Re: updates

At each level of funding we encountered structures of governance that demanded the arts conform to agendas set by business, capitalism or neoliberalism, stewarded by government policies and transmitted by funding bodies, be that through the pro-digital thrust of the CCA, the “arts investment” scheme of the LAC, or the disregard for administrative labour of the OAC. By way of The Employee’s path through the various calls for funding, FCG’s very real need for money, and the negative outcomes of our applications, I observed the gap between the agendas set by funding structures and the capacities and mandates of artist-run culture. That gap is being bridged by cultural workers contorting their organizational mandates and their own physical capabilities to navigate streams of funding that will keep their organizations afloat. How can this gap be shown?

It is a great risk to express dissatisfaction, precarity, or burnout, especially to do so alone. Earlier in this text I quoted Carlesimo’s allusion to burnout, but I want to pay attention now to her hesitancy and retraction: “It’s a very delicate thing: How do you communicate this burn out to your grant agencies while also remaining totally grateful? Because you can’t come across as acrimonious.” Carlesimo holds herself back from a direct statement, knowing that to express dissatisfaction can easily be sidelined as complaining and being ungrateful. Complaint, however, as Sara Ahmed so beautifully elucidates in her book of the same title, is intimately bound up in institutional, and institutionalized, power imbalance. Who is called a complainer has everything to do with embedded hierarchies of power, and their fundamental ableism, misogyny, racism and classism. That Carlesimo herself relegated a multi-institutional failure to be properly compensated for her own labour to the status of ungrateful complaint is both evidence of this power imbalance, and of how successfully these inadequate working conditions have been internalized by cultural workers today. In short, the answer to Carlesimo’s rhetorical question: ‘how do you communicate this burnout while also remaining grateful?’ is that you can’t. That is how to recognize an abusive power structure: lodged within the bitter choice between being grateful (and silent) or being exiled as difficult and ungrateful by making one’s ‘complaints’ known, and ‘outing’ oneself as a dissatisfied, ‘difficult’ complainer.