I would like to thank Gregory Sholette for close-reading and commenting on previous versions of this text, which helped to improve it tremendously.
The art strike was organized by the Citizens’ Forum for Contemporary Art and was coordinated by artist Katarzyna Górna and the art critic Karol Sienkiewicz.
A detailed account of the Polish Day Without Art can be found in Joanna Figiel, “On the Citizen Forum for Contemporary Arts,” ArtLeaks Gazette, September 2014, 27–32 →.
The “We, precariat” struggle was initiated by a media campaign and a demonstration coordinated by the Art Workers Committee of the Independent Union Workers’ Initiative in Poland, the Citizens’ Forum for Contemporary Art, and the online magazine Political Critique.
An account of major art boycotts, including time lines and source documents, can be found in the excellent reader I Can’t Work Like This: A Reader on Recent Boycotts and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), edited by Joanna Warsza and the participants in the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.
Some of these struggles are transversal to the field of art, engulfing entire cities or societies, including artists, many of whom are the first and most active among occupiers, to the extent that Martha Rosler has written of an “artistic mode of revolution” that is inherent to occupations and that contrasts with the artistic mode of gentrification. See her “The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation,” in Joy Forever: The Political Economy of Social Creativity, eds. Michal Kozlowski et al. (London: MayFly Books; Warsaw: Bęc Zmiana, 2014), 177–99. The repercussions of occupations for art scenes have been tremendous, as exemplified by Yates McKee’s discussion of Occupy and the New York art scene in his book Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016).
The action at Artists Space was initiated by Georgia Sagri.
The controversies surrounding this staged occupation were recounted in Sebastian Loewe, “When Protest Becomes Art: The Contradictory Transformations of the Occupy Movement at Documenta 13 and Berlin Biennale 7,” Field 1 (Spring 2015): 185–203 →. A polemical reply by Noah Fisher to this article from was published in the subsequent issue of Field; see N. Fischer, “Agency in a Zoo: The Occupy Movement’s Strategic Expansion to Art Institutions,” Field 2 (Winter 2015): 15–40 →.
Vasif Kortun, “IN TURKISH THE WORD ‘PUBLIC’ DOESN’T EXIST: Vasif Kortun in Conversation with the Editors,” in I Can’t Work like This, 138.
A genealogy of art workers’ protest is featured in Corina Apostol, “Art Workers Between Precarity and Resistance: A Genealogy,” ArtLeaks Gazette, August 2015, 7–21 →.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Art versus Work,” in Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, ed. Temporary Services (Chicago: Temporary Services, 2010), 4–5.
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), 28.
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), 111.
As Benjamin suggested in his seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review, August 1970 →.
Pascal Gielen, “Curating with Love, or a Plea for Inflexibility,” Manifesta Journal 10 (2010): 14–26.
A similar notion—that institutions are able to revamp themselves only as a result of political pressure from outside—was discussed recently by Jesús Carrillio in his account of institutional experiments in Spain; see J. Carrillo, “Conspiratorial Institutions? Museums and Social Transformation in the Post-Crisis Period,” Wrong Wrong Magazine, June 26, 2017 →.
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 86.
Michal Kozlowski, Jan Sowa, and Kuba Szreder, The Art Factory (Warszawa: Bęc Zmiana, 2015).
Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter : Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
Many prominent autonomous and Marxist thinkers—some of whom will be referenced below—have discussed the theoretical implications of the withdrawal of artistic labor. See Marina Vishmidt, “Notes on Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital,” in Joy Forever, 47–65; John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: Verso, 2008); Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015); Maurizio Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014); Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013); Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, Artwork, and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Ewa Majewska, “The Non-Heroic Resistance: Singing Mouse, Housewife and Artists in Revolt – Notes from the ‘Former East,’” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, eds. Simon Sheikh and Maria Hlavajova (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
This language, and the theory behind it, originated in theoretical debates spearheaded by the Vienna-based European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP), the traces of which are scattered across the pages of many of the books already mentioned, such as Gerald Raunig’s Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity.
McKee, Strike Art, 6.
Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude.
This concept also emerged among the group of thinkers assembled around EIPCP, who in this case referenced Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power, discussed at length in the reader Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, eds. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: MayFly Books, 2009).
See Ewa Majewska and Kuba Szreder, “So Far, So Good: Contemporary Fascism, Weak Resistance, and Postartistic Practices in Today’s Poland,” e-flux journal 76 (October 2016) →.
Universidad Nomada, “Mental Prototypes and Monster Institutions: Some Notes by Way of an Introduction,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, 237–47.
Sholette, Dark Matter, 13.
The concept of patainstitutions will be explored in the upcoming issue of the Journal for Research Cultures.
Jan Sowa, “Goldex Poldex Madafaka, or a Report from the (Besieged) Pi Sector,” in Europejskie Polityki Kulturalne 2015. Raport o Przyszłości Publicznego Finansowania Sztuki Współczesnej w Europie, eds. Maria Lind and Raimund Minichbauer (Warszawa: Bec Zmiana, 2009).
The Polish institutional art world changed, as major art institutions signed agreements to pay exhibition fees for artists. But this was only the most visible aspect of even more profound changes in the composition of the artistic universe. The strike prompted media discussion about conditions of artistic work and more generally about precarious labor. The Commission of Art Workers was established, and now functions within the framework of the independent trade union Workers’ Initiative. From the communities politicized during the art strike, many other initiatives emerged, resulting in the participation of artists in feminist and democratic protests in 2016 and 2017, and the creation of many new art groups, such as Żubrzyce (Bison-Girls) and the Consortium for Postartistic Practice.
Stephen Wright, Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013).
The concept of “art worlds” in plural was introduced and developed by pragmatist sociologist Howard Becker in his treatise Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Basecamp Group & Friends, Plausible Artworlds (Philadelphia: Lulu.com, 2013).
The results of this survey are collected on the web page of the project →.
Dmitry Vilensky, “Withdrawal as Institutional Critique: Chto Delat and Manifesta 10,” in I Can’t Work like This.
Quoted in McKee, Strike Art, 35.
Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 52.
Neil Cummings, “A Joy Forever,” Joy Forever.
John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2015).
Hito Steyerl, “If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms,” e-flux journal 76 (October 2016) →.
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 3.
Jerzy Ludwiński, Notes from the Future of Art: Selected Writings of Jerzy Ludwiński (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum; Rotterdam: Veenman Publishers, 2007), 26.