Don't Leap Into the Void: against top-down de-institutionalisation

Rumour has it that several of the major public or semi-public art spaces in London are currently making severe cutbacks to their services. The ICA recently proposed a ‘radical’ programme of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ in which unpaid curators and artists would curate the gallery’s exhibitions for a year. While the ICA’s top curators pitched this idea to a group of potential collaborators from outside the institution, existing staff members sat and waited to hear whether they would still have jobs at the end of the day. Both those facing redundancy and those putting together this ‘alternative’ option – a transparent attempt to keep the gallery open at no cost – would seem to have been on the receiving end of decisions made higher up the institutional hierarchy. Their funders and supporters might claim that managers’ errors have lead to this dire situation. However, given that several other important publically funded art spaces are facing similar problems (the Whitechapel and others loaded down with debt from capital projects are sending out begging letters to their email lists) it seems obvious that the financial crisis is the underlying cause – or at least the pretext – for this sudden contraction.

It is shocking that major public institutions should be 'restructuring' like this without making any public announcement of their plans, or any effort, apparently, to do something about it before imposing their problems onto their staff. But it is also striking that the response of middle management has been not to oppose cutbacks head on but rather to spin the crisis as an ‘opportunity’ for a ‘radical’ new approach.

While very different in their function for capital, there is an analogy here between the wider public sector and the state funded cultural sector. I hate Hackney Council for selling off public space to developers and for complicity in social cleansing. I despise the ICA for bending so zealously to the imperatives of neoliberal economics. But if it turns out they are to be viciously cut in a crunch-related purge, do I celebrate – great, at last they get a taste of their own medicine? If the council says it’s going to scale back services and ask tenants to run their own housing do I cheer – an opportunity for some real self-management? If public art spaces are up to their eyes in debt and looking for new – unpaid - inputs, do I leap at the chance to impose a radical curatorial programme on the capitalist institution?

It might seem strange to many activists, politically engaged artists or indeed MPs enamoured of the ‘budget airline’ approach to public services, but the answer to this and other related questions is no, I do not. I don’t cheer and I don’t say ‘what a great opportunity’. Because, first of all, a cut is a cut, and as the biggest capitalist crisis in decades continues, we should oppose cuts, whether in housing or in arts, services or jobs. When institutions try and pass off their downsizing or outright closure as an ‘exciting new experiment’ one should remember the real significance of the ‘Easycouncil’ idea – all such ‘liberations’ and ‘devolutions of power’ are simply desperate attempts to conceal austerity – the destruction of value in the form of jobs, budgets, etc.

Self-Reduction Not Self-Reproduction!

A capitalist crisis is all about destroying value, eliminating costs, wiping out over-valued assets, whether writing down prices or knocking down walls. Crisis is deflationary, to be precise it is the devalorisation of values – whether property prices, arts budgets, or the price of labour-power. When state institutions of whatever kind start slashing staff and services, however this is presented, whoever is blamed, we should understand it as a part of this wider process of devalorisation. There is nothing natural or desirable about it. Deflation isn’t something that just happens, nor is it ‘liberating’ per se, since it does not set us free from money any more than not eating sets us free from hunger. Our reaction should not be celebration but opposition. It’s not our responsibility to get them out of their mess.

Capital is keen to make it ours, of course, they want us to ‘own the problem’ and to help them make this process as smooth and frictionless as possible. Savvy managers play to our very sense of dissatisfaction, anger, or outright hostility to institutions in order to get potential enemies onside as they go about writing off infrastructure and jobs. That they have spent the last decade or more ruining cultural and other institutions shouldn’t inure or blind us to what’s going on now. They may hope that they can tap into our desire for revenge – it’s harder to fight for institutions that have been systematically run down and fucked up. But revenge is a dish that is best served by oneself, not vicariously through the imperatives of capital. Just as one should defend council housing (however lousy it may be, it’s better than no state housing at all), so we need to go on defending other state institutions now in crisis. We need to destroy value on our own terms, not theirs.

It may be that very soon all of us will have a wonderful opportunity for self-management (not to mention self-reproduction) in the husks of gutted state and private-public institutions. However, the process of neoliberalisation in its terminal and accelerated form should not, primarily, be taken as a kind of ‘revolution from above’, a windfall for radicals. If there were a wide social movement with a strong popular basis opposing capitalism then the tactic of undermining and taking over the tottering institutions would make absolute sense. As it is, there is a real danger that activists and artists, acting in isolation from the rest of society, will play the role of ‘left wing of deflation’ (or ‘left wing of devalorisation’). We will, as in gentrification processes past, be asked to play the role of unpaid cultural caretakers.

This time however, the market is collapsed and heading down – there is no upturn in sight, unemployment is rising, production falling, property prices are predicted to fall as much as 50% from their bubblicious peak. This is not 1991, no new Hoxton cavalry of dotcoms is going to ride in and save the day. Instead, those who become the shocktroops of these New Institutions will be pioneering a future of freedom – that is, institutions free of paid staff, cleaners, or indeed, futures. Again, if we were in a proto-revolutionary situation this could sound quite appealing, but until we are we should not conspire in the process of value destruction more than we have to.

Beyond Culturedrome?

Everyone is critical of the institutions now facing (intensified) restructuring and privatisation. Some wish they could be transformed if not 'supressed and realised' once and for all in a world which no longer needs art centres or a specialised sphere of creative activity. However, we need to keep a realistic sense of what is possible at this point in the current crisis. At present, 'radical' programmes in general are not part of some wider revolutionary movement. And we are talking about blue chip culture centres not workers councils. But even if such a social upsurge is brewing and can find a focus in elite cultural and academic institutions, it is more likely to arise through struggle against capitalist acts of value destruction than through the mis-representation of cut backs and shut downs as 'radical experiments’. However much people may love to loathe them, at present the collapse of cultural institutions is not a victory but part of our defeat.

We should be realistic about the probably low levels of wider participation in 'deinstitutionalised' institutions given the current climate of depoliticisation, defensiveness and understandable insecurity. Even a suddenly 'free' (as in unremunerated) institution would exist within a context of intensified economic and social polarisation. Rather than calling for revolutionary new programmes that have no social basis, culture workers should oppose cuts in semi/public art spaces and state-funded culture more broadly. In fact, such resistance is more likely to forge meaningful connections that go beyond the abstract discursive productions of politicised cultural workers since the stealth downsizing of institutions involves workers at every level including technicians, cleaners and other staff. It would be ironic, though not untypical, if cultural ‘providers’ were to overlook an opportunity for meaningful solidarity with other workers in the rush to develop radical curatorial programmes. Why wait till after the existing staff have been laid off to get ‘radical’?

Conspiring in the ongoing contraction of bourgeois cultural institutions is not automatically good for those they have always excluded. But it is definitely going to make things harder for the minority who either make a living and/or do something critically or aesthetically interesting in these spaces. The knock on effects of ‘decommodifying’ this activity in the midst of a crisis will be a further precaritisation and straitening of the circumstances of all involved – except, of course, the management, who will have passed their problems on to us.