File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1998/avant-garde.9806, message 91


Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 20:13:41 +0100
From: Alastair Dickson <adickson-AT-stirmargrev.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Artists' unions and anti-art


In article <199806211635.MAA06517-AT-panix2.panix.com>, malgosia askanas
<ma-AT-panix.com> writes
>Can anybody recommend any good literature on the history of unionization
>among artists?  I am (of course) particularly interested on the relationships
>between unionization trends and anti-art positions.

What is the substance of the "unionisation" which you're addressing?
Are you seeking those strands which may fit the trade union model, of a
professionalised negotiating stratum which interposing itself between
capital and labour, generally by reducing conflict to the question of
"the rate for the job"?  Or are you seeking histories of collective
artistic initiatives?

Obviously, the two are related. In Britain, some people from the
performance art mileau of the 60s have been prominent campaigners for
the National Artists Association, a trade union type organisation which
did succeed, I think, in negotiating a standard minimum exhibition fee
for artists exhibiting in galleries funded by the Arts Council of
England (unlike Scotland). 

Collective initiatives, such as artist-run galleries, tend to expire
after a natural life-course or become promotional organisations. I'm
thinking here of the difference between the London Musicians Collective
as it was around 1978 - a space for non-idiomatic music in a warehouse -
and in its current role as a promoter of festivals of various "other"
musics.

A more famous example is the Jazz Composers Guild, organised by Bill
Dixon in the mid 60s, and the later passage from JCG to the Jazz
Composers Orchestra Association organised by Carla Bley and Michael
Mantler.  I don't know whether this intriguing project has been
documented in depth, aside from a couple of slapdash pages in Jacques
Attali's "Noise" and a few pages in John Szwed's Sun Ra biography. 

Could you say more about the "anti-art" which you want to relate to such
collective positions?  A lot would depend on what you were meaning by
this?  If it was just what I might call "the left-wing of galleryism" -
spaces presenting ostensibly challenging work, whose disavowal of
popular appeal leads to empty galleries and economic dependence on state
funding - their tendency is towards a professionalised administrative
stratum negotiating the rate with the funding agencies and acting as
(anti-)aesthetic arbitrar.

-- Alastair Dickson, Stirling, Scotland
-- <adickson-AT-stirmargrev.demon.co.uk>


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