| GATS & ARTISTIC SERVICES: Reading through texts by Andrea Fraser | |
Fraser, A. 2003. “A museum is not a business, it is run in a businesslike fashion,” Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices,(The Banff Centre Press): 109—122. Fraser, A. 1996. “The critique of artistic autonomy” http://home.att.net/~artarchives/frasercritique.html Fraser, A. 1994. “How to provide an artistic service: an introduction” http://home.att.net/~artarchives/fraserservice.html |
|
Does the current GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services / AGCS Accord Général sur le Commerce des Services) reduce art and its surrounding professional activities to services/commodities to be traded, indistinguishable from other regulated service/commodities on the global market? Andrea Fraser’s theorization of the evolution of service and project-oriented practices in an increasingly corporatized art world, offers a useful analysis for examining the present paradigm shift whereby art production and art's professional practices are framed within "Cultural, recreational and sporting services" by the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) to be designated as “services” and artists as service providers. Fraser outlines how the analysis initiated in the 1960s of artistic practice as heteronomous (subject to external laws or rules), generated strategies aimed at countering the production of object/commodities through the development of practices concerned with “site specificity and institutional critique, conceptual art, and cultural activism.” The Art Workers Coalition Open Hearing (1969) demands for artists’ proprietary rights over their work, recognized art’s tangible and intangible value, in turn redefining artwork from a commercial product or good to a service product—in this case intellectual property (Fraser 1996). The conceptualization of art practice as a service was central to Fraser’s own practice in the 1990s in her development of “project work,” often comprising the “appropriation of professional models in rejection of traditional studio practice.” While “artistic appropriation of forms of representation, production, or organization from corporate culture may have begun as a critical strategy”...“entering into competition with that culture, for artists no less than museums, implies not only an acceptance of but also an investment in the stakes offered up as legitimate and desirable by that culture” (2003: 119-120). This current state of affairs is crucial to examine in light of the present application of GATS: has the concept of delivering a service—what is/was a critical and pragmatic strategy by artists and public institutions—now emerged as threatening to regulate art as a service like any other offered on the global capitalist market? |
"If the critique of the production and exchange of art objects as commodities—like the critique of the studio and the museum—emerged out of a critique of the autonomy of the artwork, it was not just as a challenge to aestheticism. Rather, it was rooted in a recognition of the partial and ideological character of that autonomy and an attempt to resist the heteronomy to which artists and art works are subject by the apparatus which supports their legitimacy and through which that legitimacy is appropriated as symbolic and economic profit. The critique of the autonomy of the art object in this sense was less a rejection of artistic autonomy than a critique of the uses to which art works are put: the economic and political interests they serve..." "One of the earliest distinctions between goods production and service provision, made by Adam Smith, relates less to the tangible or intangible character of the product of labor than the social character of labor itself: whether or not that labor produces profit. For Smith, a service is a product that contains only use value and no exchange value: it adds "to the value of nothing."[1] It may have been precisely this condition—which rendered services suspect for Smith—that the artists of the AWC aspired to in considering their work intellectual property: as Andre stated, that "no owner may in any way enrich himself through the possession of the work of art" [2]. It may be from this perspective one can understand how artists of the late 1960s saw in the condition of service products, relations, positions, and functions a means of protection from, and even resistance to, forms of exploitation (of themselves and others) consequent to the production and exchange of cultural commodities." “The critique of artistic autonomy" |
In her essay “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction,” Fraser outlines how the term “service” came to strategically describe what had come to be known as “project work.” The term service encapsulated the diversity of project work practices (in terms content and approaches) and was intended to identify the “economic condition of project work as well as the nature of the social relations under which it is carried out.” The increasing practice of cultural institutions paying fees to artists underscores the emergence of art as “service provision”: congruously “a fee is by definition payment for services." The exhibition/project “Services: Conditions and Relations of Project Oriented Artistic Practice” (organized by Draxler and Fraser and originating at the Kunstraum de Universitat Luneburg, 1994) and Fraser’s resulting essay, aimed to identify “practical and material problems, as well as historical developments which may have contributed to the emergence of artistic service provision, and to provide a forum for discussion of the impact this development has had on the relations among artists, curators and institutions.” Fraser’s motivation in generating the exhibition/project “Services” arose out of pragmatic concerns. Like many artists, Fraser found herself undertaking full-time prestigious projects for museums yet finding she was unable to make a living. At issue was a lack of professional regulations and standards governing the relations with curators and institutions. “Services” and her essay “How To Provide An Artistic Service: An Introduction” seek how artists might ensure their practical and material interests as professionals. Fraser proposes “a professional model of collective self-regulation” might be developed, whereby a methodology could be developed to “function as a basis for a self-regulating profession of artistic service provision." |
"[MOMA's staff] focus on public services may have been strategic, but what it implies is fundamental: that MOMA's staff would define their obligation as being to serve, not the museum trustees who ostensibly employ them, but the public that supports the museum through tax deductions and for whose benefit the museum exists as a charitable institution."
"It appears to us [Helmut Draxler and Andrea Fraser] that, related variously to institutional critique, productivist, activist and political documentary traditions as well post-studio, site-specific and/or public art activities, the practices currently characterized as 'project work' do not necessarily share a thematic, ideological or procedural basis. What they do seem to share is the fact that they all involve expending an amount of labor which is either in excess of, or independent of, any specific material production and which cannot be transacted as or along with a product. This labor, which in economic terms would be called service provision (as opposed to goods production), may include:
|
"The logic of the question is pretty clear. We are demanding fees as compensation for work within organizations. Fees are, by definition, payment for services. If we are, then, accepting payment in exchange for our services, does that mean we are serving those who pay us? If not, who are we serving and on what basis are we demanding payment (and should we be demanding payment)? Or, if so, how are we serving them (and what are we serving)? I would say that these questions are not exclusive to project based practice—defined as a service or not. Project based practice simply makes it necessary to pose them. I would say that we are all always already serving. Studio practice conceals this condition by separating production from the interests it meets and the demands it responds to at its point of material or symbolic consumption. As a service can be defined, in economic terms, as a value which is consumed at the same time it is produced, the service element of project based practice eliminates such separation. An invitation to produce a specific work in response to a specific situation is a very direct demand, the motivating interests of which are often barely concealed and difficult to ignore. I know that if I accept that invitation I will be serving those interests—unless I work very hard to do otherwise." |
|
Fraser flags the question as to whether the adoption of professional models from other fields—such as contracts and fee structures—might result in a potential loss of autonomy. We might examine this question again today with regard to a professionalizing shift within the art world generally, in hand with the increasing corporatization of public cultural institutions—both in management structure, and, for example, the increasing emphasis on marketing strategies and the demand to justify programs through revenue. Fraser suggests that due to increasing capitalist pressures, artists and art professionals are beginning to recognize their activities as in competition with commercial entertainment and commodity culture (2003: 119). Might such shifts have contributed to the rationalization for art and its production activities, like other publicly funded activities and services from education to health to water, to be forced into competition on an internationally regulated market under the new international paradigm that is GATS? How can artistic practices—particularly practices that are explicitly based in a service model—offer alternatives to the social and economic shift signaled by the GATS? Heather Anderson
|
"Designing contracts to safeguard our practical and material interests, or even simply demanding fees in compensation for our services, might further compromise our independence by turning us into functionaries of 'client' organizations. While many of us had taken up, in our work, the positions and activities of curators, gallerists, educators, public relations and employee-management relations consultants, security consultants, architects and exhibition designers, researchers, archivists, etcetera, we certainly did not do so to have our practices reduced to the functions of these professions. What would—should—differentiate our practices from them is precisely our autonomy. This autonomy is represented, most importantly, in our relative freedom from the functionalization of our activity—that is, from its rationalization in the service of specific interests defined by the individuals or organizations with which we work."
Notes 1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, quoted in Delaunay and Gadrey, Services in Economic Thought, 12, in Andrea Fraser, “The Critique Of Artistic Autonomy” 2. A Reasonable and Practical Proposal for Artists Who Wish to Remain Free Men in these Terrible Times," AWC Open Hearing, 32, in Andrea Fraser, “The Critique Of Artistic Autonomy” |