Workers' Club, 2005
Suzana Milevska
WELCOME TO THE WORKERS’ CLUB
Conference Time-Work-Organisation, Prague
International Contemporary Art Biennial - National Gallery Prague
14, 06, 2005
The project Workers’ Club is imagined as a kind of ironic re-staging of a workers’ club show (Mac: ‘priredba’). Such shows used to be organised in most of the communist countries on the occasions such as anniversaries, public holidays and other celebrations. During the shows various sections of the local workers’ clubs used to present their activities in a form of poetry readings, drama and sketch performances, concerts, exhibitions, quiz shows, chess and sport tournaments.
By miming the format of workers’ clubs’ shows (but not their content) the project Workers’ Club at the International Contemporary Art Biennale 2005 offers an informal ‘stage’ for interaction between art and cultural ‘workers’, and members of the audience (in a way ‘workers’ themselves). The art projects by Zdenko Bužek, Susan Kelly & Stephen Morton, Tanja Ostojić & Fahim Amir, Tadej Pogačar, Dan Perjovschi’s and Mladen Stilinović are put together in a kind of loose ‘art workers’ club’, retaining the original conceptual framework of each project. The main aim of the Worker’s Club project is not any kind of call for revival of the original concept of workers’ clubs but it rather intends to enable a ‘second sight’, a kind of framework for revisiting and critical re-evaluation of this extinct phenomenon of self-organisation and social ‘design’. The visitors are invited to mingle and communicate with the project’s participants and through various art concepts to re-consider the relevance of the issues of work and organisation of work, self-organisation, measurement of working time, and also the issues of idleness and organisation of leisure time in the cultural and art context.
Workers’ clubs emerged during Soviet communist era (in the 20s and 30s of 20th century) and originally were imagined as sites for socialising and recreation of the workers and their families. The activities exercised in such clubs ranged from amateurish leisure and hobby programmes of drama, music, photo, art and literature sections, or chess and sport clubs, to theoretical educational programmes: political courses and schools. These social environments intended to provide common space for conceiving the leisure time as active and collective, and for negotiating and consenting over the ways in which the culture and public sphere could merge with private life - a kind of platforms for “culturalisation of the masses” (Trotsky). Thus, seemingly simple socialising goals were challenged by higher and patronising aims of the ‘intelligentsia’ to provide a context where workers and their families could improve themselves by appropriating the propagated communist values.
However, besides this very important but problematic role of commitment to establish communist ethical values and better societal relations between the workers, the workers’ clubs idea inevitably challenged and affected the aesthetical values and principles. The constructivist architects and designers were provoked to social aesthetic experiments that led to modern architectural and interior design projects. The most renowned projects of workers’ clubs are the ones created by the architect Konstantin Mel'nikov (e.g. his Soviet pavilion for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925 at Grand Palais in Paris), and the unrealised geometric design of the Lenin Corner in a form of Workers’ club by Alexander Rodchenko.
The artists invited to the Workers’ Club project are to elaborate and express what they think should be the questions that one needs to engage with in an imaginary ‘art workers’ club’ today. The project will inevitably reflect on the differences between the working ethics in capitalist, transitional and post-transitional societies by putting the emphasis on the urgency of supporting the self-organisation and self-management. The issues of measurement of paid and not paid work, the productivity and consumption in the context of trans-national flux of capital and the viability of the established dichotomy between work and leisure (read: idleness) are also to be tackled.
In a way Susan Kelly’s and Stephen Morton’s project What is to be Done? has triggered the whole Workers’ Club idea: the design of their on-going archive, where the audience is invited to sit and contemplate relevant up-to-date answers to the historic Lenin’s question what is to be done? [1] once asked in a different moment in the past and its projection in the future when asked today, was in fact inspired by Rodchenko’s ‘Workers’ Club’ design. An additional historic contextual reference is the fact that the All-Russia Conference of RSDLP held in January 1912 was organised in People´s House in Prague. [2] Some of the main themes discussed at the conference concerned the issues of self-organisation of the party and the relation between theory and revolutionary practice to which Lenin devoted several speeches and resolutions. [3]
The issue of self-organisation and self-management can be a relevant starting point for making theoretical distinctions between different models of socialism and its revolutionary change. The decentralised and participatory unique model of workers’ self-management of socially owned resources and the social planning not excluding the market (formulated as ‘self-management’ by the Yugoslav socialist theorist Edward Kardelj in 50s) were once thought as fundamental alternatives to the model of central command and planning in Soviet Union. In practice the concept of self-management and social ownership in which the distinction between individual and society was expected to vanish did not prove as impeccable and resistant to the economic contradictions as it sounded in theory. [4]
Yet, how can all these social, economic and political questions apply to art and culture when taking into account the fact that the issues of work and self-organisation are not seriously embedded when discussing art? To call the artists - art workers is not very common and socially acceptable: in contrary, art is usually treated as a kind of escape from any ‘work’ entailing endeavor and labour. Also, the immaterial work involved in the creation of works of art is not measured according to the accepted economic standards, either according to production ‘per piece’ or ‘per hour'. Such a dichotomic relation between work and art has been long challenged as problematic by many artists (e.g. Bert Thies, Dialectical Leap, 1998, Manifesta 2) and philosophers. Namely, Bertrand Russell called for ‘organised diminution of work’ since he believed that people would then have more time for art: ‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.’ [5] In 1839, almost a century before Russell, Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son in law) in his treatise The Right to Be Lazy dubbed work ‘a disastrous dogma’ and he spoke critically about the results of the acceleration force of early industry: ‘All individual and social misery comes from a passion for work’. [6]
When today a contemporary anarchist Bob Black exclaims: ‘No one should ever work’ [7] it seems that he follows this radical philosophical tradition of resistance towards the obsessive compulsive workaholic-osis of the contemporary society that is probably still supported only by anarchists and artists. Mladen Stilinović has questioned the ‘work dogma’ and launched his own witty take on this issue in his work The Praise of Laziness (1993). Actually it was a performed text referring to Duchamp and Malevich (‘Laziness – the real truth of mankind’, 1921) that ends with the slogan ‘Work is a Disease’ misleadingly attributed to Marx, but in fact coined by Stilinović back in 1979.
The phenomena of workaholic-ism, over-working (e.g. the endless prolongation of the working time on internet), and unequal exchange inevitably pop up as more urgent. Is there any kind of possibility for a radical social change, or should these phenomena be included within the established economic systems and regimes of measurement of labour? In a seminar entitled 'Time - Work - Organisation' to take place at the beginning of the exhibition, Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton have invited Leena Kakko (curator at the Lenin Museum, Tampere), other participants in the project, and the audience to discuss the original context of the project What is to be Done? (2002) and to expand on Lenin's question with reference to questions of work, social change and possible future revolutions. ‘Antonio Negri has argued that under post-fordist production, capitalism can no longer measure the working day, and that there are ‘no time clocks to punch on the terrain of bio-political production’ (Empire, p.403). Given that the Czech Republic (like much of the developed ‘North’) has moved from being an old industrial centre to a post-fordist economy where over 50% of workers are employed in the service industry, we invite the public to consider what does the worker ‘do’ today?’ (S. Kelly and S. Morton)
The co-operative project European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir will question the institutions and organisations of revolutionary movements and will deal with the importance of the role that contemporary artists have in the interpretation of the continually changing capitalist society. Tadej Pogačar’s interactive board game MonApoly – A Human Trade Game is his ironic take of the renowned Monopoly game. It explores the paradoxes of sex work as a specific form of trade and parallel economy and the exploitation of immigrant sex workers as a result of the globalisation and the ‘unequal exchange’ in the ‘sex-market’. Zdenko Bužek in his joke-telling performance Bužek Comedy Club will address the work issue in a humorous but not always laughable and entertaining way. Dan Perjovschi’s Working & Clubbing: The Prague Report will create a mural/‘wall newspaper’ as a site-specific interface for communication between the artist and the other art workers at the Second Sight Biennial.
Notes:
1. The question What is to be Done? was first used in 1863 by N. G. Chernyshevsky as a title of his novel about the ‘new people’. V. I. Lenin used it again in 1902 to entitle his notorious pamphlet.
2. Lidový dùm in Hybernská Street, 7, Prague, former Lenin Museum (1948-1990).
3. The resolutions and other documents from 1912 conference are on display at The Lenin Museum in Moscow - collection A New Rise of the Revolutionary Tide (1910-1914).
4. David L. Prychitko. “Did Horvat Answer Hayek? The Crisis of Yugoslav Serf-Management” in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, February, 1991, http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=2353).
5. Bertrand Russell. In Praise of Idleness. 1932. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
6. Paul Lafargue. The Right to Be Lazy. Written in a French prison, translated into English by Charles H Kerr, 1907, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1989. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/
7. Bob Black. The Abolition of Work. http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html
Mladen Stilinović, Work is a Disease – Karl Marx, 1979 (2004)
text / silk, T-shirt
The Praise of Laziness, 1993
text
If work has created the man, then the idleness must have created the artist.
M. Stilinović
The fact that Mladen Stilinović never wrote this is a mere coincidence. Stilinović has similarly addressed the relations between art, work and idleness through many of his conceptual works. In his photographs, performances, installations, slogans or other texts that he performs, writes or prints over various objects with bright humour and wittiness he often challenges the catachrestic truisms and received dogmas inhabiting our language and culture (work certainly being one of them). When presenting the photographs of himself taken while sleeping under the title Artist at Work (photo-book, 1978), or when misleadingly signing his own slogan ‘Work is a Disease’ with ‘Karl Marx’, Stilinović creates a kind of ambiguity, an artistic alternative to the never questioned Marxian ideology authorities praising work. The slogan Work is a Disease first appeared in 1979, and it was also mentioned at the end of Stilinović’s text The Praise of Laziness that was read as a part of his performance in the Gallery Opus Operandi in Gent. The text expresses Stilinović’s concerns about the future of art in conditions of erased borders between West and East: according to the artist the capitalistic intolerance of laziness, mainly based on the need for production, is putting in jeopardy the Eastern ‘use’ of it for making art. In order to back up his provocative thesis, in addition to Marx’s bogus reference, Stilinović also quotes Duchamp’s and Malevich’s statements pro laziness and against work. Finally, in order to dispute the Western pragmatic attitude towards the importance of work he proposes the paradoxical programmatic claim ‘there is no art without laziness’. Among other infamous works by Stilinović is the slogan An Artist who cannot Speak English is no Artist, 1984 - a statement that has been quoted so many times as a kind of cultural critique of the hegemonic power in the period of disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of the processes of transition and globalisation of culture.
Dan Perjovschi, Working&Clubbing: The Prague Report, 2005
wall-newspaper
The project Working&Clubbing: The Prague Report, 2005, by Dan Perjovschi is conceived as a printed and a wall-newspaper. It is in a way a new edition of his long term project Landing that was first launched in 1998 (Manifesta 2, Luxembourg). His previous newspapers and other low-key publications created in different contexts reflect Perjovschi’s ability to quickly catch and sketch the relevant problematic that bothers people around him, as a kind of his illustrated journal given the specific situations. Each time he publishes such a newspaper with drawings, cartoons and texts (in ‘balloons’) he creates and commits to his own ‘editorial policy’ concerning the troubled social, cultural, political and economical conditions in his environment. ‘What I am right now is partly due to my newspaper activity - I have 14 years of weekly work (http://www.revista22.ro/). Even when I was for half a year in the States I kept sending the drawings. Since 4 years ago I have a weekly political column, 150-500 signs, ultra-short and ultra-tough.’ (D. Perjovschi)
In the context of Workers’ Club the wall-newspaper provides Perjovschi with a personal space for expressing and summarising the comments on the breaking news and rumours that will get spread among the biennial workers - in a way it is also reminiscent to the medium of wall-newspaper used in the workers’ clubs as internal information means for facilitating the communication and self-organisation of the workers (an imagined space for a wall-newspaper can be also spotted in Rodchenko’s design for a workers’ club). In some previous projects Perjovschi created similar site-specific murals that allowed him to express the actual relation between the space and the context in which he created/performed his work. Especially renowned are his floor mural for the Romanian Pavilion in Venice Biennial (1999) which got erased underneath foot steps of the visitors and thus referred to the fragility of national identity, and the mural from 2002 drawn all over the abandoned coke plant in Essen.
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton
What is to be Done? Time-Work-Organisation, 2002-2005
installation, on-going archive and conference
For Workers’ Club project we propose to build a workers’ study environment for the ongoing archive of responses to ‘What is to be Done?’ The space is designed to facilitate reading of previous responses to the question, the composition and exhibition of public responses to the question in Prague, and a public discussion. The basic wooden study environment will be loosely modelled on the design of Aleksander Rodchenko’s ‘Workers Club’, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris in 1925. It will contain racks to display the archive (and extra copies of responses), a small library of books and essays, an old factory time clock that can date and time stamp new responses, and a rack into which new responses can be added.
What is to be Done? began at the Lenin Museum in Finland in 2002. This project is an on-going archive that maps the network of people that responded to Lenin’s question, re-posed 100 years after the publication of the original book. The Prague archive will retain the central aim of generating and documenting ideas for social change and possible futures. Over 150 responses were received during the initial phase of project including some from Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, Jeremy Gilbert, Nell McCafferty, members of the Finnish Parliament and an array of artists of artists, visitors to the museum, friends and colleagues.
By asking this question during the conference ‘Time – Work – Organisation’ at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2005, we seek to explore how art can address different workers and forms of work, and where intellectual and research-based artwork as immaterial labour fits into contemporary regimes of labour.
S. Kelly and S. Morton
Tadej Pogačar, MonApoly - A Human Trade Game, 2004
interactive board game, edition of 100
produced by GFZK, Leipzig and P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
‘MonApoly board game is a new cartography of global sex work and trade with humans. Instead of accumulating capital, it explains the geopolitics of sex work in the period of global capitalism and new economy. MonApoly visually follows Monopoly and the basic scheme of the most famous capitalist game, but the contents are completely new. While playing the players obtain new information on the global sex work, activist organisations, crime gangs that organise slave trade, etc. The players can finance the construction of a safe house, support operations of groups that are fighting for the sex workers rights or save a sex slave from Moldova etc.’ (T.P.) The visitors of the Worker’s Club space are invited to play this board game that is a kind of logical continuation of Pogačar’s long-term project ‘Code:Red : ‘CODE:RED is an ongoing collaborative, interdisciplinary platform for investigation and discussion selected aspects of prostitution and sexual work as a specific form of parallel economy. It researches analogue economic models such as the ones of isolated groups and social minorities. The project uses real and virtual spaces and takes the form of an open dialogue between artists, sex workers and the public in selected urban environments and local contexts. The CODE:RED project takes advantage of different forms of public activity and activism, subversions in the urban, media and virtual environments. Its first public presentation took place at the Venice Biennial in 2001, when it organized – in collaboration with the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes from Pordenone, Italy – the ‘First World Congress of Sex Workers and the New Parasitism’, which brought together in Venice sex worker organizations from Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. In collaboration with a number of the leading activists and organizations in New York, Washington, Boston, and Baltimore, conference "The Ultimate Sex Worker Conspiracy Soiree: Conference and Party" was held in 2002 in New York.’ (T. Pogačar)
Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir, European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics, 2005
a speech and discussion, co-operative project by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir
The project European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics is a co-operation between Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir. It will consist of a speech to be performed by Fahim Amir at the opening night, and a discussion with the audience. This project comes as a continuation to Tanja Ostojić’s previous engagements in cultural critique of the international art institutions and her disagreement with the way in which certain relevant political and economical topics are getting introduced in the context of exhibitions and art conferences. In her opinion visual arts and political activism should continuously inform each other about different models and strategies of actions. In the context of Workers’ Club project she has invited Fahim Amir (Marxist theorist of Afghan origin, teaching social politics in Vienna) to give the opening speech. Amir’s speech is going to point to the urgency of the problematic relation between art and politics and to the importance that contemporary artists keep on trying to ‘understand the current processes with all their contradictions as expressions of and means to the reconfiguration of forces in a continually changing capitalism.’ (F. Amir) Tanja Ostojić is an cross-disciplinary artist and cultural activist of Yugoslav origin. In her performances and other relational projects she usually engages in cultural, social, and political critique of the institutional and individual centres of power. Often playing dangerously with various authorities such as immigration officials, prisons, museums, or curators, she exposes herself to possible counter-effects from these power centres. Thus she has deconstructed the border between her private and her public life as an artist, especially when crossing borders illegally in her on-going series of performances, or when in the context of her on-going project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport she got married via internet add and subjected herself to many tedious procedures and discussions with various authorities).
Zdenko Bužek, Bužek Comedy Club, 2005
performance
The so called ‘black’ jokes, not always politically correct and often told in a kind of self-defence of certain communities undergoing deep economic or political crisis, are in the core of Zdenko Bužek’s performance Bužek Comedy Club, 2005. Bužek will ‘entertain’ the issue of work by telling some funny and some less funny jokes about workers, employment and payment in capitalist, communist or transitional societies. ‘The selected jokes used to be popular in Ex Yugoslavia, from 60s until the beginning of 90s, or are jokes that were re-told during and after the war that started 1991 in Croatia and had spread to the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina and Kosovo. All during that time the ritual of telling jokes had a very important role in preserving the mental health and the social functioning of the population. The specific narrative of telling jokes had a long tradition in all countries of Ex-Yugoslavia, as an important medium of socialising that is still retained in these societies. By the way, the jokes reflect very well the people's destiny in this small part of the world during the second half of the last century. This performance is a kind of exercise which aims to enable a spontaneous communication and create a mutual pleasant time between the guests/visitors and the artist.’ (Bužek)
Zdenko Bužek’s previous performances included telling ‘black’ jokes about earthquakes by phoning the exhibition space, or creating S.O.S. line for people affected by the Istanbul earthquake in 1999. After inheriting his late aunt Blaga’s house in Skopje, Bužek dedicated few projects to her past. He engaged in re-creating real and imaginary itineraries that were based on her amazing archive of fake identity cards and other documents revealing her cryptic double identity as an ex-Yugoslav secret intelligence leader.
WORKERS' CLUB CONFERENCE
14 June 2005, 10 am – 6.00 pm, at the Workers’ Club
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome to the Workers’ Club - Short Introduction by Suzana Milevska to the Workers’ Club Project and the schedule of the conference
10.15 – 11.00 ‘What is to be Done?’
Susan Kelly: History of the Project WITBD
Leena Kakko: On Lenin Museum Tampere, Krasnoyarsk and the connection to Prague, including the 1912 conference
Stephen Morton: On Lenin’s Question ‘What is to be Done?’ and its links to the question of political organisation
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton to read and comment on some of the responses that were sent in that relate to question of political organisation: Michael Hardt, Imre Szeman and Maurizio Lazzarato
Questions and Comments
11.00 – 11.15 break
11.15 – 12.45 ‘Time-Work-Organisation’. Seminar around set Readings, lead by Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton.
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton will discuss connections between questions of work and time in the project and links to the texts. References will be made to the time clock, Rodchenko’s Reading Room, the impossibility of retaining a clear identity for ‘the worker’ in the post-fordist era and the question of cultural/ artistic and intellectual labour. Questions/Responses
Stephen Morton: On Marx’s ‘Working Day’ text + Questions/ Responses
Stephen Morton: On Negri’s ‘Time as Measure’ + Questions/ Responses
Susan Kelly: On Paulo Virno’s 4th and 5th Thesis on the Postfordist Multutude, + Questions/ Responses
Overall wrap up/ issues
12.45 – 1.00 break
1.00 – 1.45 ‘Architecture of Working Space’. Seminar lead by Inge Manka with the students of the course "Methods of Implementation" - Vienna University of Technology, Faculty of architecture and regional planning -Institute for Art and Design
1.45 – 2.45 lunch
2.45 – 3.15 ‘European Capitalism and The Need for MetaPolitics’: Discussion about
the collaborative project by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir (the opening speech, 13 June, 6.30 pm)
3.15 – 4.30 Round Table Discussion
Participants: Suzana Milevska, Susan Kelly, Stephen Morton, Fahim Amir, Zdenko Bužek, Tanja Ostojić, Dan Perjovschi, Tadej Pogačar, and Mladen Stilinović
4.30 – 5.00 Break
5.00 – 6.00 Labour Party (Bužek Comedy Club)
THE IBCA 2005 -NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE WAS HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF
VÁCLAV KLAUS, PRESIDENT OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC, PAVEL DOSTÁL, MINISTER OF
CULTURE OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC, AND PAVEL BÉM, LORD MAYOR OF THE CAPITAL
CITY OF PRAGUE.
PRESIDENT OF IBCA: MILAN KNÍZÁK, GENERAL DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE
MAIN CURATOR OF IBCA: TOMÁS VLČEK, DIRECTOR OF THE COLLECTION OF
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE
http://www.ngprague.cz/biennale/projects.php?lng=en&cat=c&id=13
WELCOME TO THE WORKERS’ CLUB
Conference Time-Work-Organisation, Prague
International Contemporary Art Biennial - National Gallery Prague
14, 06, 2005
The project Workers’ Club is imagined as a kind of ironic re-staging of a workers’ club show (Mac: ‘priredba’). Such shows used to be organised in most of the communist countries on the occasions such as anniversaries, public holidays and other celebrations. During the shows various sections of the local workers’ clubs used to present their activities in a form of poetry readings, drama and sketch performances, concerts, exhibitions, quiz shows, chess and sport tournaments.
By miming the format of workers’ clubs’ shows (but not their content) the project Workers’ Club at the International Contemporary Art Biennale 2005 offers an informal ‘stage’ for interaction between art and cultural ‘workers’, and members of the audience (in a way ‘workers’ themselves). The art projects by Zdenko Bužek, Susan Kelly & Stephen Morton, Tanja Ostojić & Fahim Amir, Tadej Pogačar, Dan Perjovschi’s and Mladen Stilinović are put together in a kind of loose ‘art workers’ club’, retaining the original conceptual framework of each project. The main aim of the Worker’s Club project is not any kind of call for revival of the original concept of workers’ clubs but it rather intends to enable a ‘second sight’, a kind of framework for revisiting and critical re-evaluation of this extinct phenomenon of self-organisation and social ‘design’. The visitors are invited to mingle and communicate with the project’s participants and through various art concepts to re-consider the relevance of the issues of work and organisation of work, self-organisation, measurement of working time, and also the issues of idleness and organisation of leisure time in the cultural and art context.
Workers’ clubs emerged during Soviet communist era (in the 20s and 30s of 20th century) and originally were imagined as sites for socialising and recreation of the workers and their families. The activities exercised in such clubs ranged from amateurish leisure and hobby programmes of drama, music, photo, art and literature sections, or chess and sport clubs, to theoretical educational programmes: political courses and schools. These social environments intended to provide common space for conceiving the leisure time as active and collective, and for negotiating and consenting over the ways in which the culture and public sphere could merge with private life - a kind of platforms for “culturalisation of the masses” (Trotsky). Thus, seemingly simple socialising goals were challenged by higher and patronising aims of the ‘intelligentsia’ to provide a context where workers and their families could improve themselves by appropriating the propagated communist values.
However, besides this very important but problematic role of commitment to establish communist ethical values and better societal relations between the workers, the workers’ clubs idea inevitably challenged and affected the aesthetical values and principles. The constructivist architects and designers were provoked to social aesthetic experiments that led to modern architectural and interior design projects. The most renowned projects of workers’ clubs are the ones created by the architect Konstantin Mel'nikov (e.g. his Soviet pavilion for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925 at Grand Palais in Paris), and the unrealised geometric design of the Lenin Corner in a form of Workers’ club by Alexander Rodchenko.
The artists invited to the Workers’ Club project are to elaborate and express what they think should be the questions that one needs to engage with in an imaginary ‘art workers’ club’ today. The project will inevitably reflect on the differences between the working ethics in capitalist, transitional and post-transitional societies by putting the emphasis on the urgency of supporting the self-organisation and self-management. The issues of measurement of paid and not paid work, the productivity and consumption in the context of trans-national flux of capital and the viability of the established dichotomy between work and leisure (read: idleness) are also to be tackled.
In a way Susan Kelly’s and Stephen Morton’s project What is to be Done? has triggered the whole Workers’ Club idea: the design of their on-going archive, where the audience is invited to sit and contemplate relevant up-to-date answers to the historic Lenin’s question what is to be done? [1] once asked in a different moment in the past and its projection in the future when asked today, was in fact inspired by Rodchenko’s ‘Workers’ Club’ design. An additional historic contextual reference is the fact that the All-Russia Conference of RSDLP held in January 1912 was organised in People´s House in Prague. [2] Some of the main themes discussed at the conference concerned the issues of self-organisation of the party and the relation between theory and revolutionary practice to which Lenin devoted several speeches and resolutions. [3]
The issue of self-organisation and self-management can be a relevant starting point for making theoretical distinctions between different models of socialism and its revolutionary change. The decentralised and participatory unique model of workers’ self-management of socially owned resources and the social planning not excluding the market (formulated as ‘self-management’ by the Yugoslav socialist theorist Edward Kardelj in 50s) were once thought as fundamental alternatives to the model of central command and planning in Soviet Union. In practice the concept of self-management and social ownership in which the distinction between individual and society was expected to vanish did not prove as impeccable and resistant to the economic contradictions as it sounded in theory. [4]
Yet, how can all these social, economic and political questions apply to art and culture when taking into account the fact that the issues of work and self-organisation are not seriously embedded when discussing art? To call the artists - art workers is not very common and socially acceptable: in contrary, art is usually treated as a kind of escape from any ‘work’ entailing endeavor and labour. Also, the immaterial work involved in the creation of works of art is not measured according to the accepted economic standards, either according to production ‘per piece’ or ‘per hour'. Such a dichotomic relation between work and art has been long challenged as problematic by many artists (e.g. Bert Thies, Dialectical Leap, 1998, Manifesta 2) and philosophers. Namely, Bertrand Russell called for ‘organised diminution of work’ since he believed that people would then have more time for art: ‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.’ [5] In 1839, almost a century before Russell, Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son in law) in his treatise The Right to Be Lazy dubbed work ‘a disastrous dogma’ and he spoke critically about the results of the acceleration force of early industry: ‘All individual and social misery comes from a passion for work’. [6]
When today a contemporary anarchist Bob Black exclaims: ‘No one should ever work’ [7] it seems that he follows this radical philosophical tradition of resistance towards the obsessive compulsive workaholic-osis of the contemporary society that is probably still supported only by anarchists and artists. Mladen Stilinović has questioned the ‘work dogma’ and launched his own witty take on this issue in his work The Praise of Laziness (1993). Actually it was a performed text referring to Duchamp and Malevich (‘Laziness – the real truth of mankind’, 1921) that ends with the slogan ‘Work is a Disease’ misleadingly attributed to Marx, but in fact coined by Stilinović back in 1979.
The phenomena of workaholic-ism, over-working (e.g. the endless prolongation of the working time on internet), and unequal exchange inevitably pop up as more urgent. Is there any kind of possibility for a radical social change, or should these phenomena be included within the established economic systems and regimes of measurement of labour? In a seminar entitled 'Time - Work - Organisation' to take place at the beginning of the exhibition, Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton have invited Leena Kakko (curator at the Lenin Museum, Tampere), other participants in the project, and the audience to discuss the original context of the project What is to be Done? (2002) and to expand on Lenin's question with reference to questions of work, social change and possible future revolutions. ‘Antonio Negri has argued that under post-fordist production, capitalism can no longer measure the working day, and that there are ‘no time clocks to punch on the terrain of bio-political production’ (Empire, p.403). Given that the Czech Republic (like much of the developed ‘North’) has moved from being an old industrial centre to a post-fordist economy where over 50% of workers are employed in the service industry, we invite the public to consider what does the worker ‘do’ today?’ (S. Kelly and S. Morton)
The co-operative project European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir will question the institutions and organisations of revolutionary movements and will deal with the importance of the role that contemporary artists have in the interpretation of the continually changing capitalist society. Tadej Pogačar’s interactive board game MonApoly – A Human Trade Game is his ironic take of the renowned Monopoly game. It explores the paradoxes of sex work as a specific form of trade and parallel economy and the exploitation of immigrant sex workers as a result of the globalisation and the ‘unequal exchange’ in the ‘sex-market’. Zdenko Bužek in his joke-telling performance Bužek Comedy Club will address the work issue in a humorous but not always laughable and entertaining way. Dan Perjovschi’s Working & Clubbing: The Prague Report will create a mural/‘wall newspaper’ as a site-specific interface for communication between the artist and the other art workers at the Second Sight Biennial.
Notes:
1. The question What is to be Done? was first used in 1863 by N. G. Chernyshevsky as a title of his novel about the ‘new people’. V. I. Lenin used it again in 1902 to entitle his notorious pamphlet.
2. Lidový dùm in Hybernská Street, 7, Prague, former Lenin Museum (1948-1990).
3. The resolutions and other documents from 1912 conference are on display at The Lenin Museum in Moscow - collection A New Rise of the Revolutionary Tide (1910-1914).
4. David L. Prychitko. “Did Horvat Answer Hayek? The Crisis of Yugoslav Serf-Management” in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, February, 1991, http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=2353).
5. Bertrand Russell. In Praise of Idleness. 1932. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
6. Paul Lafargue. The Right to Be Lazy. Written in a French prison, translated into English by Charles H Kerr, 1907, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1989. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/
7. Bob Black. The Abolition of Work. http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html
Mladen Stilinović, Work is a Disease – Karl Marx, 1979 (2004)
text / silk, T-shirt
The Praise of Laziness, 1993
text
If work has created the man, then the idleness must have created the artist.
M. Stilinović
The fact that Mladen Stilinović never wrote this is a mere coincidence. Stilinović has similarly addressed the relations between art, work and idleness through many of his conceptual works. In his photographs, performances, installations, slogans or other texts that he performs, writes or prints over various objects with bright humour and wittiness he often challenges the catachrestic truisms and received dogmas inhabiting our language and culture (work certainly being one of them). When presenting the photographs of himself taken while sleeping under the title Artist at Work (photo-book, 1978), or when misleadingly signing his own slogan ‘Work is a Disease’ with ‘Karl Marx’, Stilinović creates a kind of ambiguity, an artistic alternative to the never questioned Marxian ideology authorities praising work. The slogan Work is a Disease first appeared in 1979, and it was also mentioned at the end of Stilinović’s text The Praise of Laziness that was read as a part of his performance in the Gallery Opus Operandi in Gent. The text expresses Stilinović’s concerns about the future of art in conditions of erased borders between West and East: according to the artist the capitalistic intolerance of laziness, mainly based on the need for production, is putting in jeopardy the Eastern ‘use’ of it for making art. In order to back up his provocative thesis, in addition to Marx’s bogus reference, Stilinović also quotes Duchamp’s and Malevich’s statements pro laziness and against work. Finally, in order to dispute the Western pragmatic attitude towards the importance of work he proposes the paradoxical programmatic claim ‘there is no art without laziness’. Among other infamous works by Stilinović is the slogan An Artist who cannot Speak English is no Artist, 1984 - a statement that has been quoted so many times as a kind of cultural critique of the hegemonic power in the period of disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of the processes of transition and globalisation of culture.
Dan Perjovschi, Working&Clubbing: The Prague Report, 2005
wall-newspaper
The project Working&Clubbing: The Prague Report, 2005, by Dan Perjovschi is conceived as a printed and a wall-newspaper. It is in a way a new edition of his long term project Landing that was first launched in 1998 (Manifesta 2, Luxembourg). His previous newspapers and other low-key publications created in different contexts reflect Perjovschi’s ability to quickly catch and sketch the relevant problematic that bothers people around him, as a kind of his illustrated journal given the specific situations. Each time he publishes such a newspaper with drawings, cartoons and texts (in ‘balloons’) he creates and commits to his own ‘editorial policy’ concerning the troubled social, cultural, political and economical conditions in his environment. ‘What I am right now is partly due to my newspaper activity - I have 14 years of weekly work (http://www.revista22.ro/). Even when I was for half a year in the States I kept sending the drawings. Since 4 years ago I have a weekly political column, 150-500 signs, ultra-short and ultra-tough.’ (D. Perjovschi)
In the context of Workers’ Club the wall-newspaper provides Perjovschi with a personal space for expressing and summarising the comments on the breaking news and rumours that will get spread among the biennial workers - in a way it is also reminiscent to the medium of wall-newspaper used in the workers’ clubs as internal information means for facilitating the communication and self-organisation of the workers (an imagined space for a wall-newspaper can be also spotted in Rodchenko’s design for a workers’ club). In some previous projects Perjovschi created similar site-specific murals that allowed him to express the actual relation between the space and the context in which he created/performed his work. Especially renowned are his floor mural for the Romanian Pavilion in Venice Biennial (1999) which got erased underneath foot steps of the visitors and thus referred to the fragility of national identity, and the mural from 2002 drawn all over the abandoned coke plant in Essen.
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton
What is to be Done? Time-Work-Organisation, 2002-2005
installation, on-going archive and conference
For Workers’ Club project we propose to build a workers’ study environment for the ongoing archive of responses to ‘What is to be Done?’ The space is designed to facilitate reading of previous responses to the question, the composition and exhibition of public responses to the question in Prague, and a public discussion. The basic wooden study environment will be loosely modelled on the design of Aleksander Rodchenko’s ‘Workers Club’, exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris in 1925. It will contain racks to display the archive (and extra copies of responses), a small library of books and essays, an old factory time clock that can date and time stamp new responses, and a rack into which new responses can be added.
What is to be Done? began at the Lenin Museum in Finland in 2002. This project is an on-going archive that maps the network of people that responded to Lenin’s question, re-posed 100 years after the publication of the original book. The Prague archive will retain the central aim of generating and documenting ideas for social change and possible futures. Over 150 responses were received during the initial phase of project including some from Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, Jeremy Gilbert, Nell McCafferty, members of the Finnish Parliament and an array of artists of artists, visitors to the museum, friends and colleagues.
By asking this question during the conference ‘Time – Work – Organisation’ at the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2005, we seek to explore how art can address different workers and forms of work, and where intellectual and research-based artwork as immaterial labour fits into contemporary regimes of labour.
S. Kelly and S. Morton
Tadej Pogačar, MonApoly - A Human Trade Game, 2004
interactive board game, edition of 100
produced by GFZK, Leipzig and P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
‘MonApoly board game is a new cartography of global sex work and trade with humans. Instead of accumulating capital, it explains the geopolitics of sex work in the period of global capitalism and new economy. MonApoly visually follows Monopoly and the basic scheme of the most famous capitalist game, but the contents are completely new. While playing the players obtain new information on the global sex work, activist organisations, crime gangs that organise slave trade, etc. The players can finance the construction of a safe house, support operations of groups that are fighting for the sex workers rights or save a sex slave from Moldova etc.’ (T.P.) The visitors of the Worker’s Club space are invited to play this board game that is a kind of logical continuation of Pogačar’s long-term project ‘Code:Red : ‘CODE:RED is an ongoing collaborative, interdisciplinary platform for investigation and discussion selected aspects of prostitution and sexual work as a specific form of parallel economy. It researches analogue economic models such as the ones of isolated groups and social minorities. The project uses real and virtual spaces and takes the form of an open dialogue between artists, sex workers and the public in selected urban environments and local contexts. The CODE:RED project takes advantage of different forms of public activity and activism, subversions in the urban, media and virtual environments. Its first public presentation took place at the Venice Biennial in 2001, when it organized – in collaboration with the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes from Pordenone, Italy – the ‘First World Congress of Sex Workers and the New Parasitism’, which brought together in Venice sex worker organizations from Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. In collaboration with a number of the leading activists and organizations in New York, Washington, Boston, and Baltimore, conference "The Ultimate Sex Worker Conspiracy Soiree: Conference and Party" was held in 2002 in New York.’ (T. Pogačar)
Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir, European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics, 2005
a speech and discussion, co-operative project by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir
The project European Capitalism and the Need for Metapolitics is a co-operation between Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir. It will consist of a speech to be performed by Fahim Amir at the opening night, and a discussion with the audience. This project comes as a continuation to Tanja Ostojić’s previous engagements in cultural critique of the international art institutions and her disagreement with the way in which certain relevant political and economical topics are getting introduced in the context of exhibitions and art conferences. In her opinion visual arts and political activism should continuously inform each other about different models and strategies of actions. In the context of Workers’ Club project she has invited Fahim Amir (Marxist theorist of Afghan origin, teaching social politics in Vienna) to give the opening speech. Amir’s speech is going to point to the urgency of the problematic relation between art and politics and to the importance that contemporary artists keep on trying to ‘understand the current processes with all their contradictions as expressions of and means to the reconfiguration of forces in a continually changing capitalism.’ (F. Amir) Tanja Ostojić is an cross-disciplinary artist and cultural activist of Yugoslav origin. In her performances and other relational projects she usually engages in cultural, social, and political critique of the institutional and individual centres of power. Often playing dangerously with various authorities such as immigration officials, prisons, museums, or curators, she exposes herself to possible counter-effects from these power centres. Thus she has deconstructed the border between her private and her public life as an artist, especially when crossing borders illegally in her on-going series of performances, or when in the context of her on-going project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport she got married via internet add and subjected herself to many tedious procedures and discussions with various authorities).
Zdenko Bužek, Bužek Comedy Club, 2005
performance
The so called ‘black’ jokes, not always politically correct and often told in a kind of self-defence of certain communities undergoing deep economic or political crisis, are in the core of Zdenko Bužek’s performance Bužek Comedy Club, 2005. Bužek will ‘entertain’ the issue of work by telling some funny and some less funny jokes about workers, employment and payment in capitalist, communist or transitional societies. ‘The selected jokes used to be popular in Ex Yugoslavia, from 60s until the beginning of 90s, or are jokes that were re-told during and after the war that started 1991 in Croatia and had spread to the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina and Kosovo. All during that time the ritual of telling jokes had a very important role in preserving the mental health and the social functioning of the population. The specific narrative of telling jokes had a long tradition in all countries of Ex-Yugoslavia, as an important medium of socialising that is still retained in these societies. By the way, the jokes reflect very well the people's destiny in this small part of the world during the second half of the last century. This performance is a kind of exercise which aims to enable a spontaneous communication and create a mutual pleasant time between the guests/visitors and the artist.’ (Bužek)
Zdenko Bužek’s previous performances included telling ‘black’ jokes about earthquakes by phoning the exhibition space, or creating S.O.S. line for people affected by the Istanbul earthquake in 1999. After inheriting his late aunt Blaga’s house in Skopje, Bužek dedicated few projects to her past. He engaged in re-creating real and imaginary itineraries that were based on her amazing archive of fake identity cards and other documents revealing her cryptic double identity as an ex-Yugoslav secret intelligence leader.
WORKERS' CLUB CONFERENCE
14 June 2005, 10 am – 6.00 pm, at the Workers’ Club
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome to the Workers’ Club - Short Introduction by Suzana Milevska to the Workers’ Club Project and the schedule of the conference
10.15 – 11.00 ‘What is to be Done?’
Susan Kelly: History of the Project WITBD
Leena Kakko: On Lenin Museum Tampere, Krasnoyarsk and the connection to Prague, including the 1912 conference
Stephen Morton: On Lenin’s Question ‘What is to be Done?’ and its links to the question of political organisation
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton to read and comment on some of the responses that were sent in that relate to question of political organisation: Michael Hardt, Imre Szeman and Maurizio Lazzarato
Questions and Comments
11.00 – 11.15 break
11.15 – 12.45 ‘Time-Work-Organisation’. Seminar around set Readings, lead by Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton.
Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton will discuss connections between questions of work and time in the project and links to the texts. References will be made to the time clock, Rodchenko’s Reading Room, the impossibility of retaining a clear identity for ‘the worker’ in the post-fordist era and the question of cultural/ artistic and intellectual labour. Questions/Responses
Stephen Morton: On Marx’s ‘Working Day’ text + Questions/ Responses
Stephen Morton: On Negri’s ‘Time as Measure’ + Questions/ Responses
Susan Kelly: On Paulo Virno’s 4th and 5th Thesis on the Postfordist Multutude, + Questions/ Responses
Overall wrap up/ issues
12.45 – 1.00 break
1.00 – 1.45 ‘Architecture of Working Space’. Seminar lead by Inge Manka with the students of the course "Methods of Implementation" - Vienna University of Technology, Faculty of architecture and regional planning -Institute for Art and Design
1.45 – 2.45 lunch
2.45 – 3.15 ‘European Capitalism and The Need for MetaPolitics’: Discussion about
the collaborative project by Tanja Ostojić and Fahim Amir (the opening speech, 13 June, 6.30 pm)
3.15 – 4.30 Round Table Discussion
Participants: Suzana Milevska, Susan Kelly, Stephen Morton, Fahim Amir, Zdenko Bužek, Tanja Ostojić, Dan Perjovschi, Tadej Pogačar, and Mladen Stilinović
4.30 – 5.00 Break
5.00 – 6.00 Labour Party (Bužek Comedy Club)
THE IBCA 2005 -NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE WAS HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF
VÁCLAV KLAUS, PRESIDENT OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC, PAVEL DOSTÁL, MINISTER OF
CULTURE OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC, AND PAVEL BÉM, LORD MAYOR OF THE CAPITAL
CITY OF PRAGUE.
PRESIDENT OF IBCA: MILAN KNÍZÁK, GENERAL DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE
MAIN CURATOR OF IBCA: TOMÁS VLČEK, DIRECTOR OF THE COLLECTION OF
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE
http://www.ngprague.cz/biennale/projects.php?lng=en&cat=c&id=13
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