Its avant-garde is its disappearance. (Debord)

Getting back to the question of how to operate in a post - capitalist society: I've managed to work out that you have to stay outside and give up the notion of "career". I think the concept of career has been completely appropriated by power. What I mean by career is this progressive route that we follow patiently in order to make our lives worth something. Something that is a human necessity, the accumullation of a skill or knowledge, has been appropriated by those in power to get us to do what they need us to do in order for them to stay where they are or go even higher.
Once you give up the concept of career you can do what feels right. It can be quite painfull though.

How is your work distributed then?Whenever the opportunity arises I tell people about the work hoping that they might tell other people. Like I did in the S?o Paulo SA (Catherine David) which got Alexandra's attention. I like this idea of a story carried by people.
I give talks about my work, talk about the reasons why I do not accept sponsorship from Banks, Transnationals, and so on. I have also been very clever to stay in touch with a few curators who thought my work was "interesting". They go around talking about this artist that refuses to exhibit in corporate sponsored places - they actually do that in corporate sponsored places and get paid for it which is breaking that contract !!!!.
That is fine though because it sparks a lot of discussion.
Imagine if more people started using that kind of contrat to relate to the art world?
My work is in a dresser in my apartment. Anyone who wants to see it, borrow, exhibit can come and get it. But since there is no money to be made from it and no corporate image can be attached to it. The interest towards it is none -which says something about our time.
If tomorrow I say I have changed my concept - as the curator of the Modern Art Museum in S?o Paulo suggested I should do - I would have lots of invitations to show.

How do you use the internet, and so on?
It started with those letters to Thomas Cohn Gallery. I decided to send the letters to the gallery and to 40 people in the arts that I had the email (most of them did not know me). In the email I explained that it was an art work and that since I am paralised and cannot exhibit, the only way for the work to exist would be for people to send it to more people.
I didn't think that they would do it. But recently I found out that these letters have circulated quite a lot. I don't know how much though.
I notice there is a corporate logo on the internet site, alas...
Those weblogs are Blogger and they charge 15US dollars to actually remove their logo from the page. I have 3 weblogs and could not afford removing the logos from the three of them. I actually gave preference to the Brazilian page which I thought would be the most visited.

But I am most interested in who reads your work, and how they get it, I'm very intrigued by this question of how to operate in a post-capitalist system and I'm sure you have given it some thought. I started with an email list and added names as I found them . Most of the peope who read the site are in the arts. Art students, Historians, art critics, Gallery owners, museum directors, artists. I don't know exactly who.
I know some people have given lectures about "this artist". A woman is writing her thesis about it. She heard in some talk about political art that there is a woman that "apparently has an interesting work but refuses to show it in corporate sponsored places". She was intrigued by it.
I think the biggest problem is when people think that this is just a scam. That
I am working to hit it big in the art system...I think the majority think that that is what the work is all about. And we can't blame them. Contemporary art history is there to prove them right.

All the best,
Ana

Fourth letter to Brian Homes

Hi Brian,

People rarely write so many things I agre with.It is really important for me to hear that. I don't often find people that respond well to the ideas I have embraced. What can people do next once they discover they agree on very important issues.

I'm wondering, have you seen it moving toward different kinds of realization?
No, I haven't. Not in the arts.

...The goal of making art for institutional spaces, shared by everyone, seemed to have become a pretext for an experience that was elsewhere, for once truly present. And yet most still produce according to that same old goal. Either as though a transition can't quite be made, or as an easy way to believe in the best of both worlds.
I often find that people who have strong political ideas seem to be completely "out of it" when it comes to art. In London I remember an activist I met, who was very political. Before I left London I was invited to go to the opening of his art show, in a gallery in the East End of London. Paintings. (Here was this person fighting capitalism and who deep down dreamed of being the stereotype of an artist).
I do not put much faith in squatted venues used for art purposes either. I did participate in one, but I do think that the whole idea of exhibiting something in some art space, whatever that might be, just reinforces the institutions that need to be fought.
I think we need a movement of people/artists who refuse to cooperate with the appropriation of art by institutions of power. An artist alone who does not cooperate with those institutions of power only makes sense if his/her actions can mobilise other people to do the same. I think we need to educate the already existing political groups about the importance of including art as part of their struggle. Art as a public realm just like the streets, for that matter.
That for me is the most difficult thing to get started.
In the left, people expect artists to do exactly that: Art. Art can be brought to benefit gigs, parties and special days. It is the light part of an action. But doing that we are perpetuating the collusion that has being done to art in its broader utopic sense.

Now it begins to look like some alternative institutions are necessary (all of us who have recently made this choice of career refusal have leaned heavily on the web as a supportingresource, but it can only do certain things). Do you see any alternative accumulations on your horizon?
No. Yes in some sense.
The MST (Landless Movement) here in Brazil ocupies unproductive land. Their definition of unproductive land is quite interesting. Land is considered unproductive when it does not fulfil its social function. So latif?ndios (large estates); land where slave labour is found; land used by drug dealers, etc. are considered unproductive, are occupied and claimed for the Agrarian Reform.
Why can't we study art institutions based on their social function? Creating a movement that will occupy them and claim them back to the public sphere?
(*I know it has been done before. But it has to be done again)
But the most important element is that it has to be a movement. Via Campesina - I don't know if you are familiar with, it is an international peasant movement. Well, they consider 20 people the minimum for a movement. Can we get 20 like-minded people? Over here I can think of one person. You probably know more people over there.

[I had this project when I was in London, which never came off the ground. A Gallery/Museum Inspection. I had listed several points to inspect and then they would receive an evaluation based on some principles. I would then publish in the site the various reports.The problem with that is that they are never taken seriously and always end up in this "art curiosity tank".]

Now, another question is: What do we do when we finally manage to recover these spaces back into the public sphere? What do we do about "selecting art works". What happens to the curators? Critics?
We would need horizantal organisations.
The MST in my opinion is a model institution of horizontal organisation. The group decides. They always send a different representative to talk about the movement . So they all learn public speaking skills. They cannot rely on a single leader. They must have many people capable of being a leader.I like that.

In France, the hardest people to talk to are often your neighbors.
There is so much to gain by keeping people that way. People only get together in need.
Here because of rampant violence people are scarred of each other.

Sometimes I wonder if I am not working to hit it little in the art system.
This might be confusing but I am working towards becoming very known. I intend to get as many people as possible to know about the work I am doing. And you should work for that too. If you do not take that space "they will". That does not mean that you will become rich and famous.
This is the activist part of art making that can reach many people. You must have your views in as many places as possible and still never hit it big in the art world. That is my gol.
As an artist, though, you will still manage to communicate with very few people

I have reacted to the ordinary impression of entrapment by producing papers that essentially ensure I will never be invited back to the places I really detest (basically, the corporate-sponsored institutions).
That is what that art contract that I keep going on about is for me.

All the best, and thanks very much for your letters.
I am surprised you are still replying to my letters. All the best to you too.
Ana

Letter from Brian Holmes to Creative Clusters

This is a good example of letters to the art system:
Creative Clusters sent out the following call:

Creative Clusters is interested in projects in the field of regeneration and enterprise development that get results in both cultural and economic terms. We are now looking for presenters for our next conference (Brighton, UK, 28th April to 1st May 2004). The conference website is at http://www.creativeclusters.co.uk.

Themes for 2004 are:

- A Sense of Place: Cultural Tourism and Cultural Industry
- Social Inclusion & the Rise of the Creative Class
- European Enlargement: Implications for Creative Business
- Cultural Value and Economic Value
- Asia-Pacific Creative Industries
- Financing Creativity

If you have been involved in a ground-breaking project in any part of the world or you have a compelling contribution to make to policy, and you would like to share your knowledge with creative industry development experts across the globe, then go to http://www.creativeclusters.co.uk for more information.

Regards,
Simon Evans
Conference Director

ps Please circulate this to your colleagues and networks

Brian Holmes sent them this reply:

Hi everyone at Creative Clusters -

Hey, I'm very happy to learn about this. Your program is precisely everything I detest and critique in contemporary control systems. Be sure that I will take your site apart and use what I learn to warn others about your practices. You want to harness creativity the way people used to harness horses. You think you can make artists into fools under the orders of businessmen and governments. I find it pretty disgusting to tell you the truth. Maybe we all have better things to do than spread the deadly capitalist development model around the globe and throughout the social classes. And maybe artists and thinkers have better things to do than let themselves be intrumentalized for the management of people's minds.

Why don't you all quit this job and find something better than a caricature of humanity to devote your energies to?

In that persepctive, all the best,

Brian Holmes

This is the reply from Cretive Clusters
Brian,

Thanks for taking the trouble to write.

I'm guessing here, but is it the idea of artist as a generator of economic value
that you detest? I agree that this is a strange and maybe unwelcome idea.
We are used to thinking of economic wealth and power as something totally
distinct from cultural wealth and power - or at least I certainly was. But it
seems to me that something is changing here, and people with creative skills
are becoming as rich and powerful as industrial barons once were.

We don't necessarily like this, but we're trying to understand it, and our
conference is part of that.

All the best,

Simon

And finally Brian Holmes' reply to that

Hi Simon -

My resistance is certainly not personal, but reasoned. I think that people have been trying to understand the management of creativity and knowledge for quite a while (the bibliography is enormous), particularly in your country since Chris Smith was minister of culture. I really believe that the result is the reduction of any kind of critical autonomy. It is the situation of artists' and theorists' sheer servitude to industrial and financial agendas, represented amply in Britain by the twin (private/"public") institutions of the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern. In these contents, art decorates the blazon of the undeniably "creative" people who run ad agencies, telcoms, oil companies, financial ratings services, etc. And yet what we need now is not to regress to former, ivory tower analyses of the problems with our civilization. What we need is to develop a kind of power for artistic sensibilities which is not analogous to that formerly wielded by the industrial barons. It is clear that the discourse you are working on (and repeating) will not allow that.

Consider that the last decade, in which creative labor and entrepreneurship triumphed, has led us to a situation in which war-mongering and various forms of fascism (more precisely: liberal fascism) are increasingly present among the advanced industrial nations. Apparently the creative labor paradigm, whose importance in the "New Economy" of the 1990s is well established, has been unable to stop the development of this trend. Indeed, I think the crisis of the New Economy has actually revealed its latent other side, the authoritarian, disciplinary side of the flexible labor paradigm. I don't think there has indeed been any effort to analyze the tensions, the global division of labor within which so-called creative work develops. Rather, there has been an immense effort to capture the broadly legitimate, socially recognized aspirations and practices of artists for the furtherance of a corporate/Third Way agenda which is now bankrupt and finding its only solutions in the barrel of a gun. Under these circumstances, as I said, my opposition to the kind of program you are developing is reasoned and will obviously stand.

I really hope you find a way to desert from such an enterprise. My view, as expressed in my work on the "Flexible Personality," is that the most effective exodus can be made within one's own profession, and particularly within the university. However it requires a change of vocabulary, program and intention that is significant and legible. There is an ethics of scholarship to be reconstructed. Failing that, we will all be endlessly compelled to perform the corporate/Third Way agenda - or perhaps its more unsavory replacements, as the present trends continue.

best, Brian Holmes

Letter sent to Tadeu Chiarelli Art Historian, Curator and Critic

Espaços de Arte Contemporanea - MAC USP - São Paulo
21/05/2003

Hi Tadeu,

Yesterday you talked about the absence of conflict among Brazilians. That modernity arrived in this country institutionalised. I believe it goes well beyond modernity. Ideas, movements, actions, arrive in this country through a bourgeois elite, that only does it because this is the thing of the moment that includes him/her in contemporary times(Contemporaneidade). Being it an essential respectability factor for someone that has already supplied his/hers material needs well beyond the necessary.

There is a serious problem with your discourse when you say that "all" Brazilians avoid conflict. It seems to me that this is a strong characteristic of the dominant class, that is us. And you and I know that we are not representative of this country, don't we? Yesterday when I came back from the lecture I was listening to Eldorado radio station and the fashion editor, whose name I can't recall was launching a new trend. Critical Mass. Every last Friday of the month cyclists get together in Av. Paulista to protest against the excessive traffic. In England this is called Critical Mass and it is a periferic movement that many times gets into conflict with the police. This is a current example of what you were talking about, yesterday. An action of chock and conflict with the system here is turned into something "cool" that a bunch of "cool" people do because it is very popular in New York. And we know very well the class they belong to, their colour, etc,etc...

Do develop a deep and thorough study of the distortion that happens with powerful actions of social, cultural and philosophical transformation you must study class. The class that brings the "radical" to this country does not wish to change absolutely anything. Doesn't want to criticise, nor question, neither transform anything in depth. It wants "citizenship" changes that only improve the surrounding in which it circulates. Doesn't want to question its role neither whatever nor whoever represents tradition.

There are so many examples that I could write for hours.
When you spoke about bienials and the "back end". You mentioned that any slip can be a foreign affairs matter. How can one think freely in environments prone to conflicts of such nature? These institutions should disappear or openly admit that they are what they are, "political economic" partners, and people in your position - the curator - should think about the role that you would like to have in this dimension and openly state it.

The institutions have appropriated the public space, and now call public the visitor which implies that everything else is controlled by private interests.

All the best.

Ana Amorim