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Art
Fun Club, Art Now, Video still, 2006
ARTICLE 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free
choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of
work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has
the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just
and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his
family an existence worthy of human dignity, and
supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social
protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to
join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 23. of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights as adopted in 1948.
Art Fun Club
(Serbia), Nemanja
Cvijanović (Croatia),
Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria),
Tanja Dabo & Igor Grubić
(Croatia), Petra Feriancova
(Slovakia), Janez Janša
(Slovenia), Şener Özmen &
Erkan Özgen (Turkey),
Irena Pivka & Brane Zorman (Slovenia),
Susan Schmidt (Germany),
Tina Smrekar (Slovenia),
Mladen Stilinović
(Croatia), son:DA
(Slovenia), Goran Trbuljak
(Croatia)
April
4– May 2, 2008
You are kindly invited to attend the opening
of the exhibition on Friday, April 4th at
20.00 at Galerija Škuc.
Article 23
served as a starting point for examining the conditions of
work and existence of artists, both nationally and
internationally. Contemporary artists are generally
underpaid, their work is assessed poorly or not at all, and
they have low social security, so to survive they must often
do work which is not related to their occupation. The issue
of artists' survival strategies has recently featured more
prominently in the local contemporary art context as well,
but without much affinity for the artists' opinions. The
artists are most often referred to as examples of artistic
practice and not as living beings who usually can hardly
make ends meet from their work.
Tina Smrekar's project Surviver, which
was presented last year at the galerija miroslav kraljević
in Zagreb served as the key ground for the concept of the
exhibition in Škuc Gallery, as the artist comes from a
stratum of society whose work is most often rewarded with
charity. The artist has transformed her personal experience
into a research project, which included interviews with over
fifty artists from different parts of the world, and for the
Zagreb exhibition she complemented this with works by
artists who respond to the issues of survival in various
ways.
The second part of the exhibition in Škuc
Gallery presents the view of the curator, who responded to
the same questions from the position of a cultural worker,
an advocate for better working conditions, and a
representative of those who are on the payroll (mostly
without questioning their position) of different
institutions. The artist and the curator worked for several
months on the project and developed the exhibition in a
dialogue with the invited artists. Some of the works respond
to the issue very indirectly and some build upon it, while
interpreting the theme with humour and, above all,
cynically.
On 7 April at 19.00, within the
framework of the exhibition, there will be a presentation of
the Danish association for young workers in art, UKK,
founded in 2002 as the result of protests against the new
ultra-right government and its policies, and the Austrian
association for fine arts, IG Bildende Kunst, which
represents the interests of visual artists. Both will
present their work and ways to improve the working
conditions of creators of contemporary art.
The next day, 8 April, at 19.00, there will be a
panel discussing ‘How to fill the pockets of the
contemporary artist?!’. The discussion will involve the
BridA collective, Alenka Gregorič, Dunja Kukovec, Jadranka
Ljubičič, Aldo Milohnič, Bojana Piškur, Irena Pivka, Tadej
Pogačar, Marija Mojca Pungerčar, Borut Savski and Tina
Smrekar. Together we will seek potential solutions that
could result in better working conditions and ensure better
understanding of the living, production and creative
conditions of contemporary artists on the part of state
institutions.
Curators: Alenka Gregorič & Tina Smrekar
The Article 23 exhibition is part of
the project Land of Human Rights, which
involves six institutions: the < rotor > association for
contemporary art, Graz, the University of J.E. Purkyně, Ústí
nad Labem, riesa efau | Motorenhalle, Dresden, Trafó
Gallery, Budapest, Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, g - mk |
galerija miroslav kraljević, Zagreb. These six art
institutions have jointly developed the Land of Human
Rights. The different parts of the program – exhibitions
inside and outside the gallery space, poster campaigns,
media projects, film programmes, residency programmes,
theoretical discourse etc – are conceived and carried out on
the institutions’ own authority. The project deals with the
status quo of human rights in Europe seen from the
perspective of visual art. Starting at the end of 2007,
analyses and visions of human rights issues in Europe will
be developed and disseminated through art to the general
public over a period of three years.
The rumbling stomach art
Valuation, as one of the basic occupations of the society,
encompassing a range from personal to broader societal
criteria, determines and enables the positioning of an
individual in a social environment in which he lives and
works or, as the case may be, creates. The very perception
of the words work and create presents the first obstacle we
run into when we label diverse vocations or types of
creativity according to societal norms. Assembly line,
factory, office, trade etc. are spaces where, by general
standards, one does not create but rather work. Work as such
demands its pay, since it is socially valuable and has to be
rewarded with an earned payment without question.
A creator, whom we most often equate with
the artist, faces, however, a minor difficulty. The society
more often than not puts creating into the frame of
(useless) social activities, which does not bring any
surplus and which belongs to the realm of private relaxation
and satisfaction. Its usefulness has objectionable
parameters - most often it serves as entertainment, tension
release, relaxation, diversion from everyday work. So why
would the kind of work which is not connected to a tangible
saleable product and is therefore flirting with useless
creating, be paid. The artist should take up useful work,
valued by society as worthy of payment.
In the case of a Slovenian artist, his survival is most
often bound to the support from public institutions, which
value his work and set the amount of payment accordingly. In
most cases, the sum of money is bizarre to such extent, that
it does not even cover the basic production costs, let alone
the costs of survival. There remains the possibility of
trading their "products", the ones that the broader society
most often doesn’t recognise as satisfactory for monetary
purchase. Yet, in the time when the international
contemporary art market is blooming on all levels, in
Slovenia it is completely underfed. The blame is to be
looked for both on the level of the cultural policy climate
as well as in the reception of such novelty (for the
Slovenian space) from the side of the professional public.
Welcome to the real world of the artists,
whose mailboxes are just as well filled with numbered
leaflets the amounts on which are, just as with people who
do get paid for their work, draining the already half-empty
wallets. Yet it is worth to suffer for art, isn't it? How
else would one satisfy the empty consumerist souls who have
more than enough of their own problems. Art should entertain
and amuse, since that is its mission, even though with a
rumbling stomach.
Project is co-produced with Zavod No
History.
Sponsor is Signum d.o.o.
With the support of the Culture programme
of European Union
Land of Human Rights is a project by
< rotor > association
for contemporary art/Graz,
University of J.E. Purkyně/Ústí nad
Labem, riesa efau | Motorenhalle/ Dresden, Trafó
Gallery/Budapest, Galerija Škuc/Ljubljana, g -
mk | galerija miroslav kraljević/ Zagreb
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