Lily Stevens 3D pathway Irina Chkhaidze Anthony Davies ‘Compost’: A response to capitalist conditions and a methodology for wriggling loose 6395 words 1 ‘Compost’: A response to capitalist conditions and a methodology for wriggling loose. Contents Intro - setting the tone and arc A note Introducing ‘Compost’ ‘Compost’ as mushroom Fly in web Compost (small c) My lizard tail Eroded mind Frantic time Urgency Duration Support structures Precarity Lifting the lid RRAAF Conclusion - drawing out fertiliser Image Sheet Bibliography Further reading List of images 2 Intro - setting the tone and arc I’ve noticed an emerging trend in lecture introductions. The speaker, before getting into the bulk of the discussion, will start by noting their positionality. Often this will be a geographic location, but might also include a few details on their racial heritage, gender, or sexuality. Facets of the self otherwise left unknown or assumed. I think this micro-practice indicates a certain philosophy. It speaks something to the ecological self, a subjectivity formed through context and personal experience (Odell, 2019 p.142). Makes visible the anti-objectivity stance that the knower cannot be separated from the knowledge they share (Barad, 2007 pp. 353-96). My reason for opening the text in this way is to convey some information about the sort of epistemological framework I am learning to gradually think into. I hope this sets a certain stylistic tone too and allows me to declare an intentional decision to speak from the position of I throughout. In this ilk, I, therefore, think it's important for me to map a rough sketch of my subjective position. To acknowledge that I am of course writing within the framework of a higher educational institution, situated in London, the broader context of the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic and accelerating environmental and ecological crisis. I am British-born and educated, having lived first in London’s suburbs and second in rural Somerset before coming to study at CSM. Within this, I am positioned as white, female, bisexual, able-bodied, and middle class. I state these experiences in the belief that they cannot and should not be extricated from my writing. A note I would like to acknowledge before diving into the bulk of the text that I have had a long tussle with its structure. I had originally tried to divide it into clean parts, sub-headed and neatly arranged. Yet in my attempt to lay things out this way I found myself constantly stuck, knotted in threads that felt truncated by my attempts in separation. I have instead opted for a more integrated structure, punctuated by small titles for navigation rather than clear-cut thematic delineation. I think of this as a more compost-like approach, to facilitate the natural entanglements, to let points bleed across, and hopefully strengthen each other like a backward stitch. I will use the conclusion of the text as a place to draw out the fertiliser generated in this larger body of writing. 3 Introducing ‘Compost’ Figure 1. Installation Shot. ‘Compost’: Turning the Heap’ Phase 01. Kathrin Böhm, The Showroom. June 2021. An email landed in my inbox this May that caught my eye. A newsletter from The Showroom, a non-profit exhibition space in West London, introduced their upcoming exhibition, ‘Compost: Turning the Heap’. My engagement with ‘Compost’ began here, then stretched across the summer, and continues through this text. Before using it as a springboard for my discussion I will sketch its overview. The two-phase exhibition is the brainchild of Kathrin Böhm, a London-based German artist, architect, and social practitioner. ‘Compost’ unfolded in two connected phases: ‘Phase 1: Turning The Heap’ ran for six weeks from mid-June 2021, and ‘Phase 2: For Future Use’ ran for a further six weeks from September. In the space, Kathrin gathered remnant material from the last ‘twenty+’ years of her practice, such as posters, objects, books, and notebooks (Figure 1). These were drawn predominantly from Kathrin’s long-term collaborative projects: Myvillages, Company Drinks, The Centre for Plausible Economics and Keep it Complex Compost (2022). Throughout Phase 1 Kathrin used The Showroom as a studio and site for the public process of composting. Visitors, alongside Kathrin and The Showroom team, were invited to participate in the ongoing sieving, sifting, and archiving of materials. After a break, ‘Compost’ re-opened as a site to ‘draw out fertiliser’ from Phase 1. Knowledge was drawn from the sifted piles and the leftover material was ‘dissolved’ through a combination of swapping, buying, gifting, and trading. I managed to grab an encounter with Phase 2, just a week shy of its closure, as well as some ‘remnant’ posters that 4 hang behind me now as I write (Figure 2). Alongside these on-site processes, there was a varied programme of online events which remain archived on ‘Compost’s’ custom-built website. These video archives have provided a valuable way to contextualise and develop my understanding of the exhibition's manifold logics beyond its end. Figure 2. . 2x A3 posters, collected from ‘Compost: For Future Use’ Phase 02. Kathrin Böhm, The Showroom. October 2021 5 ‘Compost’ as mushroom Figure 3. 2x A3 posters. Tape on paper. ‘Compost: Turning the Heap’ Phase 01. Kathrin Böhm, The Showroom. June 2021. It is common practice to start from beginnings’. So I will start with the statement Kathrin Böhm made back in January 2020 which the premise of ‘Compost’ is built around. At the turn of the year Kathrin, in her characteristic style, wrote in large taped letters ‘I don't want to do another project, I want to make a pile’ (Figure 3). When I first read this statement its sentiment resonated strongly. But why? Why did Kathrin make this statement, what was the context that precipitated this thinking, a context which I also broadly share? Before moving forward I’d like to introduce my use of an ‘Image sheet’ positioned at the bottom of the text. Here I have gathered visual placeholders for ideas. Contrary to the more descriptive function of the in-body images, these devices serve as metaphors, or small handholds intended to fortify understanding amidst the more slippery aspects of discussion. For instance, turn now to look at image 1, a mushroom, which I use to point to my angle of interrogation. As you may know, mushrooms as we see them, are the small surface expressions of a much larger, fungal body, hidden beneath the soil. This body is not a fixed mass but a tangled, rhizomatic root structure, made up of millions of tiny mycorrhizal filaments (Macfarlene, 2019 pp.87-124). The roots, therefore, precede the ‘blooming’ and pre-determine the mushrooms' form interdependently with above-ground 6 conditions. I want to try and see ‘Compost’ as a kind of mushroom, emergent from an underlying root system and a particular set of ground conditions. So while ‘Compost’ will remain the focal point of discussion, it will sit alongside ongoing consideration of the wider systems that shape it. Fly in the web The Showroom, in collaboration with Kathrin, frames ‘Compost’ as a shared desire to discontinue business as usual (The Showroom, 2021a, 5:05). Mapping the contours of this statement will be a core part of this writing but first I want to carefully define the texture of ‘discontinuation’. While I align with desire I reject the notion that ‘Compost’ can operate in full separation from the systems it is inherently enmeshed within. So let me point to image 2, the fly ensnared in the sticky web of threads, to visualise this discontinuation in a particular way. I have lifted this motif from the writing of Marxist-sociologist John Holloway (2002 p.3). Holloway introduces this fly metaphor to demonstrate the inherent subjectivity of position. However, the significance of this image for me here is the way it can be used to describe the scope of our agency. In this configuration, the web’s threads are best understood as the complex, often abstract, local and global forces shaping our diverse lived experiences. The fly simply marks a coordinate where the intersection of these manifold influences shape material. While I take this image from Holloway I want to pin the ramifications it describes to cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s writing. ‘Capitalist realism’ is the terminology Fisher uses to describe our contemporary political and cultural era as one chronically lacking in viable systemic alternatives (Fisher, 2009 p.8). So here the trapped fly is relevant because it delineates a position of entangled stuckness. I’m setting things up in this visual way to discount the possibility of instant or total escape. However, Holloway takes care to still describe the flies' ability to pull, hack and wriggle from ensnaring threads. For me, this helps calibrate my understanding of ‘Compost’s’ agency to the Capitalist web it’s stuck within. In particular, I hereon choose to attach closest to the motion of ‘wriggling’. Wriggling is a method for unsticking, a way to loosen from constraints, and as I understand it, a realistic way to enact discontinuation from business as usual. Compost (small c) Let’s start by briefly considering the process of composting as a metaphor from which Kathrin draws, before digging into specifics. Composting utilises the ecological process of decay to generate fertiliser from waste organic matter. While length varies, it typically takes six to two years for compost to reach ‘maturity’ (The Royal Horticultural Society, 2021). However, as Phase 1’s, ‘Turning the Heap’ title refers to, ongoing labour is required throughout the process, such as mixing in more matter and adding water. These two simple descriptions of compost allow me to introduce the entangled themes of time and labour. In echo of its metaphor, ‘Compost’ was a site of activity, rather than a site of display. The space contained the slow ongoing labour of ‘turning the heap’ across the full span of both its six-week exhibition phases. So, in connection to the framework I have just set up, is this mode of production a method of wriggling and if so what does that reveal about Capitalist conditions? My lizard tail 7 Instead of trying to make a generalised statement as to how Capitalism shapes time, I’m going to use my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as a more manageable entrance point. The sudden halting of business as usual as a result of national lockdowns quickly revealed much about the former's contours. Image 3, a GIF still, captures a twitching lizard’s tail which, despite being separated from the body, retains echoes of its previous movements. For me lockdown magnified my relationship to productivity, through the ways my body still echoed with its impulses, like a disembodied lizard's tail. I noticed how my approach to art-making was propelled by a constant need to feel ‘productive’. Despite the absence of activity to fill time with, slowing down and being unproductive felt unnatural and uncomfortable. I now understand this as an example of internalised capitalism1, and indicative of the broader logic that insidiously directs our lives. This experience helps explain why I connect with the unproductive desire to make a pile instead of a project. Kathrin describes the ‘project’ as an economic unit feeding into neoliberals ‘repetitive production on demand’ (Böhm, et al. 2021 p.2). But why did I notice my productivity drive as negative and why does Kathrin similarly cite repetitive production as problematic? To begin to map a sense of this question I look to theorist Jonathan Crary’s analysis of capitalism's processes in his book, 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep ‘We are long past the era in which mainly things were accumulated. Now our bodies and identities assimilate an ever-expanding surfeit of services, images, procedures, chemicals, to a toxic and often fatal threshold. The long-term survival of the individual is always dispensable if the alternative might even indirectly admit the possibility of interludes with no shopping or its promotion. In related ways, 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends.’ (Crary, 2014 p.10) Crary characterises 24/7 through its incessant and rapid cycles of consumption and production. What he indicates here is how participating in these cycles, to which productivity is directly related, contributes to states of depletion: both ecologically and psychologically. It remains relevant to point to the ways capitalism’s economic framework deems that which is ecologically destructive as ‘productive’. The logic of productivity is decoupled from ecological temporalities of regeneration, and thus as Crary notes is inseparable from the environmental crisis. Therefore on one level, it can be said that the logic of being ‘productive’ given its economic roots, is a logic tied to the destruction of ecological processes on which our lives depend. Eroded mind So on the one hand it could be argued that there is a general environmental rationale bound up in Kathrin’s rejection of repetitive production. Yet this issue of unsustainable expenditure also 1 I owe the initial shaping of my ideas around this from The YIKES Podcast episode on internalised capitalism, probing the ways this manifests particularly in our relationships to productivity (Loach, Becker, 2021) 8 relates to the psychological realm. Deregulated markets operate at a tempo fundamentally at odds with the physical limits of the human body (Crary, 2014 p.15). For it is not only our wider environment that has physical thresholds but the smaller-scale environment of flesh too. Artist and writer Jenny Odell's book, How to do Nothing, helps articulate the link between these realms. Odell’s particular focus is on the attention economy, how capitalism exploits attention as a commodity, particularly through the mediums of social media, advertising, and the news. Odell writes: ‘Just as practises like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose ‘production’ slowly destroys the soul until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.’ (Odell, 2019 p.xix) This metaphor likens the cognitive effect of performance, which I’d tie directly to the input-output dynamics of productivity to that of ecological desertification. Similar to Crary, Odell is outlining how this market-logic expends finite resources at a greater rate than natural regeneration. What is important to emphasise is that although such processes might facilitate short-term gain, they ultimately lead to long-term impoverishment by depleting the vitality of their material substrate. To amplify this argument, I also want to highlight the way Mark Fisher directly connects capitalist economic conditions to the mental health crisis (2009 p.36). Fisher argues that instead of capitalism’s individualisation of this accelerating phenomenon, this crisis should be linked to the pressures of living and working in capitalism as its fundamental cause (2009, p.19). This might at first seem like a tangential point to bring in, but the connection between ecological and mental health crises is important. If what I’m pointing to is that their roots lie within the demands of an economic framework to which artistic production also falls prey, this analysis helps amplify the necessity of wriggling away from capitalism. Frantic time This discussion of production needs to be fused with a more specific unpacking of time. Since time is a cumbersome and abstract topic it helps me to describe it in terms of movement. Crary’s description of 24/7 capitalism includes a speed which the slowness of composting directly contrasts. Yet I also want to use Curator and Author Nato Thomspon’s description of capitalism's temporal motion as a ‘franticness’. He writes, ‘We are frantic workers even when we work against the very conditions that produce our franticness’ (2010). This analysis came from an essay titled ‘Contradictions of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective’. The text describes the recent tendency for art practises to operate with slowness in response to our context of shrinking and chaotic time. This franticness of course also connects to the attention economy's distractive apparatus, as unpacked by Odell. So while I’ve already pointed to the link between capitalism and mental health, I want to think about how time correlates to creative practice. If, as Odell suggests, creativity needs incubation time, then franticness is not a creative 9 ally (2019, p.165). Mark Fisher also writes on the relationship between time and creative production, which this extract from, Ghosts of my Life helps me think through: ‘Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal - from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms - but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before.’ (Fisher, 2014 p.16) The particularly useful terminology here is ‘withdrawal’, relating closely to Odell’s notion of incubation time. If Fisher suggests withdrawal to be a necessary but increasingly scarce ingredient for creative practice we might then see ‘Compost’ as a form of public withdrawal from the demands of productivity. It utilises the public space of the gallery for a form of ‘unproductive’ (in the economic sense) labour. It’s a kind of labour normally operating ‘behind scenes’, or within the context of a 24/7, frantic capitalism increasingly not at all. I want to stress that ‘Compost’ isn't a withdrawal of labour entirely but an assertion of a different kind of production. This is the suppleness of its ‘wriggling’ here, as a redefinition rather than outright rejection of parameters. ‘Compost’ doesn't disengage with the notion of producing, but merely the capitalist tempos and directives within it. It still aims towards generating value. ‘Compost's’ reflective methods could thus be framed as regenerative, like the act of catching breath or stretching after running. I posit that as a form of withdrawal after activity (twenty+ years of artistic production) it, therefore, bears alignment to ecological and bodily time frames. If capitalism's relationship to time and resources is broadly unsustainable, slowing down can be seen as a method for ensuring the longer-term sustainability of creative production both in relation to mental and ecological health. Urgency This distinction between productivity (as defined by capitalism) and producing per se is also important to maintain when thinking through urgency. Franticness is not without concrete cause, for the intersecting crises that capitalism is co-producing are indeed urgent. And it is indeed the apparatus of the attention economy, constantly feeding us with the stories of crisis, that both further contributes to cognitive exhaustion and our overall sense of urgent franticness. Take for example three top headlines that arrived in my inbox in just one week of October 2021: ‘World faces disastrous 2.7c temperature rise on current plans, UN warns.’‘Children face the brunt of worsening climate.’ ‘World conflict and chaos could be the result of summit failure.’ These three happen to all relate to environmental crises, but I use them to indicate how withdrawal might seem at a glance, both illogical and irresponsible. Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a social theorist who writes about the importance of cognitive justice. I turn now to his writing in Epistemologies of the South to help think through our temporal bind: ‘We live in a time torn apart by two extreme and contradictory temporalities disrupting the time frame of collective action. On the one hand, there is a sense of urgency. A long series of phenomena seems to demand that absolute priority be given to immediate or short-term action because the long term may not even exist if the trends expressed in 10 those phenomena are allowed to evolve without control….on the other hand, there is a sense that our time calls for deep and long-term civilisational changes. The phenomena mentioned above are symptoms of deep-seated structures and agencies, which cannot be confronted by short-run interventionism insofar as the latter is as much a part of the civilisational paradigm as the state of affairs it fights.’ (Sousa Santos, 2016 p.27) The contradiction Santos helps map here begins to articulate the issue of meeting urgency with urgency. What’s particularly useful about this framing is the way it locates short-term thinking at the roots of these urgent crises. By taking a more systemic approach Santos invites the urgency to be instead seen as a symptom, which therefore necessitates a different logic of response. To relate this back to a cultural context, we might see that to continue producing and working in an accelerated urgency, even as an effort to problem solve, risks recapitulating the framework of thought from which these problems stem. Not only does Santos’s writing therefore usefully connect with my mushroom framework, but it helps articulate the very need for long-termism and slowness despite urgency. In this light, I would therefore suggest that Kathrin’s intention to pile, sift and reflect is not simply a rejection of the neoliberal frame but a calibrated wriggle against the urgencies’ it’s producing. It does this by occupying a productive tempo that restrains from capitalism's desire for quick and immediate knee-jerk responses, which I want to visually mark through image 4. Duration Yet again however the argument must be stretched wider and deepened. Slowness as a descriptor of ‘Compost’s’ temporal agency does not go far enough. If slowness marks an overall tempo what Santos’s text also leads towards is the question of duration2: the time span across which a slowness might operate. I noted duration as an important characteristic of compost back in my introduction, but want to dig into its significance more. To do so I offer this extract from Kathrin found in ‘Compost’s’ press release: ‘The publication of the social (re)production of architecture: politics, values and actions in contemporary practice by Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal in 2017 was an important moment for me - when an idea becomes an embodied experience, and won't leave. The simple but fundamental realisation that everything we do either supports or undermines a system. If we want systemic change, we need to care about the reproduction of the values and systems we want, and not just their set up.’ (The Showroom, 2021b) It is this last sentence in particular which I see as closely bound to the theme of duration. What I draw from it is the idea that for discontinuation with business as usual to have a lasting effect, the act must be sustained. To put this idea directly in relation to the fly metaphor, while thus far finding effective ways in which to wriggle has been important, of equal value will now be the question of how such wriggles are thereafter sustained. Kathrin’s framing of duration as a core ingredient for change can also be linked to Santos’s critical description of our current paradigms intrinsic ‘short-termism’. Crary also notes this tendency, by characterising late 2 Duration, long-term and sustained are labels I will use to describe similar overall character. 11 capitalism as time decoupled from longer-term undertakings, even abandoning its former fantasies of Progress (Crary, 2014, p.9). So with these ideas what we begin to see is that to effectively wriggle slowness must be equally paired with a long-view, a duration, a way to sustain itself if it is to be a counteractive force capable of producing change. Support structures Continuing with this topic of duration, I begin to consider the exhibition frame and shift focus to its containing structure, The Showroom. If so far my discussion has leaned favourably towards ‘Composts’ methods, what happens if I consider how these might be replicated beyond the exhibitions given time-frames? What would it take to reproduce or replicate its values elsewhere? And so here I point to image 5 of the wooden ‘support structures’, lifted directly from Celine Condorelli's book of the same title, to begin thinking about the hidden relationships that prop up and sustain cultural production (Condorelli, 2009). And so that inevitably leads me towards the subject of infrastructure and resources. In relation to my previous discussion of duration, during the opening event, Kathrin talks more specifically about a desire for ‘Compost’ to feed long-term infrastructures (The Showroom, 2021d, 1:12). However, I want to take this sentiment and ask more specifically; ‘what long-term infrastructures are needed to feed ‘Compost’-like practises’ ? I ask this to shift focus from the work's inner methods, towards its relationship with the wider art ecology. Once again, to get my bearings, I look to Mark Fisher for an overview on how cultural infrastructure interdependently connects to wider political conditions: ‘If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in these cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished.’ (Fisher, 2014 p.15) This extract helps re-emphasise the web’s complexity and makes explicit the relationship between cultural production and social provision. By linking the absence of general affordability of living to cultural conservatism, Fisher allows me to connect his earlier diagnosis of capitalism's imaginative sterility to its growing economic inequities. This lack of affordable space of course also connects back to and co-produces the issue of diminishing time for creative production, as well as cognitive depletion. These issues are all inherently interconnected. What is important here for my argument however is the way it urges me to expand my attention, out from a more abstracted conversation about time, to one that delves more closely into financial foundations. If I care about duration and the maintenance of ‘Compost’s’ wriggling then I must link its methods to financial practicalities. Precarity 12 Fisher uses punk as an example of cultural innovation that was facilitated by a context of robust social provision. What therefore underlies Fisher's analysis is the assertion that stability is a necessary precondition to cultural flourishing. Yet, what characterises the UK’s contemporary Post-Fordist, neoliberal labour market is a condition better described as precarity (Fisher, 2009 p.34). To draw an example of this precarity relevant to my experience, I point to recent UCU (University and College Union) strikes. In February 2020 74 universities went on strike for 2 weeks and more recently in December 2021 58 universities went on strike for 3 days, (UCU 2020, 2021). Grievances and demands were broad, but the issues of pay, casualisation, and overwork particularly demonstrate the realities of precarity. According to Arts Student Union’s website staff pay has fallen by 17.6% relative to inflation between 2009 and 2019, over one-third of staff are on short-term and or zero-hours contracts and over 70% are burnt out due to workloads (2021). Aside from indicating general economic and psychological pressures the issue of casualisation particularly pin-points a pervading instability. These symptoms of marketisation can also be mapped onto London’s grass-roots arts ecologies. For example, a recent article by Chris Fite-Wassilak in Art Review specifically attributes the growing disappearance of London's underground art scene to ever-rocketing rent and privatisation. What is worth pointing to here is how, in the absence of permanent, affordable space, Fite-Wassilak notes a resulting shift towards smaller, itinerant, more event-based ways of working (Fite-Wassilak, 2021). These temporary modes are not models primed to offer the more long-term forms of space, time, and support necessary for longer-term practises. This context, therefore, problematises my question of how might ‘Compost’s’ methods be replicated. Whether it is short-term employment or lack of dependable space or income to work with, these precarious modes constrain the possibility of long-term thinking. Not only this but their occlusion of stability also limits sustained innovation, the kinds needed to wriggle loose from capitalist realism. And so, to visualise this condition of precarity I point to image 6, the meat grinder. This metaphor I pull directly from Fisher’s writing, where the grinder is used as a figure to encapsulate capitalism's remorseless metabolising of life and resources in its insatiable hunger for profit (2009, p.15). Lifting the lid So if the broader context is one of financial precarity, does ‘Compost’ wriggle, and if so, how? To get a gauge of this I want to lift the lid on The Showroom a bit more and consider ‘Compost’s’ finances. When I visited, I took a photo (Figure 4) of a large poster titled ‘Economic Underpinnings’ which attempted to quantify the labour, time, materials, and finances involved in the production of the show. Now on one level, this in itself could be described as a wriggle. To be transparent about finances is not common institutional practice, so this as a method, although slight, still constitutes discontinuation. Since the financial crash, and resulting cuts to public funding, arts organisations have increasingly turned to private funders. Despite the progressive politics touted by many arts institutions, looking under their financial hood often reveals sticky contradictions. In his scathing critique of the art world’s conservative complicity, Morgan Quaintance suggests that to look at the funding behind organisations often reveals they benefit from structures that harm artists and working people (2017). If business as usual 13 therefore marks an intentional financial opacity, to expose money is to wriggle in another direction. Figure 4. Poster. 1x1m.‘Compost: For Future Use’ Phase 02. Kathrin Böhm, The Showroom. October 2021 While a dig into The Showroom’s 2021 financial report, reveals it still manages to rely predominantly on ACE funding, despite public funding cuts, Kathrin disclosed during ‘Composts’ Diverse Economies event that part of her salary came from a large property developer (Breckman & Company Ltd, 2021)(The Showroom, 2021c, 2:10). This is an example of the complicity Quaintaince refers to and indicates the ethical problems often bound to private funding. If Compost formulates a critique of arts neoliberalisation, what does it mean for it to be supported by an agent of local gentrification? At its core, it is not only antithetical to its values but also arguably unsustainable as support. Gentrification processes accelerate rent rises which not only unethically displaces lower-income residents but ultimately outprice local artists and smaller arts organisations too (Quaintaince, 2017). I would therefore posit that these ties with private funding, even as small supplements to public funds, act as a counteractive force to any internal wriggling. So whilst I would agree that institutional transparency is necessary, it is also not sufficient. The stickiness of the web, of course, renders the notion of ethically ‘pure’ funding a fantasy. However the question of financial sustainability is core to the longevity of an organisation, and for the practises they hold. ‘Compost’ duration therefore cannot sustain unless this issue is more imaginatively addressed. 14 RRAAF I am taking this stance because I remain interested in the possibility of compost’s replication, but I’m not satisfied that its current support structures hold the ingredients to do this. Thus I feel like the question of what long-term infrastructures are needed to feed ‘Compost’, still dangles in the air. We see that the very conditions ‘Compost’ formulates its inner logics against, come to constraint it. So in echo of the inherent futurity baked within compost as a process, I am ending by unpacking RRAAF short for Radical Renewable Art and Activism Fund as an example of the economic restructuring, ‘Compost’ needs but didn't quite engage in. RRAAF was launched by Glaswegian artist Ellie Harrison in 2015 as a direct response to ongoing public funding cuts and the ethical limitations of private sponsorship. Its founding aim is to, ‘establish a new ethical and autonomous funding source for radical art and activism, by investing in renewable energy technologies’ (Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund, 2018). Since its launch, RRAAF has developed into the energy cooperative ‘Glasgow Community Energy’ (GCE) and has now installed its first solar panels onto the roofs of two local schools. Aside from directly providing power to these schools, income will soon be generated by selling surplus electricity, fed back into the grid. RRAAF is legally registered as a Community Benefit Society, a new cooperative form designed to ensure surplus income is used towards the local community. The remaining £30,000 needed to invest in the initial infrastructure was then raised through a community share offer, which essentially enabled anyone to become part of the new co-operative. The offer attracted 170 applicants, who as members will be able to vote on how that surplus is distributed across local projects (Glasgow Community Energy, 2021). The first thing I want to draw out from this model is the embedded horizontality and democracy within the cooperative power structure. One way to frame the current funding landscape is a general lack of agency. Particularly in relation to ACE, decision-making processes defining access to funding remain hidden and centralised. Not only this but the terms of that funding, where accessed, are pre-defined by overarching strategies set at top organisational level (Jubb, 2020). Zarina Muhammad, one half of the art critic duo, The White Pube, posits that such strategies act as a softly coercive framework of ‘best practice’ that long-term deviation from remains difficult to maintain (2020). In short, the governing structure of larger funding bodies tends not to afford artists much wriggle room. Contrary to this RRAAF’s decentralised structure of collective ownership offers room for self-determined agendas, as well as a ‘no strings attached’ policy for the grants. Thus perhaps enabling more projects the scope to define both ‘productivity’ and ‘best practice’ differently. RRAAF is not just a fund distributor but an infrastructural project. Therefore, members get a say not just on how funding is spread but also on how the very source of those funds (the panels) are managed too. Thus their financial agency exists on multiple levels. Furthermore, the projected lifespan of these panels, and so the span of reliable income, is 20-25 years, thus endowing the initiative with an intrinsic long-termsim. I want to suggest that this decades-long dependability is far better positioned to facilitate 'Compost-Esque' logics of slower productivity than the larger public and private funding bodies that currently feed it. 15 The long-termism of RRAAF is of course a virtue of its renewable power source, solar. This aspect of RRAAF is core to its overall ethicality. Unlike the compromises common to private funding, RRAAF’s grants will genuinely align with the radical ideas of the work it supports. What seems particularly neat to me here though, is the way this model simultaneously responds to the issue of financial stability and environmental urgency. However, given earlier discussions on this, I suggest that funding cannot be deemed sustainable in the long run if its source is not at its core ecologically compatible. This is because, throughout this text, the intrusive interconnection between ecology, infrastructure, and culture has been made visible. In this light, one cannot be addressed without the other. Of course, RRAAF holds its limits, for it still operates within this shared context of constraint. For example, In 2015, the government changed its policies on renewables which made RRAAF far less economically viable than its initial hopes (Community Energy Scotland, 2016 p.29). It might be a model for sustainably supporting creativity, but it is still built within a context of precarity. Yet, the fact that RRAAF exists despite constraints, makes it a hopeful and relevant case study. I would therefore frame RRAAF not just as an act of wriggling itself, but most crucially, an infrastructure capable of sustaining others in their acts of wriggling. RRAAF is a ratchet (image 7), a kind of wriggling-multiplier! Overall, the combination of long-term dependability, ecological renewability, and radical democracy operate together create a support ripe for sustaining the reproduction of Compost-like methodologies. Conclusion - drawing out fertiliser Thinking of this writing’s compost-like structure I conclude by attempting to draw out fertiliser for my own future use. By unpacking ‘Compost’s’ logic I have attempted to probe the capitalist conditions it sits within and the sticky interdependence between politics and culture. This has led me towards an intersection of themes including exhaustive productivity, ecological urgency, mental illness, labour precarity, and the increasing cost of living. I have attempted to formulate an understanding and critique of these aforementioned conditions through the ideas of numerous theorists and contemporary case studies, often personally drawn. Throughout the discussion I have framed Compost’s methodologies as wriggles, attempting to loosen from the negative grip of these broader symptoms. I see ‘Compost’s’ core logic of withdrawal and slowness as an apt response to 24/7 capitalism and the unsustainable demands of the attention economy. And I frame duration as a necessary response to urgency. This theme, in particular, necessarily shifted my attention to structural questions. By unpacking ‘Compost’s’ economic underpinnings, I rubbed up against limits within public and private funding which prompted my turning towards RRAAF. The power structure and fusion of environmental and financial sustainability led me to suggest that RRAAF’s holds the agency to support the expansive and long-term wriggling of Compost-like practises. Capitalist Critique has been a bedrock, yet the fertiliser to carry forward is methodology. This is where I see ‘Compost’ resonating with my practice, not through form, but its underlying sense of dissonance and scale of response. My feeling of dissonance, from which theory flows, is that the wider context I make and learn within is not conducive for modes of sustained experimentation intrinsic to the philosophy of my course. This writing has helped me flesh out 16 that feeling, using ‘Compost’ as a starting point. Although I leave with a greater understanding of the way art practice can be shaped both conceptually and materially by capitalist logic, I also have a sense of the agency it can wield in refusal to these predicaments. What is exciting to me about methods is their possibility of reproduction in other contexts. And so I point to my very final image (8), that of the swiss army penknife to visually describe the form of my summary. As a manifold tool whose value lies in its non-hierarchical plurality, I also want to position the methods drawn from this text as equally plural, small-scale, and practical. My considerations of ‘Compost’s’ futurity now condenses within me as an urge to continue thinking beyond the last full stop here. Whilst the act of mapping conditions of course remains an important preliminary basis for wriggling, I am filled with the desire to stretch this approach even further. I posit that at the core of both ‘Compost’ and RRAAF lies the question of ‘what sustains art practice’? Yet, I now begin to see that even this flows from a wider question, that must ask before it what exactly is it we even want to sustain? And so, still sitting in the dissonance of the web, I think this tool of inquiry can be further sharpened going forward, to ask; what does a post-capitalist, post-carbon future look like, and how can art practice begin to pre-figuratively enact it? This imaginative re-phrasing still tends to an underlying urge for sustainability, but it adds a stronger sense of directionality to the notion of wriggling. With this refreshed question, wriggling begins to become not just a loosening from constraints but something that slowly builds towards an entirely different configuration of threads. 17 Image Sheet 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 18 6. 7. 8. 19 Bibliography Arts Student Union (2021). UCU Strike Action: Info Hub. Available at: https://www.arts-su.com/advice/ucustrikeaction/ (Accessed: 12/01/2022) Barad, K. (2007). in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham N.C: Duke University Press. Breckman & Company Ltd (2021) for The Showroom Gallery Limited. Report and Financial Statements. Available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_oner eg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p _p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=%2Faccounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage& _uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A1143332 8&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRend erCommandName=%2Faccounts-and-annual-returns&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_w eb_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=1055262 (Accessed: 12/01/2022) Böhm, K., et al. (2021). ‘Exhibition as Pile - Kathrin Böhm Making Use of Exhibitions’, PARSE journal, 13:1 pp. 2 Available at: https://parsejournal.com/article/exhibition-as-pile/ (Accessed: 14/10/2021) Cambridge Dictionary (2022). Infrastructure. Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/infrastructure (Accessed 16/01/2022) Community Energy Scotland (2016). Opportunities for new Community Energy: A Scoping Report for the Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund. Available at: https://issuu.com/rraafund/docs/report (Accessed: 12/01/2022) Condorelli, Celine (2009). Support structures. Sternberg Press. Compost (2022). About Compost. Available at: https://www.compost.kathrinbohm.info/p/about (Accessed 16/01/2022) Crary, J. (2014). 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. Winchester: Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of my life. Winchester: Zero Books. 20 Fite-Wassilak, C. (2021) ‘Why London’s Underground Art Scene Is Disappearing’. ArtReview. Available at: https://artreview.com/why-london-underground-art-scene-is-disappearing/ (Accessed: 12/01/2021) Glasgow Community Energy (2021). Our History. Available at: https://glasgowenergy.coop/about/history/ (Accessed: 12/01/2022) Holloway, J (2002). How to change the world without taking power. Available at: https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/readings/Holloway_Change_the_World.pdf (Accessed: 12/01/2022) Jubb, D. (2020). “Time to change the structure”. Available at: https://davidjubb.blog/2020/10/24/time-to-change-the-strategy/ (Accessed: 16/01/2022) Kenton, W. (2021). Productivity. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp (Accessed: 16/01/2022) Loach, M. Becker, J. (2021). Breaking up with internalised capitalism [Podcast]. 29/04/21. Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-yikes-podcast/id1498623503?i=1000519219447 (Accessed 16/01/2022) Macfarlane, R (2019). Underland. Penguin Random House. Muhammad, Z. (2020). {the community, the state and a specific kind of headache}. Available at: https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/communitystateheadache (Accessed 12/01/2022) Odell, J. (2019). How to do Nothing. New York: Melville house publishing. Quaintance, M. (2017). ‘The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression’, e-flux conversations, Available at: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/the-new-conservatism-complicity-and-the-uk-art-worlds- performance-of-progression/7200] (Accessed: 01/11/2021) Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund (2018). About. Available at: http://rraafund.ellieharrison.com/about/index.html (Accessed: 12/02/2022) Solnit, R. (2016) Hope in the dark. Great Britain, Canongate Books Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South. New York: Routledge. The Royal Horticultural Society (2021). Composting. Available at: https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/composting (Accessed: 15/01/2022) 21 The Showroom, (2021a). Art on a Scale of change. 14/07/2021 Available at: https://www.theshowroom.org/library/art-on-a-scale-of-change (Accessed: 12/012022) The Showroom, (2021b). ‘COMPOST: For Future Use’. Press release. The Showroom (2021c). Katherine Gibson: Diverse Economies Available at: https://www.theshowroom.org/events/katherine-gibson-diverse-economies 03/08/2021 (Accessed: 24/11/2021]) The Showroom (2021d) Live Online Opening of COMPOST and launch of PARSE Journal #13: On the Question of Exhibition. 07/07/2021 Available at: https://www.theshowroom.org/library/online-opening-of-compost-and-launch-of-parse-journal -number-13-on-the-question-of-exhibition (Accessed: 31/11/2021) Thompson, N. (2010). ‘Contradictions of time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective’, E-flux, Issue #20. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67649/contractions-of-time-on-social-practice-from-a-temporal -perspective/ (Accessed: 18/10/21) UCU (2020). UK’s biggest ever university strikes as staff begin 14 days of walkouts on Thursday. Available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/10643/UKs-biggest-ever-university-strikes-as-staff-begin-14-days- of-walkouts-on-Thursday (Accessed 16/01/2022) UCU (2021). Universities to be hit with three days of strikes in December. Available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/11872/Universities-to-be-hit-with-three-days-of-strikes-in-Decemb er (Accessed 16/01/2021) Further reading Ahmed, S (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham, Duke University Press. pp.1- 48 Beech, D. (2019). Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production. London: Pluto Press. pp.1-21 Franklin, S. (2017) ‘Staying with the Manifesto: An Interview with Donna Haraway’. SAGE journals. Theory, Culture & Society. Volume: 34 issue: 4, pg: 49-63 DOI:10.1177/0263276417693290 Petrešin-Bachelez, N. (2017). ‘For Slow Institutions’ e-flux, issue #85 22 Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/ (Accessed: 16/01/2022) Remesova, A. (2019) Art is always related to power” - An interview with Jonas Staal. Available at: https://artportal.hu/magazin/art-is-always-related-to-power-an-interview-with-jonas-staal/ (Accessed 16/01/2022) Springett, J. (2022). ‘Solarpunk: Life in the Future Beyond the Rusted Chrome of Yestermorrow’. Thejaymo. Available at: https://www.thejaymo.net/long-form/solarpunk-rusted-chrome/ (Accessed: 16/01/2022) The White Pube, (2021). ideas for a new art world. England: Rough Trade Books List of images 1.Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock (2017). Untitled. Available at: 5d22247a-b49c-4880-aac4-72f2cc91a591.jpg (Accessed: 15/01/2022) 2.Marcel (2013). Fly in a web. Available at: 115241.jpg (Accessed: 15/01/2022) 3.Phenomena Lizard Tail Twitching. Available at: Phenomena-Lizard-Tail-Twitching.gif (Accessed: 15/01/2022) 4.Untitled (2014). Available at: 5b9e3ff12400003000956531.jpeg (Accessed: 16/01/2022) 5.Condorelli, C. (2009). Support structures. Available at: supportstructures_spread_3.jpg (Accessed: 15/01/2022) 6.Ideal Practical (2021). Red manual meat mincer. Available at: 7144116_WEB1.jpg (Accessed: 16/01/2022) 7.Giant (2022). Giant Ratchet Multi Tool. Available at: GIANT_RATCHET_MULTI_TOOL_1.jpg (Accessed: 16/01/2022) 8.Victorinox (2022). Victorinox Fisherman Swiss Army Pocket Knife, Medium, Multi Tool, 18 Functions, Fish Scaler With Hook Disgorger, Red. Available at: 61Kb8SX0+4L._AC_SL1292_.jpg (Accessed: 17/02/2022) 23
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