This academic essay is from a while back, and has been published in Intersections, the postgraduate journal for multidisciplinary exchange of research and practice at Ulster University, but I’d realised that i hadn’t shared it here…
What a Way to Make a Living: how labour precarity and a lack of recognition for artists’ work create the conditions for burnout.
Jane Morrow
Supervised by Dr. Cherie Driver & Brian Connolly
The context for my research is the precarity of artists’ studios and workspaces in Belfast. There are approximately 450 studio-based artists in the city, across some 17 organisations. There are many more artists who work from home studios, particularly since March 2020 (for the purposes of my research, I am focusing on formal studios – those with more than two members, with buildings or supported by public funds, if, indeed, they qualify). The arguments made throughout my enquiry are for increased recognition and value for artists’ work and workspaces as essential sites of artistic labour and production. Artistic labour is – even without unstable workspaces – beset by precarity (erratic and poorly resourced living and working conditions, personal and professional overlap, the gig economy and competitive individualism); by barriers (age, gender, parenting, accessibility, minority cultural/minority ethnic background, class, moralisation and vulnerability, privilege and recognition) and is beset by instrumentalisation despite financial disinvestment (public expenditure and the social, economic and environmental multipliers required of the arts in order to justify it). In response to this journal’s theme of endurance, this paper focuses on just one aspect of artists as workers: burnout.
Keywords: artistic labour, burnout, artists’ studios, workspaces, precarity, resilience
Research into precarity has been growing for a decade across fields including economics, social sciences and the arts. It is indisputably a response to factors such as the long-term fallout from the global financial crisis, government-imposed austerity measures, neoliberalist agendas, and – most recently – the Covid-19 pandemic. My research into the precarity of artists’ studios and workspaces in Belfast is broadly positioned within discourses that affect our public and cultural spaces: neoliberalism, cultural democracy, the built environment, instrumentalisation, disinvestment in culture, and the contemporary social, economic, and political crisis of work (Cohen, 2018, X).
This paper focuses on just one key consequence of precarity in artistic labour – one amongst many others, including barriers to labour and low levels of remuneration – and one that is particularly pertinent to this journal’s subject of endurance: burnout. How does precarity enable burnout, how might it be mediated, and what steps can be taken towards a resolution? This paper introduces some key thinkers on precarity (Figiel and Shukaitis, Ross), labour and cultures of work (Banks, Beech, Cohen, Petersen), social value (Adorno, Belfiore), artists as producers (Child, Steyerl) and art world inequality (Beirne et al., McElherron et al.) amongst references to reports and policies and extracts from my primary data interviews. It also draws heavily on the lyrics of 9 to 5 (Parton, 1980); not just one of the best songs ever written, but a way of life for the many millions of us who tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen.
Pour myself a cup of ambition
Talking to artists about the work they do constantly brings up their dual use of the word “work”. There is their art work, and then their paid work, and while one has its hourly rate and holidays and sick pay, the work that they’re really passionate about is the other work – the one that they would do anyway, even if no one ever paid them a cent for it. (Tipton, 2011)
To what end, this relentlessly precarious labour, ongoing disinvestment and the often-inextricable confluence of personal and professional spheres alongside what academic and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen lists as ‘overwork, overstimulation, perpetual communication, anxiety, insomnia’? (Cohen, 2018, 128). Added, in 2019, to the World Health Organisation’s 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), burnout is referred to as ‘an occupational phenomenon [but is] not classified as a medical condition’. Burnout exists as a broad-brush default in contemporary society in a way that can’t simply be characterised by generation (Anne Helen Petersen’s Can‘t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation or Cohen’s archetypal 1990s Slacker) but also by sector and discipline; almost by design.
Several definitions and etymological origins have been posited for burnout, though I have elected to use that proffered by Cohen, which has seen the term evolve through theology into secularism, moving from what was characterised as a spiritual crisis (2018, p5) into a characterisation of something so unfathomable and beyond reach that it generates only complete apathy. Petersen, who draws on Cohen’s definition, does not seem to push the phenomenon far enough when saying that ‘exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.’ (Petersen, 2021, xvi).Burnout’s benign indifference can easily become the ultimate goal; as Cohen suggests, the profound, primeval and ‘anxious pursuit of our desires is a craving for their extinction’. The imagined and longed-for relief of repetitive labour within supplementary employment (gig economy, above), and an ability to switch off at the end of the day paradoxically plays neoliberalism’s hand.
They just use your mind, and they never give you credit
Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel frame a perfect storm of a creative class instrumentalised in labour and economic markets, a post-Fordian work ethic, increasingly precarious and unstable working conditions, and the social and psychological investment of artists who profoundly embody their work as their primary means of authentic expression. Drawing on the standard-bearing figure of Joseph Beuys, they posit that…
…to be an artist is to make peace with the reality that there can be no outside to one’s work, that every moment could be seized upon as a space of production, and thus there can be no space of respite from work, no weekend retreat. (Shukaitiis and Figiel, 2020, 290-302).
Industry, of course, (in post-industrial society) is a layered and nuanced term which, Adorno implies in The Culture Industry (1991), does not refer to the specificities of production or things produced, but the term that characterises a system that produces. The value of art is recognised, but only if it is of service to others and not intrinsically. Eleanora Belfiore’s The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History deals in a substantial way with the instrumentalisation of the arts to develop alternative agendas:
…variously represented as an expanding sector of the economy, a major export earner and a stimulant to tourism… as a catalyst for urban renewal, a business asset and a cost-effective means of employment…promote social cohesion and community empowerment…reduce the prison population and improve health… and they have even been seen as agents of social stability and the renewal of social society.
(Belfiore and Bennett, 2008, p.6).
Meanwhile the arts have been systematically deprived and dismantled by evidence-based policy making. Elaborating on the implications of eroding arts from public policy debates, Belfiore implies that were it not for public subsidy, discussion of the social value of arts would not take place at all. What it also implies is a means by which to measure outputs. In the case of artists’ workspaces, as sites of internal production and not external engagement – ‘the kinds of routine, everyday practices of making—the mundane assembly of the necessary tools, materials and artefacts, the work of thinking, preparing and planning, the quotidian and repetitive dimensions of art production’ (Serafini and Banks, 2020, 351-372). This renders measurement of their outputs unquantifiable, leaving them vulnerable to market-led forces.
The very mechanisms that keep artists dependent on public funding, unrelentingly demonstrating their worth and the rotisserie visibility of their ‘artrepreneurialism’ are those which keep online, are those which keep practitioners, as critical, and therefore ‘agitating’ elements, in place. Artrepreneurialism is a term coined by Jen Harvie, author of Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (2013) which is used to refer to ‘contemporary art making which rewards entrepreneurialism, individualism, creative destruction and self-interested profit making’ quoted in Child, 2019, 53. The response to the Tories’ recent attempts (May 2021) to cut arts subjects in UK higher education institutions by 50% (deeming them not ‘strategic priorities’), has resulted in a number of open letters and petitions. Alex Frost, an artist based in London, established the first of these petitions, addressed to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, in which Frost stated that Williamson:
…clearly believes that the arts should be a monoculture of privileged unquestioning elitists, cutting funding to arts subjects in Higher education will be very, very effective. Gavin clearly wants an arts for and by the privileged, so that his position is never challenged or questioned nor does he want to see or hear a perspective on the world that is anything other than predictable.’ (Frost, 2021)
Well you got dreams and you know they matter. Be your own boss, climb your own ladder
As a result, when opportunities arise, and regardless of the unpredictable tempo (Ross, 2016) with which they do so, they must be seized wholeheartedly, just as small and vulnerable mammals pack their cheeks for winter. If this phrasing could be viewed as unacademic, and worse – potentially disempowering – that is intentional. Artists ARE disempowered and this is an issue which is more visceral, more evocative than purely academic language could attempt to articulate. An interview conducted with an artist based at Flax Art Studios, who wished to remain anonymous, summarises the machinations and impacts of such a pattern:
It’s difficult to say no to opportunities that coincide, especially after quieter periods. I’m thinking specifically of a time when I was trying to complete a commission in Ireland while on residency abroad. I learned a lot about my limitations – if I’m looking for a silver lining – but it put me under a level of stress that I haven’t experienced before or since. The funding for the commission (a public sculpture) came through late (4 months prior to the intended installation date) and whilst it allowed me to work with a fabricator for elements of the project, I really needed a small team of people. Without that, I ended up working 20-hour days for the final 2-3 weeks of the project (filled with fear of not delivering). It’s hard to describe the emotional and physical toll that takes. I think emerging artists often do find themselves with wildly unrealistic workloads because we don’t have access to, or don’t feel as though we can demand, the resources and support needed for certain projects.
This artist articulates, quite simply, that is there is often not enough work to go around to sustain oneself. When there is more work for one person to undertake at one particular time, we must consider the reasons for this – must funding be used by organisations (who offer such opportunities) before, for example, the end of a financial year? Must complex models of delivery, such as biennials or festivals, take place at similar times of year, or as part of even larger infrastructural juggernauts, such as City of Culture programmes? There must be more responsible dialogue from those inviting artists into their programmes and not simply with the assumption that they are paying the artist for their work and are therefore doing them a favour.
It is also essential that those in positions to offer opportunities to artists communicate with their sectoral peers to remove these – problematic – poolings of activity and resources. Initiatives such as Arts Council England’s clash diary can mediate this – a spreadsheet which organisations complete with their proposed programmes for the forthcoming year, which is then searchable by region and art form. In Northern Ireland, it is more common to seek to provide an all-or-nothing audience offer, which aims for spectacle, such as the ‘First Thursday’ gallery launch event schedule. This does work well for audiences, who get to experience lots of art at one time, but can be problematic for artists and organisation staff, who simply cannot be in more than one place at a time. Whatever the time-based solutions to these issues, the failure to adequately financially resource opportunities remains – in the Venn diagram of good, fast and cheap, something or someone always suffers; in this case, the artist.
5 to 9, you keep working, working, working
As with so much within a neoliberal, apparently meritocratic ‘homo economicus’ culture, the extent to which an artist now succeeds in seizing opportunities relies solely on individual resources, rather than systemic ones – the confluence of obsession, perfectionism and hypersensitively which appear to characterise our discipline. Hamann (2009, 37-59) identifies the neoliberal homo economicus as a worker who is:
fully responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclusion of all other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social conditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves.
Indeed, the reversal of Covid-induced work-from-home towards live-at-work has highlighted the proliferation of burnout across many sectors (and vastly more so for women than for men). In their piece ‘New year, same work anxiety. How capitalism makes work-life ‘balance’ feel impossible’, freelance journalist Rainesford Stauffer asserts that:
…it’s become clear this isn’t just a paranoid quirk specific to overthinkers working multiple jobs, like me. A new year brings new pledges to improve our work-life balance amid chipper reminders not to make work your whole life. But it’s the precariousness that has to be solved first. You can’t outrun anxiety about taking time off without addressing the system that creates and perpetuates that anxiety. It’s impossible to divorce this precariousness from capitalism, including the embedded disparities in our workforce and work-related policies. If you’re too worried about losing your job or having your hours cut to take a weekend off or take a breather, it makes sense that you’d just keep working. (Stauffer, 2021).
When the historic carrot-and-stick model of reward that characterised Fordism is now no longer societally acceptable, it does require, as Shujkaitis and Figiel reflect, an individual ‘embracing of the principles of autonomy, mastery and purpose’. Taken in the context of an already enmeshed personal-professional state, the flipside (to take an absolute binary approach) of these – superficially – liberating motivations unfortunately become all-consuming, isolating and corrosive impositions (Hito Steyerl).
Whilst there have been moves towards dismantling this culture in an increasingly mental-health aware arts community – supported locally by the 2018 NI-wide-sector-rippling Changing Arts and Minds report and increasingly politicised (and welcome) focus on narratives of collective care within practice – it is not apparent whether this this view of an artist as someone who must suffer in order to succeed continues to persist within the public consciousness (a subject which goes beyond the scope of this research). However, Beirne et al. (2017, 213) confirm that:
identity research has established that struggling is a regular feature of cultural work, although most of this relates to personal anxieties and ways of mediating threats to the self that come from public performance and audience reaction… The processes involved are intimate, emotional, and often uncomfortable since the struggles are about artists coming to terms with their own abilities, reputation, and sense of purpose.
Certainly, one outcome of an oscillating relentlessly busy schedule and an entirely empty one is the onset of the opposite of artistic passion: apathy. Furthermore, harmful suggestions of artists’ inherent idleness – with the apparently arts-led programming strand that led to a BBC documentary, assumptively titled What Do Artists Do All Day? as just one example – which, even if tongue-in-cheek, critically undermines this inherently generative ideology and discipline.
Yet what of resilience, or even resistance, for practitioners who are burned-out? Martin and Sunley (2010, 27-43) offer three highly nuanced pathways for characterising resilience within systems: that of the ability to rebound as quickly and easily as possible – following shock – to a previous state; to absorb shock and continue to maintain a stable and coherent direction; and adaptability to (or anticipation of) shock – the ‘pivot’ that has characterised artists and arts organisations’ expected responses to the conditions around the pandemic. Each of these definitions implies a degree of autonomy; once again, a focus on the individual to absorb impacts, and perhaps – to go one further – to institute a regime of wellness and self-care techniques in order to resolve vast, complex and structural fissures. Beirne et al. (2017, 204-221) reflect on Mark Banks’ findings that artists can achieve autonomy:
…typically combin[ing] aesthetic values with social and political awareness. It involves an ethical sense of personal ties to family, community and society that take the practice of being an authentic artist or creative worker to the point of questioning and possibly challenging accepted conventions and understandings.
And you’re in the same boat with a lotta your friends. Launching ideas you all believe in.
What Banks describes is something not that distinct from caring professions, in which the avoidance of compassion fatigue is a regular negotiation. However, he also articulates the role of community, of solidarity, of commonality and of energy in artists’ actions and engagements. Today – against a backdrop of the pandemic, global social justice movements and the impacts of, for example, Brexit, on workers’ rights – a refocusing on both the theory and practice of self-organising – and of unions in particular – are timely.
These circumstances now exist on top of a decade of austerity, the apparent solution to the global financial crisis, which contributed to widespread, top-down disinvestment throughout the sector, and artists budgets being slashed (fees and opportunities were easier to cut; as soft targets within organisational budgets, they did not carry the same obligations as staff or buildings). Visual artists have seen the rise of interdisciplinary unions composed of, for example, theatre and dance sectors, as well as developed connections with, for example, housing co-ops, and – through formalised networks – have increased their opportunities to hold employers to account. Artists’ unions are offering an opportunity to collectivise and set terms around what WE do, OUR values, and OUR rate of pay. These unions offer a sense of solidarity following an era of competitive individualism, and one of the most powerful weapons in a union’s arsenal is that of labour removal, to draw both the attention of those who they work for, and in the wider public consciousness.
But what might that mean for artists and the art-world, and for the public who may occasionally seem difficult to convince of art’s intrinsic value? Kerry Guinan, Chair of Ireland’s new artist union Praxis, positions the artist at an intersection of institutions that commission or exhibit artists’ work, alongside those that artists depend on such as studios, in addition to broader welfare and employment systems. For Guinan, she is specifically ruminating, in the formation of Praxis, on ‘what kind of labour power does an artist hold in these areas and how it can be withheld’(2021). With increasing scrutiny of, and some resistance to, returning to work as it once was – pre-lockdowns – artists are going back to the drawing board.
The tide’s gonna turn, and it’s all gonna roll your way
Without significant systemic overhaul of the public perception of the arts, increased funding, recognition of art-work as work, and the dismantling of hierarchies even within the sector itself, solutions to burnout will be unforthcoming. Furthermore, post-pandemic, we may be approaching a point in the collective consciousness where burnout is so widespread that it either is accepted and becomes a non-issue, or threatens entirely the current world order as the only issue for every workforce. Where artists are so often called upon (exploited?) to help to create and share a new set of values, this fundamental re-think cannot start or end with us. Continuing to hold to account those in power is becoming a collective responsibility and global reality, and artists and arts organisations are just one component. But their labour must firstly be acknowledged, and one key message must change – both within and beyond the art sector itself – that art work is not vocational (or easy) but that it is labour, and must be understood, planned and remunerated accordingly. If the wider public want the end products – the quality of life that art demonstrably offers, and the social, environmental, cultural, and economic growth of their cities – then artistic labour as well as the space (both literal and figurative) for production must be nurtured. Alongside the public and funders, universities and sector-support bodies also have a part to play in this advocacy.
You can do it.
References:
Adorno, T. (1991) Culture and Administration, The Culture Industry. London: Routledge Classics
Beirne, M., Jennings, M. and Knight, S. (2016) ‘Autonomy and resilience in cultural work:
looking beyond the “creative industries”’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21(2), pp. 204–221
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