Fair Play - Art, Performance and Neoliberalism

J. Harvie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137027290
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book asks what is the quality of participation in contemporary art and performance? Has it been damaged by cultural policies which have 'entrepreneurialized' artists, cut arts funding and cultivated corporate philanthropy? Has it been fortified by crowdfunding, pop-ups and craftsmanship? And how can it help us to understand social welfare?

1

Labour: Participation, Delegation and Deregulation

Introduction

In 2010 artists Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd opened the original London version of the deeply immersive theatrical event You Me Bum Bum Train (YMBBT) in a disused building in Bethnal Green.¹ Individual audience members started out at timed intervals on journeys that took them through dozens of carefully produced immersive scenarios where they were the only audience, they were invited to perform and they became ‘the star of the show’ (Hemming, 2011). Bond and Lloyd request that volunteers, audiences and reviewers keep the scenarios secret so that future audiences can be surprised, but some of the scenes have gradually been disclosed: a kebab shop; a chat show, where the audience is the host; and an American football team’s changing room, where the audience is the coach (ibid.). Financial Times reviewer Sarah Hemming revealed,

By the time I reeled out, elated, I had delivered a sermon, burgled a house, given a pep talk to a team of American footballers and been thrown down a chute with the rubbish sacks …. In a typical journey on the You Me Bum Bum Train, every scene is fitted out in precise and loving detail, down to the institutional lighting in a job centre, the oily car parts in a garage or the smell of a football changing room.

(2011)

Audiences and reviewers raved. Daily Mail reviewer Patrick Marmion enthused, ‘People emerge high with excitement’, and, ‘this must be one of the most amazing, must-see events of the summer’ (Marmion, 2010). Hemming (2011) described the show as ‘inspiring, liberating and exhilarating’. Bond and Lloyd won an Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award.

YMBBT returned in modified form in 2011 in an old postal sorting office in Holborn, central London, and in another incarnation in Stratford, East London, as part of the London Cultural Olympiad in summer 2012. By now, it was a huge cause célèbre, partly because its tickets were piping-hot commodities and sold out speedily, but also because its practices of employment – or more precisely unpaid employment – were garnering increasingly high-profile scrutiny, including with actors’ union Equity. You Me Bum Bum Train’s inventors Bond and Lloyd claimed that, to achieve its deeply immersive experience, the show required thousands of volunteers as cast and crew. In one incarnation, says Lloyd, ‘4000 people took part because they wanted to contribute for unknown strangers – it’s kind of like a big surprise party’ (Time Out, 2012). Bond and Lloyd have argued that tickets would be prohibitively expensive if all volunteers received Equity wages. ‘Our last show involved 450 people’, Bond explained in 2012. ‘If we paid everyone at Equity rates, it would cost between £2.5 and £3m to stage. It’s just not possible’ (quoted in Barnett, 2012a). All YMBBT’s cast and crew are volunteers and unpaid, and even Bond and Lloyd do not take a wage from the show, reportedly surviving on working tax credits and sleeping in the venues (Chandrasekhar, 2012). Furthermore, Lloyd claims that it is not only impossible to pay volunteers, but undesirable. ‘Even if we could pay people’, he has said, ‘it would completely change the dynamic. The whole point is to create an exciting, inclusive experience – for the audience and the performers …. It’s really special’ (quoted in Barnett, 2012a).

‘A row is brewing’, the Guardian reported before the show opened in 2012. ‘The performers’ union Equity is considering taking legal action against the company’s two artistic directors, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, on the grounds that none of the small army of actors and crew involved in the show – which costs £20 a ticket – gets paid’ (Barnett, 2012a). In 2011, the blog Actorsminimumwage (AMW) had launched a campaign encouraging YMBBT volunteers to claim National Minimum Wage and to collaborate with Equity in pressuring YMBBT producers to pay that wage (AMW, 2011). AMW pointed out that the YMBBT company received £40,000 in Arts Council funding. The show’s various co-producers have included other ACE-funded organizations such as the Barbican, Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Cultural Olympiad. Bond and Lloyd argue that YMBBT both requires and thrives on free labour; others counter that YMBBT ravenously devours free labour, mocks the principle that labour should be paid and risks making acting the privileged domain of the independently wealthy. Interviewed by the Guardian, actor, director and Equity member Samuel West, for example, said, ‘no matter how good the artistic results, I can’t support a working model where actors aren’t paid at all. Otherwise the only people who can afford to be in those shows are those who have other jobs or savings or private incomes – and that alters the demographic of actors you can use, and eventually the demographic of the profession’ (in Barnett, 2012a).

You Me Bum Bum Train offers a notorious example of some of the acute pressures on human labour – and humans ourselves – in contemporary art and performance cultures. In insecure contemporary economies, people are persuaded to undersell themselves by taking underpaid and unpaid work in the hope that it will lead to future paid work – as well as for the thrill of the work itself. But while YMBBT makes this potential for exploitation starkly visible through the headline-grabbing example of its thousands of unpaid volunteers, it could be argued that such worker exploitation is pervasive – if usually less acute and less frequently noted – across much contemporary art and performance, where audiences are increasingly regularly called on to participate in, contribute to and at least co-create the performance also for free and sometimes, more precisely, at the cost of a fee. Even in immersive theatre events where all professional performers are paid, audiences often contribute their labour for free by, for example, peopling crowd scenes. In one-to-one performances, the audience member is often invited to act – to be in bed with Oreet Ashery in Say Cheese (from 2001) or to have one’s feet bathed by Adrian Howells in Foot-Washing for the Sole (2009) (see Zerihan, 2009). Likewise, in many audio walks – such as, in London alone, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999), Graeme Miller’s Linked (2003) and Platform’s And While London Burns (2006) – the listener becomes the performer of the walk, the ‘real’ actors long gone. Similarly, in relational and installation art, the audience co-creates the event – by having a social encounter in a work by Tino Sehgal (for example in These Associations in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 2012), sliding down a slide in Carsten Höller’s Test Site (Turbine Hall, 2006) or inhabiting the microclimate of Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project (Turbine Hall, 2003).

Some might argue that these examples of audience participation are precisely the opposite of the kind of worker exploitation detractors accused You Me Bum Bum Train of perpetrating. Indeed, it might be that in these instances, audience members are not passively exploited, but rather actively exploit opportunities to be expressive, to be empowered, to claim agency in the making of art and performance, to be ‘spectator-performers’² and to be artists. Whatever one’s position in these arguments, they indicate, first, that labour is circulating widely across makers and audiences in contemporary art and performance, and second, that this circulation of labour is important and demands scrutiny because it articulates and significantly affects social power relations.

In this part of the book, I explore labour trends in contemporary art and performance to ask what social power relations they create and thus how they may be politically enabling and/or problematic. I propose that longstanding rules and etiquettes that have limited audiences’ active participation in art and performance are, in many contexts, loosening up, bringing about a kind of deregulation of art and performance’s labour laws and pools so that, often, ‘the artist is no longer the central agent in his or her own work, but operates through a range of individuals, communities, and surrogates’ (Bishop and Sladen, 2008, p. 9). I consider how this labour deregulation in art and performance corresponds to the broader deregulation of markets – particularly labour markets – under neoliberal capitalism. I interrogate what the effects of this artistic deregulation are for social power relations, art, performance, individuals and groups. And I explore how understanding patterns of labour in contemporary art and performance can help us better understand and negotiate patterns of labour and their social power dynamics in culture more broadly (see Bishop, 2012; Jackson, 2011; Kattwinkel, 2003; Kester, 2004; Miessen and Basar, 2006).

In the next section, I describe in more detail the kind of art and performance that delegates labour and/or agency principally to its audiences but also to others. Then I explore, first, some of the potential social benefits of art and performance which make everyone an artist, and second, some of the potential social problems of this trend, particularly as these problems relate to shifts in contemporary labour patterns. Then I consider the relation of the participating audience member to what American futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler called the ‘prosumer’ – the consumer who also designs and produces what she consumes. Finally, I consider what this trend, which appears often to empower individuals, might do for groups, group dynamics and social good. Though I acknowledge that art and performance’s delegation of labour – or agency – offers some important social benefits, I argue that in many instances it risks reproducing some of the most egregious conditions and effects of contemporary labour relations, though at its best, it draws self-reflexive critical attention to that risk.

Delegated art and performance

Art and performance that delegate activity cover a huge range of forms and examples but their delegation usually follows one of two routes: more frequently, they delegate to audiences who participate without remuneration; less often, they delegate to people – whether amateur or expert – who are specifically contracted to do something by the artist or performance company.³ One could say that audience participation is always required to make successful art or performance. Indeed, Jacques Rancière argues that the apparent passivity of the audience member in conventionally organized theatre is precisely that, apparent, since the spectator is, in Rancière’s terminology, ‘emancipated’, actively engaging with the production intellectually and critically (Rancière, 2009). I agree with Rancière that, ideally, this is true. But the art and performance I focus on here usually requires its audiences physically to act, often implicitly suggesting that this audience is more ‘emancipated’ than Rancière’s, though I will be interrogating this suggestion. This kind of cultivation of physically active audience participation usually happens, in theatre, in immersive environments, one-to-one events and performances where audience members are deliberately outnumbered by performers, and in visual and sculptural art, through large-scale immersive or relational environments. In both theatre and visual/sculptural art, ‘making’ is also sometimes delegated to specifically commissioned others, both expert and amateur. In what follows, I outline these varieties of delegation – acknowledging that they do not exhaust the list of potential contexts for cultivating active audience participation – before moving on to explore their social effects.

Immersive theatre and art

Immersive theatre characteristically creates a through-designed environment which surrounds audience members and in which they are generally invited to move about. Theatre scholar Adam Alston (2012, p. 194) describes it succinctly as ‘a promenade theatre form which allows audiences the benefit of free-roaming within hands-on and multi-sensory performance environments’. Realist theatre’s usual fourth wall is not so much removed (as on a proscenium arch stage) as moved, such that it and the other ‘three’ walls of the theatrical fictional space encompass the audience along with the theatre performers. This kind of performance seldom if ever uses an auditorium that is separate from the stage space, so it is often produced not in purpose-built theatres but rather in large and usually flexible spaces such as railway arches, disused factories, vacant offices, and civic buildings such as schools and town halls.

In the United Kingdom, one of the greatest exponents and best-known makers of immersive theatre is the London-based Punchdrunk, formed in 2000. In their own words, Punchdrunk make ‘immersive theatre in which roaming audiences experience epic storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds’.⁴ Their 2006/7 adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, co-produced with the National Theatre in a six-month run, played to a total audience of almost 30,000 people in 119 performances in a five-storey, 150,000 square foot former archive building in the old London neighbourhood of Wapping (Punchdrunk, 2011, Archive page). Even before entering the building, the audience began to be immersed in the show’s ambience by being disoriented: the venue was far from any of London’s main theatre districts in a neighbourhood whose industrial past was at the time only partially gentrified; the building’s adapted use was only minimally sign-posted; and getting from the gated entrance to the site on Wapping Lane to the building’s actual entrance required circumnavigation of almost the whole of the building’s perimeter (see Marini, 2013, ch. 2). Inside, audience members were ushered into a lively, crowded bar and given undecorated Venetian carnival masks to wear. In small groups they were then escorted in an elevator up to the top floor and released to explore the rest of the building’s 40-odd rooms and environments. Set in 1950s United States, the spaces of this Faust were variously designed as a dance hall, a diner complete with booths and plastic mustard bottles, a domestic sitting room, a corn field with real stands of corn, a pine forest headily scented by real trees, a maze of filing cabinets, a cinema and a row of shops. Audience members could follow performers, go exploring the many atmospheric environments, chase a narrative and/or re-watch repeated scenes. Equally, they could move in ways apparently unmotivated by the show itself, for example, following another audience member, moving against audience and performer flows or even staying put in a single location. Every audience member’s experience was uniquely composed by him or her, and though commentators often reported failing to gather a strong sense of the performance’s overarching narrative, they also reported that the show produced a palpable sense of excitement, engagement and opportunity (see Clapp, 2006; Glusker, 2006; Lightig, 2007).⁵ ‘It’s theater for the interactive age’, observed reviewer Anne Glusker in The New York Times, ‘[b]ut instead of moving a cursor, you simply move yourself, choosing whatever character you want to follow, whatever sound intrigues you, whichever enticing corridor you are drawn to explore’ (Glusker, 2006). In immersive theatre events such as this, each audience member chooses what show to compose for him or herself.

Visual, sculptural and aural art that immerses its audiences in similar ways is generally installation art that sometimes produces relational aesthetics. Installation art is not simply composed of an object or objects but produces an environment which, as in immersive theatre, surrounds and contextualizes the audience (see Bishop, 2005). For Test Site in London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall, for example, Carsten Höller installed five aluminium and Perspex spiralling slides ranging in height from four storeys to one. Turbine Hall visitors were invited to slide down the slides or simply to watch while others did so. Höller transformed the Turbine Hall at least partly into a playground (Höller, 2006). For his Turbine Hall commission, The weather project, Olafur Eliasson installed a mirrored ceiling, apparatuses that emitted mist and, high on the Hall’s eastern wall, a large half-circle screen backed by monofrequency lights. This screen doubled in the ceiling mirror to form a ‘sun’ and largely limited colour perception in the Hall to a range between yellow and black. Eliasson’s installation immersed Turbine Hall visitors in a slightly eerie indoor microclimate in which, again, they watched each another and played, making patterns on the floor to be reflected in the ceiling (see Harvie, 2009b). In Sehgal’s These Associations, there were no material objects, simply human participants, both those hired by Sehgal to move around the Turbine Hall, play in it and speak to visitors, and those visitors who responded by interacting and ‘associating’ with Sehgal’s designated delegates. Art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud has influentially described relational art as ‘an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’ (2002, p. 14, italics original). What is ‘relational’ about Test Site, The weather project, These Associations and other installations like them is that they cultivate social interaction rather than private contemplation, and that their important ‘content’ might be not so much objects (for example, slides, mirrors or lighting) as social interactions and relations.

One-to-one performance

One-to-one theatre events are similar to immersive theatre in that each audience member experiences a unique event, however similarly the performer repeats it for each audience member. Similarly, in many-to-one performances such as You Me Bum Bum Train, the individual audience member is treated as though she is the only audience member in a series of quickly sequenced mono-performances. In fact, each scene performed uniquely for her will swiftly be performed uniquely for the next audience member, and the next, and so on in a kind of serial mono-performance. Beyond creating a sense of a unique performance, however, performance produced for solo audiences can be seen to invite those solo audiences to co-create the performance in ways that go beyond usual expectations about audience energy or even the responsiveness typically required of immersive theatre, since performance for a solo audience member usually entails direct address and requires, or at least requests audience interaction. Thus, in performance for solo audiences, the audience member should actively be able to change the performance’s outcome. In You Me Bum Bum Train, for example, different audience members will develop different pep talks for the football team and different host personae for the chat show. Similarly, each audience member will establish a different relationship in solo encounters with Ashery or Howells.

Art delegated to contracted workers

Though art which delegates labour and/or agency from the artist to others most commonly delegates to audiences, sometimes it delegates to experts or amateurs who are explicitly commissioned by the artist to produce the work. In visual and fine art in general, artists regularly contract work to other experts, for example to realize a work in a particular medium (one of Tracey Emin’s writings in fluorescent lighting, for instance) or to create infrastructure for the artwork, such as its frame or lighting. But the scale of much immersive and relational art practice in large spaces like Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall means that artists are currently creating works that require much more substantial contributions of expertise from workers from other disciplines, such as engineering, in order to realize the work’s technical complexity.

Anish Kapoor’s 2002 Turbine Hall installation Marsyas, for example, was a massive, red, horn-like sculpture with three apertures, one facing out at each end of the Hall, and one opening over the bridge that spans the Hall. The apertures were held open by giant rings made of a total of 40 tonnes of high-st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Fair Play
• 1 Labour: Participation, Delegation and Deregulation
• 2 The ‘Artrepreneur’: Artists and Entrepreneurialism
• 3 Space: Exclusion and Engagement
• 4 Public/Private Capital: Arts Funding Cuts and Mixed Economies
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index