critique of unpaid labor vs. IRL (Berlin funding cuts etc.)

“I just want to get paid for everything I do”.

I hear this all the time from “precarious” artists and cultural workers of all kinds: people I recognize as such, and people I consider not at all precarious, people from all over the world, i.e. the EU, North America, and beyond. This demand for remuneration is as justified as it has grown repetitive, tiresome, and is often misused in conditions of self-organized projects, where awareness of positioning from which this labor critique is delivered, is often lacking.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to get paid for all the art gigs, for getting up in the morning, or properly, for teaching, as in — to be paid for what I actually (want to) do, but there is just one problem. No such luck. Let’s see, then, how the dominant labor critique of working as an artist/organizer/teacher and expecting to get paid, is affecting the discourse IRL. In other words, what happens if we financialize all our labor, or are willing to "work" only when conditions are right?

To be clear, this essay is not a debate of the question of whether institutions should pay artist fee, to this the answer is absolutely. It is also not a polemic on whether cultural funding cuts is a good thing, they are not. I’m more interested in what, whom and when we call "institutions", and how we work as independent artists, researchers and miscellaneous, together and apart, on our ideas. And, how, in my experience, taking off pressure of getting paid from the making of art, discussions, or from writing, offers a freedom to think and do something more valuable than the same work produced via commercial streams that we are forced into by market demands, or by the granting system. It does not mean being oblivious to the cost attached to such freedom, or shedding of the system, or being oblivious to each other’s IRL constraints. We should acknowledge also the imbalance of enjoying the freedom I write about, without having to subsidise one’s livelihood through secondary and third employment to pay the bills, of the many trustafarians amongst us in Berlin (existing subtly, in less obvious, and perhaps more modest, way than it is a norm in a place like New York), and to whom the questions I raise here are of no consequence.

I will begin from afar: 

In the era when I was still on Facebook — before the Occupy and long before BLM (which really gained momentum in 2014, not 2020 / during COVID, though the latter perception prevails), and therefore in the era before racial profiling became mainstream talking point in the institutions (again) — a British performance programmer, a friend of a friend, was travelling to NY from London. He updated his Facebook status with a complaint, something about being pulled aside to be frisked and general rudeness at JFK. Yes, he was white. And I was not yet the person I am now. So it was a big step back then, for me to comment: "Yeah, welcome to how the rest of the world lives".

Same message to everyone aghast at funding cuts in Berlin: 

“Welcome to how the rest of the world lives”.

The grantification and professionalization, as antidote to privatization of cultural sphere has meant:

The policing of affect and tone

The policing of language

The meritocracy (as if interface does not determine what is considered “talent”)

The “relevance” (same)

The inherent nanny state function of the always belated pie charts of affirmative actions and attention

All these aspects continued stratifying who gets to speak and about what and when, and absolutely nothing got better. If it seemed to anyone otherwise, they had not been paying attention, or perhaps, were willing to play along to the system’s demands.

In the afterhours of a recent event on identities and pushing against them, at diffrakt in Berlin, I was told (re: publishing) that I needed to choose what I want. My two choices: get recognition (aka eventually start getting paid for what you do), or stick to my principles (in this case, that artist/writer should not pay to play, meaning be the one bringing the publisher print and design money). 

That evening at diffrakt, Yasmin Zaherm, the author of The Coin, was there to represent the kind of identitarian position that “works in the entertainment”. The direct and humorous address of the problem of being a commercial writer was a familiar tactic I recognized from my time in New York, which felt new and refreshing again, amidst all the virtue signaling of Berlin. Zaherm is open about being willing to cut and slice the manuscript to meet the editorial demands in order to reach more readerships via traditional publishing. As long as there is a kernel of what she still believes in, she says. She was described by the moderator as non- compliant with the requisite performance of a perfect victim expected of her, as a Palestinian writer. 

(There was fretting in the audience, from other aspiring writers, who wondered out loud if one should avoid a moralizing position in a novel. The question, telling of the times.) 

I appreciate the sentiment of not playing into a character, only I see Zaherm playing into one, just not of the victim: the well heeled young woman weathering palatable madness in New York (or another major city, equally exciting) is the narrative road well travelled — of late, by Ottessa Moshfegh, Natasha Stagg and Marlowe Granados (none of whose books I could fathom reading because they describe people and situation I know too well and have developed an allergy to).

Meanwhile, money-wise, as Maxi Wallenhorst brought up in her story of disappearing street addresses, many (more) artist-run institutions and project spaces are about to lose their space in Berlin. The budget cuts hang over the upcoming Holidays, right next to all the other ominous dark clouds. I am, yes, sympathetic and (even more) depressed with the news, but I am other things too. At home, I sigh and shrug. Some of these institutions, frankly, have questionable agendas and practices that do not differ from all the commercial outfits out there: heavy on declarative and performative, low on actual adherence to the over-stated leftist politics; idiosyncratically selective, and insular (all of which, perhaps it is time we admit, is inevitable). Too often these project spaces’ versions of “international” mean heavily North American, Australian, and a dash of Global South (as, what bell hook called, "spice"), or on another end — an art space becomes a zero-dimensional diasporic community center. 

This summer a young German philosopher with 300 Euro/month grandfathered rent widened her eyes, and told me (with some schadenfreude), she would not know how she’d live, if she’d lost her place and had to pay my (new rate) rent — equivalent to her entire monthly budget. 

Oh?

I will quote an acquaintance from Brazil here:

“They must think we pay for things in rainbows.”

Whenever these sorts of conversations happen I wonder who is supposed to show solidarity with whom here, and who is expected to do the “emotional labor” of supporting the one in need. Who, in this conversation, is more precarious? Reciprocity would be ideal, but only by acknowledging asymmetries too. Instead prickly resentments and self-soothing blossoms. During a moment of tension, a Russian-German curator, until then interested in joining my collective project, responds (when I attempt to transparently discuss the difference of investemnt in our respective structural positions): “It is none of my business what you do for money…” Assimilating well, she has adopted the preferred attitude here in Germany — the cover story of “privacy”. But having “privacy” to retreat into, by the way of not needing to discuss or negotiate the subject of money, is by and large a privilege too.

Just like drawing the lux boundary between work/play or leisure/pleasure/work does not apply when there’s no such a choice, there might have been something happening, long before COVID, long before everyone started wearing keffiyeh, or hanging Ukrainian flags on their balcony, the something that ushered in Trump and AfD, current budget cuts etc.

Neoliberalism, ecological disasters, exclusion on political grounds, high rent, and wars are at your doorstep?

“Welcome to how the rest of the world lives”.

Yes, now all of us will have to work harder and without pay, because: no nanny state will bail us out of the current situation. Perhaps its function was not what we needed, and new forms of organizing are incoming as a result. From where I stand, it may be for the best. Maybe the situation of reduced nannying will give a chance for new aesthetics to emerge, the ones that stalled until now. Aesthetics of when no one is watching over the shoulder for you to fill in an application and prove your relevance, and you do what you do because you want to, it interests you, it’s a problem you want to know more about.

Is this “activism”, or is it survival? I call it (art)life as I know it.

As we leave the evening at diffrakt, someone says: "At least the cultural sphere has a voice, (self-)representation and a momentum. There are other cuts, possibly bigger, possibly worse that are not mentioned at all of these protests." I ask what cuts they mean. To social services. I ask if the person who tells me this will talk about it, out there, in a public sphere. Some sort of deferral ensues, they have no social media; the other person present says they have low instagram stories reach (which is undoubtedly higher than mine). I am too tired to pursue this further. We are leaving a (purposefully tautologically named) center for theoretical periphery. We know that things always begin from sideline conversations, small story reach is irrelevant.

But is it possible to talk about every single issue at hand with the same emphasis, at all times, while having a side job, or three? Unlikely. We choose our battles, we do what we can with what’s available.

“Welcome to how the rest of the world lives”.