[-empyre-] the field disappears....: MUTEmuted: forward from Pauline von Mourik Broekman

[naxsmash]

Postscript--

I'm a subscriber to MUTE's print mag, and Tim Murray has curated  
online art projects for them.  I must forward this letter to you all  
from MUTE's co-founder.... in support of Simon's remark about the  
funding debacle.   -cm
--------------------------------------------------------

Mute's 100% cut by ACE
- a personal consideration of Mute's defunding,

by co-founder Pauline van Mourik Broekman

Please send us your comments and feedback on Mute's 100% cut by ACE  
this week. We are hoping to set this in the context of the broader  
cuts across the arts and society, which represent a sustained assault  
on the conditions for free expression, critical thinking, and  
independent production – be that directly or indirectly. You can do  
that on Metamute.org, Facebook, Twitter, on our list, Mute-social at lists.metamute.org 
, or email, mute at metamute.org. Thanks!

We are very sad to announce that, on Wednesday, Mute Publishing found  
itself in the category of 'losers' as these emerged from ACE's  
National Portfolio Organisation decisions. The magazine had presented  
to ACE a programme that combined a web and print magazine, books and  
events, community self-publishing, education, and digital strategy  
support and advocacy work, but faltered in the second stage of the  
assessment process, where its financially precarious position and  
'weak' governance structure – as well as the perception other  
organisations were better placed to deliver to ACE's strategic goals –  
proved fatal, resulting in a 100% cut to core funding.

We regard the process of being placed in competition with other arts  
organisations as poisonous and distracting: while we will privately  
question the sizeable uplifts granted to large, established  
organisations (which, in the greater scheme of things, need further  
funding about as urgently as Paris Hilton needs another handbag), in  
the end we recognise it as a familiar part of the divide-and-rule  
principle that has long marked the operations of support agencies like  
ACE, where a chronic reliance on the parent body for the basic  
apparatus of organisational reproduction nurtures fear among the  
'dependents' – slowly but surely stripping them of all sense they can  
do anything for themselves, let alone together... The spectacle of  
slavish gratitude for the spoils of public funds, in which even  
organisations cut or killed felt compelled to reiterate the basic  
tenets of ACE's funding paradigm (excellence, innovation, global  
leadership and creativity), were truly depressing in this regard – not  
one voice standing out for offering a different vision or lexicon of  
practice.

For us, the relevant story is elsewhere, as it has always been, and is  
effectively being obscured by a smoke-screen of rhetoric: it is said  
that 'adventurous and risk-taking programming is being rewarded', and  
a 'resilient' arts portfolio composed. Although we concertedly  
participated in the process, adapting our organisation's operational  
model to that demanded by ACE's 'Achieving Great Art for Everyone'  
agenda (within which we happily chose to deliver to the Excellence and  
Innovation Aims), the relevant story lies in the devastation being  
wrought upon the social in general. Here, in the name of prudent  
economic management, Government's disinvestment in art and education  
(two fields with which Mute interfaces most intimately) appears as a  
symptom of a larger programme of creative destruction, launched in the  
name of an aggressively kickstarted, entrepreneurial Britain that we  
all know is doomed to fail, but not without wrecking the lives of  
millions.

To be a 'winner' in the arts variant of this competition (and that  
means those who, as The Guardian dubbed it, 'won big'; not the  
hundreds kept on on a shoestring), several kinds of compliance are  
required. Firstly, a near religious belief in the power of art to  
'deliver' personal transformation. Second, a normative and by now  
entirely standardised model of art-organisational development, where  
success is measured via the ability to diversify funding sources (via  
trading activities, rights management, sponsorship, philanthropy and a  
variety of non-public sources), have 'reach and impact' (loose catch- 
alls combining audiences, media reception, influence), and offer  
'engagement' – all of which, it is reiterated, can only be achieved by  
bodies in possession of larger executive boards, which have  
represented on them 'experts' from the realms of Finance, Legal,  
Development and Artistic Vision, and who watch Income and Expenditure  
lines like hawks, assuring they mitigate risk, execute their mission  
and stay on a number of targets, as these encompass financial,  
audience and strategic partnership projections. As Mute – and many  
others, such as the Scottish based Variant magazine (another 'loser'  
of late) – has attempted to discuss in a series of articles stretching  
back decades, the backdoor this structure has offered to an entirely  
corporatised version of art, wherein genuine diversity and antagonism  
is replaced by superficially different versions of doing the same  
thing (and many platforms for critical discussion gradually desist  
from analysing culture as a whole to discussing the ins, outs, rights  
and wrongs of particular art forms), is one of the great untold  
stories of mainstream contemporary culture.

As a critical platform seeking to understand culture in the round –  
i.e. in the many and various ways it exemplifies, illuminates and  
engages with larger processes (be they, to put it cheesily, part of  
the 'macro' dimension of global economics, or the 'micro' level of  
subjectivity) – we have attempted to shore up our core editorial work  
with a range of others that could help subsidise this. OpenMute, our  
consultancy and tools agency, through which we also facilitate the  
publishing activity of many other independent producers, has been the  
most visible result. But the free-content economy of the web, which  
felt like a natural home for our discussions, eventually became Mute's  
nemesis, as sales and subscriptions decreased at the same speed our  
web readership grew, and a growing international community of readers  
slowly and unwittingly dealt our 'business model' a death-blow.

We must now figure out what to do about this, as all of us who've  
worked on the magazine for so long have no intention of stopping our  
work because of a funding decision. Many different working models can  
and are already being imagined. Others in the many small to medium  
sized digitally-led organisations which have been cut will be trying  
to figure out their futures similarly, as will, it seems, many  
comparable small organisations whose governing remits aren't deemed  
essential in the current round. We are particularly perplexed by the  
blow dealt to diversity-led organisations, who engage with questions  
we imagine will increase rather than decrease in urgency in 'Austerity  
Britain'.

We will attempt to continue the discussion in a number of places. One,  
on our website, Metamute.org, which publishes weekly and where we will  
open space for responses to ACE's funding decisions, on Mute  
Publishing as well as other organisations, as well as the Googlegroup,  
acedigitaluncut and media arts discussion list CRUMB*, where many are  
hoping to marshall a more specific discussion about the apparent  
disinvestment in the still badly understood area of digital practice.  
ACE's decisions reflect a presumption digital has been 'dealt with' by  
conceiving of it as integrated in routine organisational development  
processes, rather than demanding to be explored as a highly self- 
reflexive area of work with a long and rich history linking into  
video, performance, independent publishing, installation art, software  
development, literature and more. Given the consolidation,  
surveillance and privatisation happening in the digital realm as we  
speak, now seems exactly the wrong time to be making such a move. The  
fact that ACE (and partner organisations like the BBC) are seeking to  
align themselves with digital innovation and broadcasting at exactly  
the same time just demonstrates further ignorance and shortsightedness.

Yours sincerely,
Pauline van Mourik Broekman

Director and co-founder of Mute, with Simon Worthington, and writing  
on behalf of brilliant staff, Editorial and Advisory Boards, namely  
Josephine Berry Slater, Caroline Heron, Howard Slater, Darron Broad,  
Laura Oldenbourg; Omar El-Khairy, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles,  
Demetra Kotouza, Hari Kunzru, Mira Mattar, Benedict Seymour, Stefan  
Szczelkun; Sally Jane Norman, Andrew Seto, Sukhdev Sandhu and Andy  
Wilson.


The CRUMB archives, including a recent discussion on this topic, are  
here:
http://www.crumbweb.org/showArchive.php?refr=1301661104&sublink=1





On Mar 31, 2011, at 1:47 PM, Simon Biggs wrote:

> Sorry not to have contributed more. We in the UK are rather  
> preoccupied at
> the moment with the melt down of public funding for the arts and  
> education.
> Radical cuts to each have just been announced, most recently  
> yesterday with
> 100% cuts right across the arts in England. It's a case of crisis  
> management
> for many.
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 31/03/2011 20:47, "naxsmash" <naxsmash at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> dear  evanescent -empyreans,
>>
>> A relatively failed attempt on my part to 'field' a very broad topic,
>> 'how does a field become visible, when" comes to a close as March  
>> goes
>> out like a lamb (but not without
>> radioactive traces from Japan in my breakfast milk here in San Luis
>> Obispo County, or 'so I saw the news today, oh boy...').    I loved
>> what I read, and I really appreciate
>> those who tried to contextualize a topic with such a subtle gradient
>> of emergence. It was a tumultuous month.  So many fields visible at
>> once.  So many disappearances.
>> It's a very, very hard time.  Thanks to all who did post-- Chris,
>> Simon, Martin, Cara, Monica, GH, Mike, Simon, Cynthia, Thyrza,  
>> Julian,
>> Joel, Andreas, Lynn, Gabriella, Ana--
>> I hope I didn't forget anybody.
>>
>> I was preoccupied with a new show just opening last Friday,  'Teorema
>> Drawings' -- if you like please have a look. installation curated by
>> Cara Megan Lewis in a new project space in Kansas City, my old home
>> town.
>> http://www.christinamcphee.net/teorema-drawings-at-cara-and-cabezas-contempora
>> ry/
>>
>> Thanks for your patience and have fun next month.
>>
>> Love,
>>
>> Christina
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> naxsmash
>> naxsmash at mac.com
>>
>>
>> christina mcphee
>>
>> http://christinamcphee.net
>> http://naxsmash.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
> http://www.elmcip.net/
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>
>
>
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland,  
> number SC009201
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre



naxsmash
naxsmash at mac.com


christina mcphee

http://christinamcphee.net
http://naxsmash.net