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forword.grants /
marketing.colony /
equiptment acquisition /
symptom hall.space /
phoenix.cinecycle /
ancient futures.the net /
performance.women's work /
gender.performance /
do it yourself ethos-zines /
robot writing /
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oca.zines /
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history.books /
foreword.grants
"It seems improbable that we suffer from a 'lack of history'. Perhaps, instead, we suffer from a lack of articulated histories, any history which is not constructed from within the narrow confines of an 'art' discourse, within the confines of state-funded documentation and promotion. Perhaps it is not the history we lack, but an acknowledgment and interest in art practices and art politics that stray too far from the cultural mandate of the status quo."
- Dot Tuer,
The CEAC was Banned in Canada, C Magazine, 1986.
There is a strange calm as artists watch the immolation of government cultural funding in Ontario by the politically ascendant right. Other issues, like past and recent censorship, triggered more vocal and coordinated actions. Why hasn't a broad-based artists' coalition emerged to oppose the cuts yet? In this era of "Workfare" purges when subeconomic babysitting gigs are prosecuted as social assistance fraud, does it seem outrageously self-interested to request, accept or mount a spirited defense of arts grants? Is it shock, guilt feelings, or a lay low and weather the storm sense of resignation? Or have artists have been making do with next to nothing for so long, nothing doesn't seem so big a stretch.
In the context of cuts, the Ontario Arts Council awarded a $75,000. "Venture fund" grant to Bravo!FACT this year for a corporate TV series of ad-length "minidocumentaries" "about" art. Most of the jurors who will dole this money out to producers will be CHUM-CITY staff. The projects will be screened in gaps between international flicks that are available for rent in any video store. Bravo! will placate CRTC regulators about CAN-CON requirements, and simultaneously avoid showing longer, independent film and video by Ontario artists. OAC's role in this project brings to mind 1980, when the Ontario Arts Council gave an indirect "grant" to the Ontario Censor Board, to pay censorship fees for the Funnel Experimental Film Centre. The OAC has, reluctantly or enthusiastically, long been in the business of brokering the arts through an array of government and corporate agendas. Now, as the reigning Conservatives and aristocratic benefactors headed by the Chalmers family pull out of OAC, artists pause before leaping wholesale to the defense of an arts bureaucracy that, by any analysis, isn't always accountable to artists.
Recent histories published by artist-run centres give scant attention to self-funded cultural practice, mostly noting it as a form of cultural collateral that registers as "deferral" on the line-items of grant applications, used to validate the next round of funding requests. The fact that artists are deliberately working outside the subsidized model is minimized at best, and frequently dismissed. Except for the creatively or administratively impaired, the oddballs and sociopaths, self-funded publications and venues are portrayed as stepping stones for young artists and writers on the road to stable, subsidized careers and programming structures, and as fresh veins of cool new blood for the corporate culture milieu. This myth echoes through granting agencies, that rationalize themselves as social service stations en route to full participation in the culture industries. It has been internalized by even the most non-commercial artists, who reference their subsistence and practice in terms of civil-service unions, social service agencies, and nation-building bureaucracies.
Arguably, state funding plays a minor, though significant, role in the meager finances of most artists. The real funding bases for marginal and oppositional culture are volunteerism, hobbyism and do-it-yourselfism. Much of this art circulates through a network of microdistribution entities that are localized, transitory, embodied, and opposed to vertical integration and economies of scale, the monopoly mechanisms of corporate culture. The artist-run centres have internalizated corporate and bureaucratic models, and this process has been actively encouraged in successive restructurings of cultural funding programs, as they adapt to power. Maybe it's time to own our self-funded production and distribution, and to include it in our cultural analysis.
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