‘To see and be seen’: Ethnographic notes on cultural work in contemporary art in Greece

Introduction

Roaming around the neighborhood of Kerameikos–Metaxourgeio (KM) in central Athens in October 2011, one could not help but notice a striking contradiction. On the one hand, the palpable presence of impoverished immigrants, drug addicts and prostitutes, the ‘outcasts of modernity’ as Zygmunt Bauman (2004) would put it, and on the other, ‘creative crowds’ tracing the routes of contemporary art in semi-wrecked residential or industrial blocks. The reason and occasion for this encounter is ReMap, a biannual contemporary art event initiated by an investment company that owns and employs as venues a large number of buildings in the district. This entrepreneurial initiative attracts numerous artists and cultural workers, whose desires for creativity and professional development in the field inadvertently interweave with processes of urban regeneration and global flows of capital and migration.

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in October 2011 in ReMap, examining the quotidian reality of cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece in relation to the larger cultural, economic and social implications of neoliberalism and its manifested crisis. My main focus is on the ways that participants interpret and perform their involvement in an art project closely related to real estate speculation and urban development, and on the ways their desires for self-realization through work are played out in the field of contemporary art, a value regime loaded with an ‘anti-neoliberal structure of feeling’ (Day et al., 2010: 148). The social interactions rehearsed in this field, what Pablo Helguera (2012) refers to as ‘social scripts’ (p. 7), include certain codes of communication whose closer examination demonstrates that the desire for self-fulfilling and autonomous work needs to be apprehended in relation to certain materialities and their symbolic understandings in different ethnic, cultural and economic contexts. The conditions and effects of the severe economic crisis in Greece are capable of reframing ‘essential’ qualities of cultural work, such as the promise of autonomy and self-realization in the workplace which are challenged and even suspended.

I critically employ Mark Banks’ (2010) concept of ‘negotiated autonomy’ to describe the everyday struggles and micro-decisions in which precarious cultural workers engage in a field dominated with high demands for individual visibility and recognition. For Banks (2010), negotiated autonomy refers to the ‘more routine conditions of cultural production where workers find themselves engaged in a quotidian “struggle within” to try to mediate, manage or reconcile the varied opportunities and constraints of the art–commerce relation’ (p. 262). As I argue, autonomy for workers in the transient and expanding field of contemporary art appears neither as a given nor as a state where they linearly progress. Instead of being de facto ‘autonomous’ or ‘relatively autonomous’, cultural work seems to be contingent upon capacities to effectively perform ‘social scripts’ in a field where, according to Pablo Helguera (2012), the ‘predominant idea is to ‘‘see and be seen’’, an environment where there are admired objects, but the main objective is tied to social relations’ (p. 24). In this regard, autonomy is performative, a process of ‘doing’ grounded on social interactions between workers’ desires, their articulations in larger systems of meaning and spheres of action, institutional and financial limitations, labor conditions as well as the micro- and macro-economic and social relations present in various contexts. For instance, as we will see, the commonly accepted fact in the field that art has to be independent of economic rationalization was one of the discursive arenas around which conflicts, negotiations and subjective restructurings occurred. In an event so closely connected to processes of real estate speculation, the art–commerce relation becomes a contested terrain where certain identities and identifications are performed, carrying or giving birth to other, emergent structures of feeling.

Method and scope

To date, there is no scholarship on the conditions in which cultural workers in the Greek cultural industries perform their labor and, similarly, there are few scholarly accounts examining contemporary art from an anthropological perspective. This article aims to initiate a debate by paying attention to the concrete materialities and discourses in which workers are daily implicated. The empirical material comes from participatory observation involving personal visits to venues and events; informal discussions with visitors, critics and residents of the area; collection of written and visual material related to the event as well as hour-long qualitative interviews with seven of the event’s participants. The participants I spoke with, both men and women in their 20s from middle- and upper middle–class backgrounds, received university education in the fine arts and were working as exhibition assistants, invigilators, tour guides and guards for free or for a small compensation. No one had a stable job, and their employment status can be considered rather precarious. Hardly maintaining themselves from cultural work, they had to rely either on family income or on other jobs. The goal of their participation in ReMap 3 was to pursue a career in the art sector and thus to be able to make a living from it, something extremely difficult, if not impossible, in the current bleak economic environment. In short, what all the informants shared was their young age, skills, university education, aspirations for recognition and an uncertain future employment combined with expectations for downward social mobility. In this sense, this social group gathers the characteristics of a relatively privileged section of the social category that Guy Standing (2011), among others, terms as the ‘precariat’, currently a ‘class in the making’ (p. 1).

After a brief theoretical discussion focusing on recent sociological discourse on autonomy in cultural industries where I introduce the macro-theoretical concepts that inform this article, I describe the context in which this event took place, the state of the Greek crisis, its effects on the field of contemporary art in Greece as well as the particularities and the discourse generated so far around ReMap. Subsequently, I present excerpts from the discussions with the participants focusing on their experiences from ReMap and cultural work in general. In the next section, I analyze the interviews in relation to the above discussion putting emphasis on how workers’ desires, hopes and subjective aspirations for autonomous work interweave with larger systemic processes and contemporary techniques of capital accumulation. I do so ‘reflexively’ in the sense that I often find myself implicated in similar ‘political’ dilemmas and crossroads regarding the distribution of my own work as a researcher and cultural producer. In this sense, this research does not make claims to the ‘ethnographic authority’ (Clifford, 1988) of a disengaged observer who examines the field from an external or even privileged standpoint. The process of collecting and analyzing the material then is in a constant dialogue both with my own experiences as a cultural worker and the theoretical frameworks presented here (Marcus, 1995: 96).

Moreover, the ‘field of contemporary art’ is not perceived as a restricted ‘system’ or a ‘structure’ with crystallized and self-contained internal laws, rules and regulations, but as a moving, fluid, dynamic and transnational network of cultural practices informed by certain theoretical traditions, performances and discourses. Following James Clifford (1988) who observed long ago that it becomes increasingly ‘hard to conceive of human diversity as inscribed in bounded, independent cultures’ (p. 22), I avoid seeking how the field contains or manifests certain social attitudes, rather looking at the ways that discourses and practices that emerge in the fieldwork can be read vis-a-vis discourses and practices played out in the social field at large. In this sense, the discussion that follows the presentation of the research material is also speculative exploring the limits and possibilities of what the field ‘does’ or can potentially ‘do’ in our social landscapes.

Recently, Pablo Helguera in his book Art Scenes (2012) speaks about the need for a social anthropology of contemporary art that will focus on the ways that the ‘collectively constructed values’ (p. 2) of the field produce new worlds. Despite the fact that in the past decade art and anthropology initiated a strong scholarly relationship, on the one hand, through the popularization of anthropological theories of art and material culture studies in Anglophone art departments that prioritize object-centered and relational approaches, like for example Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and, on the other, through the incorporation of ethnographic approaches as integral components of artistic practice (Foster, 1996), there are very few studies attempting to see contemporary art as a sphere of action through anthropological lenses. Sarah Thornton’s popular book Seven Days in the Artworld (2012) and Don Thompson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (2009) have recently made such an attempt, but they are neither – strictly speaking – scholarly works nor do they see the field in relation to larger systemic processes. Some other recent attempts to examine contemporary art and labor include the work of Pascal Gielen (2010), who mainly employs sociological approaches as well as the edited volume Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art (Aranda et al., 2011) bringing together a collection of texts that position artistic labor in the framework of Post-Fordist production.

By focusing on cultural work in the contemporary art sector in the present time in Greece, I wish to contribute to a growing body of empirically based scholarship on the qualities of cultural work in the past 10 years (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; McRobbie, 2002, 2004; Ross, 2003). These studies examine the social and economic power relations that produce culture, an approach associated with the political economy of culture and communication (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Mosco, 1996; Wittel, 2004), combined with an anthropological understanding of culture that sees structures as generated by and generative of the workers’ agencies, desires and performances (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Mahon, 2000). While the political economy approach often suffers from a ‘problematic reduction of labour to an abstract category’ (Wittel, 2004: 19), anthropological approaches are more attentive to the processes through which workers’ agencies and subjectivities affirm, reject, shape or suspend existing social structures and institutions, emphasizing the perspective of the participants and to the ways they make sense of the social world around them (Bryman, 2008; Mahon, 2000: 474).

Autonomy in cultural industries

Cultural work refers to the practice of individuals who are involved in professional or semi-professional activities that aim to ‘produce social meaning’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 12). The category, as understood here, is related with particular branches of industry that make use of creativity as their ‘raw material’ and in which individual creators wish to professionalize themselves. These branches involve workers in fields as diverse as fine arts, design, filmmaking, video games, music and advertising (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). In the past decade or so, debates around cultural work have mainly focused on its precarious and exploitative nature (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Lorey, 2009; Ross, 2000), its structural cooptation from processes of capital accumulation (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Gielen, 2010) and its non-alienating potential against, strictly speaking, productive labor (Bishop, 2012; Hardt, 1999; Ray, 2011).

A key term in all these accounts on cultural work is the concept of ‘autonomy’, or ‘relative autonomy’, according to which cultural workers are capable of realizing themselves in the processes of work. The word ‘autonomy’ is comprised of the words ‘auto’ (self) and ‘nomos’ (law) roughly meaning to ‘give yourself your own law’ (Holmes, 2004: 101). The artist and cultural worker are not fully subordinated to perform standardized, mechanical labor, as for example the industrial worker was, but have the capacity to control or influence to some degree aspects of the creative process, imprinting upon the object of their labor subjective feelings, emotions, affects and thoughts (Banks, 2010). Succinctly put, according to Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta (2010), the discourse on autonomy is the ‘sine qua non of creative work’ (p. 224).

Often, the condition of cultural work as an inherently ‘autonomous’ profession is seen as stemming from the very nature of cultural commodities vis-a-vis capital valorization (Banks, 2010; Eagleton, 1990: 368; Ryan, 1992). Drawing from Bill Ryan (1992), Banks (2010) holds that cultural commodities have to contain singular traces of individuality and thus workers’ subjectivity as their market value depends on a level of differentiation from mass-produced objects. As Ryan (1992) writes,

Every book must have an author, every score a composer, every film a writer, director and cast of actors, unlike cans of peaches, lines of cars and shirts on a shop rack where the direct producers of these commodities are entirely unknown to their purchasers. Artists must be engaged as named, concrete labour. (p. 45)

As argued by various scholars, the current economic paradigm, described under various, often overlapping, terms, namely, cognitive capitalism (Moulier-Boutang, 2012), communicative capitalism (Dean, 2012), bio-capitalism (Morini and Fumagalli, 2010) and semiocapitalism (Berardi, 2009), relies to a large degree on the subsumption of subjective feelings, thoughts and emotions to productive ends (Dean, 2012; Terranova, 2013), where work becomes the ‘central locus of psychic and emotional investment’ (Smith, 2013: 36). Since the production process becomes increasingly ‘subjective’ and life itself is ‘put to work’, work can be understood as any activity that produces value, from ‘liking’ on Facebook to simply communicating one’s feelings about brands. In this sense, cultural workers become a segment of the larger ‘social factory’ that wishes to professionalize in industries that produce social meaning.

The relative freedom in the creative process is responsible for the seemingly paradoxical condition and possibility both for the generation of economic value and the articulation of counter-hegemonic discourses. In the first case, ‘pleasure in work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Miege, 1989), or work as the site where one is most capable of realizing one’s desires (Smith, 2013: 37), is seen as an instance of a new dominating mode of capital accumulation. Autonomy, or better the promise for autonomy and self-realization in the workplace, becomes the ‘carrot’ that demands ‘sacrificial’ imperatives from cultural workers (Ross, 2000: 38). Foucauldian accounts of cultural industries tend mostly to emphasize this fact, that is to say how the (self-)exploitation of cultural workers relies on a certain internalization of neoliberal governmentality that cultivates the promise of freedom and creativity in the workplace without tackling larger systemic questions (Lorey, 2009; Mokre, 2011). Isabelle Lorey (2009) regards practices of self-precarization that appear to be the ‘free choice’ of cultural workers to move from one job to the other, to be ‘unfixed’ or even to ‘dissent’ against the rigidity of the old social forms, as deeply embedded in neoliberal mental frameworks. According to Lorey (2009: 197), cultural producers are so prone to exploitation due to the belief of their own freedom and autonomy that they are almost presented by the state as ‘role models’ or ‘model entrepreneurs’ for creative economy enthusiasts.

Beyond this gloomy picture, the condition of ‘relative autonomy’ of cultural work is also seen as having the potential to offer new possibilities against a rationalized economic hegemony (Banks, 2010; Hardt, 1999; Harvey, 2001; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Ray, 2011; Virno, 2009). Gene Ray (2009) sees the artists as ‘relatively free to make the art they choose according to their conceptions’ (p. 80), while Paolo Virno (2009) notes that ‘the capitalists want to seize autonomously and freely produced intelligence and forms’ (p. 30). The so-called ‘artistic mode of critique’ is in this sense relatively free to produce critique in the form of affects, emotions, desires, sociabilities and life forms distinct from market imperatives (Hardt, 1999), even if these may be captured at a later stage by processes of capital valorization.

Context: Greek economy, the art sector and ‘ReMap’

In the first decade of the 2000s, a generalized sense of success and euphoria prevailed in the mainstreams of Greek society. The country had joined the Eurozone, as Greek identity was modernized, and in a way ‘empowered’, becoming more European. The 2004 Olympic Games and the building of big infrastructural projects such as the Athens Metro, the Attica Road and the Rio-Antirrio bridge, as well as various national ‘victories’ such as in the Euro cup in 2004 and Eurovision in 2005, contributed to the construction of the narrative of a strong European nation with a booming economy. The ‘new’ Greek national identity was based on the narrative of a modernized, de-balkanized nation that even though small and maltreated by ‘powerful elites’ could revive the ‘deeds of its ancestors’ in the body and soul of celebrated modern Greek ‘heroes’, the athletes, the pop singers and the yuppie entrepreneurs.

Within this euphoric atmosphere, a similar boom was observed in the field of contemporary art. In the years of the high rates of growth between 2000 and 2006, many artists living abroad started returning to Greece in the hope of a new beginning. At the level of infrastructural support, two new contemporary art biennials started operating in 2007, both in Athens and Thessaloniki, providing platforms for showcasing Greek alongside international art, while also a number of new galleries opened branches, giving an overall sense that the field had the prospect to progress.

However, the escalation of the Greek debt crisis led Eurozone members and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April 2010 to agree on a €110b bailout package in order to ‘help Greece meet its financing needs’ ¹ and ‘safeguard financial stability in the euro area as a whole’. ² Greece in exchange agreed to make ‘draconian reforms’, including the cutting of pensions and state expenditure, firing public sector workers, fast track investments and abolition of collective bargaining. According to the then Prime Minister (PM) George Papandreou, Greece’s crisis was a major opportunity ‘to address and resolve, once and for all, deep-rooted problems that are holding the nation back’. ³ Here, it is interesting to note that during the crisis, media and politicians who supported neoliberal reforms promoted the idea that the ‘backwardness’ of the nation was directly connected to excessive protesting, striking and generally to any kind of collective resistance against neoliberal policies. As we will see later on, participants in ReMap often rehearsed different variations of this position.

At the time of my research, the public disapproval against government policies, and especially against the forthcoming austerity measures, was growing huge and as a result massive demonstrations were taking place in Athens and other Greek cities. Although the ‘Greek debt drama’ has been seen as a ‘muse for its artists’ ⁴ and although it has been speculated that Athens will become the ‘new Berlin’ ⁵ due to its ongoing ruination that leads to cheap rents and attracts artists internationally, in reality during the time of my research, many art workers wanted to move abroad finding it extremely hard to be compensated for their work, let alone make a living from it. Especially since the beginning of the crisis in late 2009, more and more galleries started facing hard times, reducing their participation in international art fairs as collectors were becoming increasingly reluctant to invest in such a precarious marketplace (Kuhnt, 2012). The 18th edition of Art-Athina, the biggest art fair and largest commercial event of contemporary art in Athens, was postponed and the 3rd edition of the Athens Biennale took place with a very low budget, with the majority of all artists and workers taking part in the event offering their services for free. Succinctly put, while I was conducting fieldwork, the professional field of contemporary art was under severe crisis, with most of the cultural workers being in an extremely precarious position and many seeking to move abroad for new career opportunities.

ReMap and urban development

The artists and cultural workers that I spoke with were participating in ReMap, one of the most visible platforms for international contemporary art showcasing that takes place biannually in the area of KM in Athens, Greece. It is set up by the real estate investor and entrepreneur Iasson Tsakonas, founder and executive manager of the company Oliaros. Oliaros is a construction company that owns a large number of buildings in the area and has a vital interest in its regeneration. The main reason that ReMap was initiated was to make the district more ‘arty’ and thus more attractive to prospective buyers. ⁶

Despite its clear role as a vehicle for gentrification, in its official announcements, ReMap employed some Situationist jargon, stripped of its anti-capitalist underpinnings, officially presenting itself as ‘an experiment in psychogeographic maps, created by transitory spaces, a process of indeterminate and mutable form that gives rise to a multi-layered and incomplete cartography of the KM district’. ⁷ The first edition of ReMap took place in 2007, receiving attention in the artworld for hosting a part of the first Athens Biennale (Athens Biennale and ReMap are still officially ‘creative partners’, supporting and helping each other in organizational and marketing issues). Its subsequent version was already expressing aspirations for becoming an established art platform, where according to their announcement, it aimed ‘to introduce KM as a world-class contemporary art hub’. ⁸ The third edition of ReMap – from which the empirical material has been collected – took place between the 12 September to 30 October 2011, having the more modest claim to ‘enhance Athens’s positioning in the international contemporary art scene’. ⁹

Similar to its previous editions, for the duration of the festival the aforementioned entrepreneur used some of the buildings that he owns in the area as venues where the different exhibitions and art projects occurred. Most of these buildings, where each one of the 50 plus independent and gallery-run shows participating in ReMap was housed, were old, uninhabitable and overall in very poor condition. The participants were fully responsible for it, having to clean, arrange and organize the space and take care of practicalities such as electricity, heating and other bills, as well as having the obligation to show it to prospective interested buyers. In short, the entrepreneur used the otherwise disused buildings that he acquired before setting up ReMap as venues in the hope that through the festival and together with other state or private initiatives, the area will raise its value and turn from a bad-famed district into a smart, multicultural and creative one.

ReMap, however, proved to be very controversial even from its first edition. Tsakonas and his company Oliaros have been accused of setting it up as part of a larger project aiming to give value to an urban area densely populated by lower classes, the Roma community and impoverished immigrants. The first article that launched an explicitly polemic against ReMap was that of the architect Eleni Tzirtzilaki, member of the group Nomadic Architecture, who in 2007 argued that Tsakonas and his company were setting up ReMap so as to displace the immigrants inhabiting the buildings:

The buildings have been bought by an investor [i.e. Iasson Tsakonas] and the displacement of the residents took place so that the buildings could be empty for the beginning of the Biennale in Athens … What is incredibly annoying, in bad taste, and suspect, is that an investment program is presented as an artistic event – even an avant-garde one – … mixed in with ideas such as psychogeographical maps and social networks, that is, with ideas that have worked and are working in exactly the opposite direction, defending the city and those that inhabit it. ¹⁰

The same author in 2009 was the first to connect so explicitly contemporary art with the concept of ‘gentrification’ in the context of Greek urban theory as a link between art and real estate speculation in an article written about the second ReMap edition. ¹¹ Such an allegation linked ReMap in public debates and everyday discussions to processes that have largely negative connotations in contemporary art imaginary, such as the displacement of immigrants and poorer social classes, the instrumentalization of art for a development project and the exploitation of art workers for this cause. As a case in point, while I was conducting fieldwork in the area, a provocative act of vandalism took place, characteristic of the notoriety ReMap has in the activist imaginary. An undocumented group signing as ‘antifascists’ threw flyers, dead fish as well as a plastic bag full of human excrement into different venues of ReMap, accusing it of its plan to gentrify the area. The incident, at which I was present, was controversial and, as we will see later on, troubled all my informants, forcing them to take sides.

Informants’ dilemmas: participation, volunteerism and conflicts over space

When I met Natalia, 24 years, a media artist and recent graduate of the Athens School of Fine Arts, she was preparing her portfolio in order to apply for a master’s degree in digital arts at the same school. If the application was successful she was planning on attending the program for the first 6 months, but if it did not fulfill her expectations she was planning on applying for a master’s abroad. Generally for all the people I talked with the notion of ‘studying abroad’ mainly represented ‘Europe’ and enhanced possibilities for professional development.

We met in the canteen of the Athens School of Fine Arts which at the time was under occupation by students resisting reforms in the education system to speak about her experiences in ReMap. Natalia was aware of the ambivalent status of ReMap and has read Tzirtzilaki’s articles. Although Natalia along with a group of artists were invited to participate in ReMap 2 in 2009, ‘after looking at some articles that have been published’, they decided to turn down the offer because

the owner of these spaces is the gatekeeper who opens up the space for you, an elitist audience either from Greece or abroad, passes, looks at the works, gentrifies the area and then he [the owner] can sell the houses more expensive.

Back then, Natalia and her fellow artists decided to organize a critical counter-show on the tactics of ‘urban camouflage’ as they called it. The show was running in parallel with ReMap and was trying to expose the ideological role of the latter as ‘camouflage’, a pretext for urban development. However, as their show was not supported by any institution and was not properly advertised, it was visited according to Natalia ‘only by us and our friends’. This ‘failed event’ in terms of attendance stood for her as a formative experience in realizing that visibility and thus recognition for a career in the sector can be more easily facilitated through some sort of institutional support.

Eventually 2 years later, in 2011 at the time of our interview, Natalia was participating in ReMap’s next edition as a gallery assistant for a Swiss gallery involved in the event. Even though she was paid ‘ok’ from the gallery – and not from ReMap itself – she told me that because of the networking opportunities she would have accepted working even without any compensation:

I would even work for free precisely because I come in touch with people that I would never have the chance to meet and who can explain their work so that I can understand it and be wherever I fancy afterwards. So ReMap for me worked very positively.

For Natalia, concerns over participation in ReMap were to be judged on personal grounds, that is to say, whether the job was personally beneficial for her career or not, and not on ideological ones. Her belief in the potentially transformative power of art and self-expression framed this narrative:

These are pseudo-dilemmas, to exhibit or not to exhibit in ReMap. The issue is to be able to be a strong artist and whether you are put in ReMap or in MoMA or in Louvre is to be able to suggest something new and to able to communicate with what you make.

According to her, the Greek art and activist scene in particular ‘refuses to “grow up” and face up the hard reality’. As noted earlier, during the crisis a similar variation of this discourse started gaining momentum in the Greek public sphere linking refusal to ‘structural reforms’ with ‘backwardness’. As Natalia puts it,

First of all, what about Guggenheim? Was it not built by someone who had money? … the fact that capitalism moves art? Hello?? It is not something new. I don’t get it, why do we need to swim in the mud and say always no, no … To be always so humble … and end up showing our art where, in Kolonaki? [a rich district in Athens with many commercial art galleries], where galleries are humane and respect the citizen? Where? Do you know what I mean?

Thus, it makes no sense turning down an offer to participate in an art event in the early stages of one’s career:

If you have the luxury to choose a gallery, you can say: ‘no, you have lots of money and across the street there is a junkie, so I do not want to participate’ … and then have your consciousness clean. On the other hand I see that those who are against ReMap, exhibit in galleries where exactly the same thing is happening …. A gallery is owned by a gallerist, who, yes, has studied art journalism or marketing, but has the money to open a space.

The non-existence of alternatives when starting a career in the sector was generally a view that all the informants shared. As Thekla, 24 years, an arts management graduate succinctly admits in our interview, ‘it is a sector where you have to ‘penetrate’ in one way or another’. Another participant, Kallia, 27 years, an arts administrator who wishes to become curator and artist, similarly believes that the only way to advance in the sector is through volunteering: ‘even if I was to rethink how could I “enter” the sector in order to meet people, I could say that essentially I would came up with the same way: voluntarism’. A similarly position is shared by Akis, an artist working as an invigilator in a gallery-run project in ReMap, who believes that, ‘if you do not get to know the right curators, art historians, you will not be able to participate in exhibitions … there is no hope otherwise’.

Daphne, 25 years, is a recently graduated art historian currently looking for a master’s in curating abroad whom I met in a German gallery participating in ReMap. Work in the contemporary art sector ‘never seizes to surprise’ Daphne as she loves ‘seeing the reactions of the people’, even the negative ones. The enjoyment for her lies in the process of deciphering the ‘secrets’ of contemporary art for the public. Making contacts is for Daphne the principal motivation to work for free. When I asked her about her experience in the contemporary art sector, she stated,

Everything I did so far was voluntary. Apart from some programmes in DESTE foundation, where again the money was not enough. But I simply made many contacts with people. I met many artists – for example I met Jeff Koons – and I enjoyed very much this experience … Yes, making contacts is fundamental. And not only because this may lead somewhere … because it is a bit difficult to go to him and say ‘Hi Jeff, find me a job in New York’, but just because of the conversations we had. He told me about some universities he knew well.

Daphne, as most of the other participants, feels somewhat uneasy of working without being paid. However, she sees things in pragmatic terms:

I have filled my CV with lots of volunteering work and I try to see if this counts for some gallery, just to manage to earn the basic wage. It is a plus, because I know people who have PhD’s and … do nothing. I met many people in a Art Athina who are in worse situation than me. And I try to do whatever possible to find a job in the field I want, because I have studied so many years and I want to work on something relevant to what I did.

Another participant that I met is Vetta, 26 years, an art historian who had only recently returned from Paris where she did her master’s in anthropology and cultural studies. When we met, she described to me the various difficulties she faces when looking for a job in the art field. At the time we met, she was working in one of the galleries in ReMap without financial compensation. Similarly to all other participants, she explained that ‘you see what is going on in the scene and you network if you look for a job’, admitting that ‘it is very difficult to enter the artworld circuit. I think it is easier for people who have worked in business’.

Vetta was aware of ReMap’s role in gentrifying the area:

When I started working with ReMap something was not going well with this project. Because I have read some articles and already worked with Tzirtzilaki who wrote one of these articles, I knew the situation more or less. But the curator of the *** gallery convinced me that she was herself critical enough on the issue, so this was something that convinced me to cooperate with her.

Vetta was therefore critical of ReMap, having been persuaded by a curator’s own critical stance. The only reason to participate was the establishment of a personal relation:

I do not identify with it. I do not identify with it at any level. Generally with this project I can’t stop having my doubts. It was essentially a personal contact I wanted to establish with the curator. But in no way do I identify with it.

When I asked her whether she enjoys working in the contemporary art sector, Vetta asserted that the ‘good features’ of cultural work, such as communication and cultural exchange, in reality were often replaced by boring, bureaucratic tasks, which were neither always self-fulfilling nor enjoyable:

I like the flexibility [in cultural work], but I believe that working for free is exploitative to a high degree. And they usually present it in a way … that you are going to communicate with the artists etc. While this might be true in some cases, working in the gallery is not essentially very different than any other bureaucratic job. For instance, I have decided not to bother with the Athens Biennale because I found the whole thing entirely set up. In the workshop I have attended, they trained us on how to work for them for free. We were thirty people in the class, almost all women. They made us pick up calls, pretending that we work and they told us what to say.

For Vetta, as well as for all other participants, there were many problematic occasions during the event where they had to perform roles not related to their original job description. Apart from the vandalism incident, to which I will to return later on, everyone described different situations where there was a level of incomprehension and even conflict between the intention of the event to show art and its reception from local residents, mainly immigrants living in the district. Natalia narrates some of these occasions:

Most of the immigrants believe that in the exhibition spaces where we have the work we also have Georgian girls and they come and ask us, ‘where are the Georgians?’ A guy comes up to me the other day and says ‘I want sex’. He liked me apparently. There are many brothels in the area and he thought that we are a brothel because we had some works with neon lights in the space. We tell them here ‘paintings, paintings’ … Another person was faced with a similar incident when he found smuggled products in the exhibition venue. Boxes with many shoes among the works … He did not know what to do.

Akis, the painter, shares similar experiences:

Look, when I first came here, I said, is it possible? It is a bit controversial to pass above the dead body of someone who has just before shot heroin and do contemporary art … In any case the immigrants in the area are alienated, it is very difficult for them, not because they do not have the cultural background, but because they feel inferior … They see well-dressed people inside the venues and they already feel disadvantaged. You can feel it in the way they look at you. It is similar as to having a lady that cleans your house who does not accept to have coffee with you, because she knows that your positions in the world are different.

Likewise, Vetta explained that

some of the immigrants who live in the area entered the gallery space and they were asking us whether we have opened a new store. When we were telling them that it is an art exhibition, they were asking ‘why is this art?’

Niki, an arts administrator who was invigilator and gallery assistant in one of ReMap’s shows, admitted that some local residents felt threatened by their presence because their show was a comment on the brothels that exist in the area:

Think that when we were setting up the exhibition and we placed our sign that reads ‘Bordello Nacional’ there was opposite us a local café with people who felt a bit unsettled … I think that the title irritated them because they thought that we misinterpret or criticize their culture … I believe that they feel that there is something going on, but I am not sure if they would ever be willing to enter the different universe of contemporary art, which could even cause an explosion inside them … I think that they have built their own world and they do not want so much to try different things … Many people entered the venue who indeed thought that the building was a brothel.

Fear and uneasiness were also feelings that the participants experienced while working in ReMap. Niki said that she is on ‘permanent stand-by in case something happens’; Nestoras, an artist working around identity politics who participated with his own show in ReMap, said that he is ‘afraid to stay alone during the night’, and similarly, Natalia told me that she ‘is afraid when she leaves alone in the night’.

This state of alert was intensified by the fact that ReMap was a permanent target of anti-gentrification activists. The culmination of this rage was the vandalism incident described above. When I asked Niki how she sees these actions, she replied,

I do not see it this way … it is a free [non-ticketed] event. It does not have any income and sometimes I think that if they were part of it they would not be reacting in this way … I think it was reactionary. However, these things exist. It is nice when you see that people are touched by the event one way or another.

Nestoras describes in similar terms:

It’s a shame that five or six students from the Fine Art School, who I swear to God in 3 or 4 years they will be applying to ReMap, were bothered. I know that as I too had the same fellow students who now run after the art fairs and run after ReMap and the Biennale, but back then they too were throwing shit and rotten fish. This circle never changes.

Vetta, who worked for one of the galleries that was attacked, said that she laughed with the incident, which, however, was a little problematic because ‘they threw shit on the work of an artist who was neither the gallerist, nor Tsakonas’. Vetta, however, was the only one to recognize the political motives of the activists: ‘the truth is that whoever did it was furious enough and that this event [ReMap] was anyway provocative’. Natalia, on the other hand, frames the incident in art historical terms:

You put a bucket of shit in order to react? You know what I do not like? First of all shit connects the action with Viennese Actionism, Herman Nitsch etc, that have nothing to do with the issue. It has been done before …. We live inside shit and we see that they throw us shit? There is no way out. It is a closed system reproducing shit.

These last statements make manifest the general psychological condition of most of the participants, namely, the feeling of being entrapped, of being stuck between the desire for creative and autonomous work and a social context that constantly obstructs or prevents its realization.

Concluding remarks

In the above discussions, it became clear that all participants were aware of an explicit clash between at least two different cultures in the area, the contemporary art crowd and the impoverished immigrants. They did not see any substantial connection occurring between these two worlds, at least during the 2 months that the event lasted. Although most of the participants recognized themselves as part of a gentrification process understood as problematic, they also felt entitled to lay claim on the social space around the area of KM. This indicates how gentrification is a political–economic process which can be, on the one hand, rationally understood by participants in the cultural industries, but, on the other, enabled by their (our) embodied needs and desires: the need for cheap residencies, studios or exhibition spaces and the desire to create, to be part of an artistic milieu, to explore, to be experimental and to find aesthetic merit in ruins and decadence. All these needs and desires correspond to the raison d′être of contemporary art, to its ‘social scripts’, so much so that I would argue that contemporary art as a professional field is almost by definition tied to processes of gentrification (at least in the early stages of the process, when artists and creatives ‘discover’ an area) (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984).

What is also apparent from the above interviews is that cultural workers in the field of contemporary art in Greece are willing to offer their labor power for free in order to become visible in a field, where, as mentioned in the introduction, the ‘predominant idea is to “see and be seen”’ (Helguera, 2012: 24) and where, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) put it, ‘those without a project, who no longer explore networks are threatened with exclusion – that is to say, in effect, with death’ (p. 111). However, (relative) autonomy in the workplace for the participants I spoke to is not a given. As we have seen, they often felt insecurity, fear and uneasiness and had to negotiate these feelings with their desires for autonomous work. Part of this negotiation was the rationalization of the activist attack as an action by some reactionary, immature youngsters to whom most of them did not attribute any political motives. It is also telling that most of the participants perceived their participation in ReMap merely as beneficial for their careers and not necessarily as a ‘fun’ and self-fulfilling experience, while in some cases, such as in Vetta’s, the work was described as rather ‘alienating’. In this sense, as it became clear the emotional investment in cultural work as a place where they are most ‘themselves’ (Smith, 2013: 37) is what prompts them to work for free under not very pleasant conditions in the hope of a more stable and autonomous future.

Following from the above it can be argued that in ReMap, as well as in similar events around the world, one can certainly discern a double exploitation as a technique of generating capital; first, the exploitation of the workers’ desire to realize themselves in work and second the exploitation of the fact that there will always be someone to do the job from the ‘permanently temporary labour force’ (Smith, 2013: 35). On the other hand, as we also saw, most participants were self-reflective about their participation, seeing it as an opportunity for further future autonomy and self-creation. In this sense, I agree with Tiziana Terranova (2013) who sees the current economic paradigm of creative capitalism (or ‘cognitive capitalism’ as she prefers to put it) crossed by a ‘constituent tension between the tendency to exploitation, subsumption and proletarianization on one side, and autonomy, self-reference, and self-creation on the other’ (p. 50). This tension could be understood as a space of possibility for cultural workers to tactically intervene, subvert or contest hegemonic techniques of subjectivation.

If we look at the macro picture of this dialectic, however, between the relation of consenting to work for free vis-a-vis the expectation of enhanced autonomy, a spiraling logic seems to appear: on the one hand voluntarism is taken to be ‘inevitable’ for someone to progress in the field and at the same time this very inevitability of voluntarism inescapably contributes to the creation of a ‘massive reservoir’ of disposable workers willing to offer their labor power for free almost under any circumstances (Miege, 1989: 83). This dynamic, in the long-term, turns cultural work into a privileged occupation as workers from lower classes without a backup income may find it less easy to devote time to free work and thus progress in the field. The crisis is also intensifying this process as state and private funding for cultural institutions has diminished and labor gets further devalued. In this sense, cultural work is not immune to the in-built exploitative nature of the capitalist mode of production as a system that regards labor as another commodity. Capitalism’s mode of production, aiming at the maximum generation of surplus value, is indifferent toward the qualities of labor, that is, if it is free, expressive or self-fulfilling while its profit-logic and tendency for unlimited growth, and as Cohen (2012) puts it, ultimately ‘clashes with art workers quest for autonomy to pursue meaningful work, to be paid decently for their labour power, and to be able to sustain themselves’ (p. 144).

This last issue leads to a discussion of the possibilities of organized resistance against this condition. Do cultural workers have any agency to collectively resist the precarious condition of their work, and, if yes, how? As with other ‘creative’ professions, the labor force in the sector of contemporary art is fragmented and highly competitive and individualized. In the case of cultural workers in Greece, possibilities of solidarity among them seem to be few, as, as we saw, no one among the participants perceives their demands for creative and paid work as part of larger demands which can be collectively put forward. The latter, when they became part of the discourse, were mostly seen as competitors in the job market. In this sense, the desire for better working conditions becomes a personal quest in the labyrinths of the job market, a quest pursued through internships, volunteerism, personal relationships and permanent life-long learning, the acquisition of skills and university degrees that usually leads to casual work, projects, placements and temporary contracts. In this sense, as fixed workplaces hardly exist anymore, labor struggles for precarious cultural workers may take forms different to the traditional unionized struggles that presuppose a unity, a common identity, built on the space of work. Such forms, recently organized by cultural worker collectives as Precarious Worker’s Brigade, Art Leaks and the Ragpickers Collective, may include decentralized guerilla actions, whistleblowing, occupations and boycotting of cultural institutions. For instance, the occupation and activation of the disused theater Empros by precarious cultural workers in Athens, 1 month after ReMap 3 ended and only some blocks away from it, was a positive step aiming to forge new experimental relations of producing, distributing and experiencing artistic work.

Finally, the authoritarian, anti-democratic neoliberal management of the escalating economic crisis in Greece can be regarded as an exportable laboratory of social engineering and labor relations in ‘states of emergency’ and it thus may resemble future political–economic governmental techniques implemented across Europe. To make a fitting analogy, artistic labor itself has been seen by post-operaist theory as a ‘laboratory for a particular kind of extraction of value’, relying on flexible, individualized, motivated, non-unionized and disciplined workers, ‘which can then be generalized beyond the art sphere’ (Shukaitis, 2013: 114). In this sense, the cultural and art workers in Greece are located at the vanguard of a process of economic restructuring and social engineering, and the potential resistances to this model are significant, for informing future constellations of working, thinking and being.