By Ben SchaafmaIn his essay “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and Imaginary Publics,” Grant Kester points out that “it seems apparent that paradigms to justify public arts funding in the United States are going to change. A great deal depends on the ability of the art world to reformulate the relationship between publicly funded artists and the publics they hope to represent.”

Other Options attempts to identify artists’ practices, which critique these old paradigms, and the infrastructures that support them, while simultaneously engaging publics in new ways. These examples are not meant to be models to be reproduced, necessarily, but offer temporary and contextualized practices, which have the potential to inspire practical changes in the way in which culture is supported on both large and small scales.

With the history of community based practices of the 60’s and 70’s in mind, as well as the practices of mediating the relationship between artists and institutions in the 80’s and 90’s, I set out to explore contemporary practices, in hopes of building a vocabulary of practical examples for re-thinking the current climate of support structures, and learning how to operate outside of them. This research was conducted as an ongoing project of the Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday (InCUBATE), a research group dedicated to challenging current infrastructures, specifically how they affect artistic production. InCUBATE consists of four individuals, including myself. As art historians and arts administrators, our goal is to explore the possibility of developing financial models that could be relevant to contemporary art institutions, as well as collective or individual artist projects working outside an institution. Particularly, we are exploring financial models that are less constrained by external controls and market concerns and which are more effective, more realistic, and more relevant to both art and the everyday. Our goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible situations, document these innovations, and make this information available to everyone. —The information presented here is an analysis of this research project, called Other Options.

Artist as Foundation: Mimetic charitable giving
According to the National Endowments for the Arts, from 1999-2000 there was total of $2.4 million available in direct financial support for individual artists from public agencies (national, regional, state and local) and foundations. At this time, there were an estimated 2.5 million artists working in the US, thus resulting in about $1 for every working artist. The scarcity of financial support for individual artists has perpetuated a competitive environment of grant-seeking artists, which has resulted in more artists professionalizing their writing skills, increasing the amount of time they spend on administrative procedures needed to support their career as an artist. The processes and bureaucracy of the grant writing and allocation process can often be burdensome and impenetrable, and for some artists, it can suppress the desire or ability to experiment.

Josh Greene: Service Works
In response to the decreasing amounts of available resources, San Francisco-based artist Josh Greene has essentially created his own personal foundation. For the better part of his artistic career, Greene has been supporting himself through service-oriented jobs. He currently works as a waiter at a high-end eatery in San Francisco, where restaurant goers easily drop hundreds of dollars in a sitting. Greene has decided to set aside one night’s worth of tips per month, which he then grants out to artists at the end of each month. The amounts vary and typically range between $200 and $500.

According to Greene, Service Works is an attempt to bridge the gap between his art career and his service-industry career, yet it seems to blur this separation rather than connect the two. As part of Service Works, Greene records and describes the activities and tasks he performed through out the evening in order to make the money he later grants.
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“I am most interested in funding small projects that may involve exchange, interaction, storytelling, and problem solving. I have a particular fondness for projects that grow out of and deal with real-life situations, be they political, personal, or environmental. I also enjoy work that incorporates risk, humor, pathos, and absurdity.”
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In 2000, 315,000 out of the 2.4 million artists identified by the NEA’s survey held secondary jobs. Situations like Greene’s are not uncommon. What are the benefits of funding your own and others’ cultural production through wages earned through a service industry occupation? Stuart Keeler, an artist and recipient of a Service Works grant, begins to look more closely at the outcomes and possibilities of the granting project.

Our goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible
situations, document these innovations, and make this
information available to everyone.

“We don’t have the National Endowment for the Arts like it was. Josh’s work is really exciting because it borders between a socially based art agenda, a new genre of public art, and the other side where he’s become an organization to instill work and be a benefactor in a really interesting, non-freaky, and non-controlling kind of way.”

Keeler’s description of the project also begins to illustrate another common complaint surrounding the minimal public and foundation funding that is available to artists. He continues: “With larger grants they’d want to know the gauge of steel, the font title, they’d want to see every plaque in advance. There’s such a fine line between telling them too much and not telling them enough, which can kill a piece. [Service-Works] was a pretty open and democratic process.”

Keeler’s assessment of Service Works raises valid critiques of the way foundations, particularly in the US, operate in a way that can often make it more difficult to make their work. However, it becomes problematic to point to Greene’s project as one that solves these issues. Greene’s success lay more in his gesture and ability to create a network of individuals around the desire to support certain types of work, and their interest in attempting to create new methods for doing so. Not only is Greene funding the projects he is interested in, he is investing in his career as an artist by building his reputation (read: social capital ), which assists in legitimizing his own practice within the field of other contemporary art practitioners. Though Greene’s process of reallocating his own personal financial resources may seem generous upon first observation, it is important to note the ways in which he absorbs the cultural capital of the artists who receive his grants. By claiming Service Works as an artistic practice, Greene’s own actions of granting are brought to the fore, rather than primarily supporting projects and creating a platform for artists. The question still remains – can an artist reallocate monies to other working artists effectively by mimicking a charitable foundation?

Joanna Spitzner: JS Foundation
Joanna Spitzner offers a similar approach to Greene, though in a much more formalized and economically substantial way. Spitzner is both a working artist and professor. Teaching at a private university allows her to spend her summer months free from occupational daily responsibilities. Due to her privileged situation, Spitzner has decided to take on a new job each summer and deposit her paychecks into an account dedicated to granting to artists. In order to manage these funds and the disbursement of the funds, Spitzner has created her own 501c3 foundation complete with a board and advisers.

From the JS Foundation’s mission statement: “The Joanna Spitzner Foundation seeks to expand creative knowledge through its support of contemporary art and ongoing research in art, economics, and philanthropy. The Foundation gives small grants to artists that are funded by wages donated from work performed. This funding strategy is used to demystify economic systems by connecting them to lived experience. The foundation is an art work in progress by Joanna Spitzner, as well as a functioning private foundation. It seeks to generate dialogue about daily life, economies and giving, while furthering the creative and social possibilities of art.”

Similarly to Greene, Spitzner both articulates her giving as an artistic practice, and emphasizes the relationship between the economy and lived experiences by keeping a running journal of the number of hours she works and the daily activities she performs in order to earn money for the foundation.

While waiting for IRS recognition of her 501c3 status, the JS Foundation seeks to mimic the payment structure of most service-industry jobs with a direct correlation between the hours worked and payment by hiring artists as employees of JS Foundation:

“I expect the artist to want and to be paid more than I will make per hour. I think this is where the value question comes in, as well as different economies. I would like to choose the artist based on his/her work, rather than on how much money they want. I will have to probably work 2 or 3x as many hours to meet the artist’s wages per hour; and I will aim to start my work before the artist in order to make sure I can pay this person. I will ask the artist to fill out a time sheet, and be paid bi-weekly. I am not so concerned with a finished product from the artist, just an openness to exploring what his/her work process means.”
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Beyond conflating an arts practice and service-industry occupation, the artist has made a conscious decision and concerted effort to closely mimic other foundations that artists are familiar with by creating a 501c3 nonprofit organization. What are the benefits for a foundation, which disburses minimal funds to become entangled with such bureaucracy?

There are much easier ways to give away money, but Spitzner’s decision to formalize this process in this way allows her and others involved to demystify the organizational structure of a foundation. The JS Foundation has documented their process of becoming a legally recognized foundation, sharing all official documents and processes via their website under the title “How to Start a Foundation.” This level of transparency and focus on administrative practices is much different than Greene’s approach, which allows the JS Foundation to function more like a foundation and less like an artistic gesture or practice. In addition, by developing a creative application of a 501c3 tax status, it allows for the potential of creating new possibilities for utilizing this tax-structure.

Despite a transparent giving structure and formalized method, the JS Foundation still confronts the issues of funding and support from a privileged position. Spitzner may not have the same economic power or influence as a major family foundation, but her position, which allows her to reallocate her surplus (in this case both time and money), perpetuates the disparity between granters and grantees. Is it possible to create a structure where those with privilege and those without can participate equally when deciding how best to allocate expendable resources?

Geraldine Juarez: The Tanda Foundation
Outside the U.S., few are familiar with our unique tax structure that is in place to support nonprofit and non-governmental agencies. Similarly, there is limited knowledge of alternative forms of support structures in other countries, both formal and informal. The Tanda Foundation is an attempt to integrate an informal economic structure (tanda) with a more formalized structure of charitable giving typical in the U.S. (foundation). This amalgamation is achieved through the development of a web 2.0 platform, most often synonymous with social networking sites.

A tanda is a free form of economy practice and rotating credit association common among illegal immigrants. The model works when a group of individuals pool money on a weekly or monthly basis by paying equal amounts into a pool. Each person is then assigned a number, which decides the order in which the funds will be disbursed. One payee will receive the lot for each turn of the tanda. This process is repeated until each person participating has received the pool of money. This informal economy traditionally comes from lower to middle class populations in Mexico, where individuals have limited access to bank accounts and utilizing formalized systems of credit. The same is true for illegal immigrants living in the United States.

The foundation exists as an online web 2.0 structure (i.e. Myspace.com, Facebook.com), which allows users to create personal profiles, avatars and upload project proposals in need of funding. The primary function of the site is to connect artists and with multiple funders. This process is achieved through requiring users to deposit a minimum of $1 USD and a maximum of $1,000 USD into an account within the Tanda Foundation. By depositing the money, users are awarded voting privileges to decide which projects will be funded. The strategy differs from a traditional tanda, in that not every user receives payment, and relates to U.S. charitable foundations in the way proposals are received and funded based on the decision of a panel of interested individuals or patrons providing the funds to be dispersed. Though, within traditional foundations, panelists are not often held accountable to their funding decisions and provide minimal feedback to rejected applicants. The Tanda Foundation attempts to stimulate a productive exchange by requiring users to provide feedback on the proposals in addition to their vote.

In addition to providing financial support, the Tanda Foundation also offers “association grants,” which allows recipients to include the Tanda Foundation in their resume or curriculum vitae. This, potentially, will improve their likelihood of receiving grants from other foundations or being considered for exhibitions. The more the network surrounding the Tanda Foundation grows or the popularity of grant recipients increases, potentially, the more valuable the affiliation becomes.

Understanding this project in the context of the practice of the tanda is important for several reasons. What does it mean that a creative community can learn and organize by using tactics of illegal immigrants? Looking to the fringes of the neoliberal economy may yield more possibilities than continuing to support the current infrastructures in place.

Ned Rossiter’s concept of “organized networks” attempts to locate these new institutional forms created by neoliberalism. These types of social networks are often championed for their horizontality and democratic intentions. Rossiter considers the real ramifications of these new networks and proposes ways to understand new forms of immaterial labor and economic exchange created by them:
The trick with a project like OrgNets is to treat it as a symbiotic device that both facilitates the generation of concepts and affects the allocation of economic resources. The latter may take the form of direct funding, commissions, participant fees for summer schools, or in-kind support by institutional partners – eg office space, use of equipment, personnel, etc.

Rossiter’s treatment of this concept offers a valuable perspective to begin to assess the potential success or failure of a project like the Tanda Foundation. In using Rossiter’s characterization of organized networks, the promise of the project’s ability to both generate new concepts and allocate economic resources becomes clear. Furthermore, the Tanda Foundation attempts to employ the democratic nature of Web 2.0 by creating a platform for collective authorship, as described by Yochai Benkler: “At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture.”

Though, in the case of Tanda, the framework is held and controlled by its users, rather than a single person or concentrated group with privilege. Its focus is the reallocation of financial support rather than accumulation of profit or harnessing the immaterial labor of its users. The participatory nature and horizontal structure of the Tanda Foundation and other Web 2.0 structures allows for potential that is absent from Greene’s or Sptizner’s projects.

Reflecting on Other Options
An analysis of these projects has yielded a list of various effective and imaginative approaches for supporting the arts that exist outside typical methods – blurring the distinctions between market oriented and nonprofit support. These varied approaches collected through this research include models based on creative enterprise, which re-invest and disperse profits in ways similar to non- profit organizations. Other approaches include inventive and resourceful uses of surplus and excess, reallocating institutional resources and creating temporary structures that meet timely needs.

As artists continue to interrogate the current infrastructures set in place to support both artistic and cultural production in United States, new possibilities that address artists’ needs in more effective ways, will continue to be developed. Rather than support a system that impedes cooperation and encourages competitiveness due to limited resources, new organized networks based on collaboration succeed due to varied sources of support, which are being developed in response to the failure of the mono-lithic nonprofit organizational structure.

Through this research, it has become evident that there is a need for new infrastructures, networks and systems of support, which more effectively meet the needs of artists working today. The practices outlined in this research reflect this transition as they relate to the fluctuations of capitalism and globalization. By creating situations controlled by a diversity of value systems, these hybrid approaches and rhizomatic structures allow for understanding the power structures that control them. The Other Options exhibition illustrates this transition, which relies on self-organization, participation and imagination.

1. As part of the historical research for this project, we looked at Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD restaurant and Haha’s FLOOD project.
2. Jennifer Maerz, “The Tipping Point.” S.F. Weekly, 7 July 2007, sec. Arts.
3. Ann M. Galligan and Joni Maya Cherbo. “Financial Support for Individual Artists,” Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society Vol. 34 (Spring 2004), 23-40.
4. Jennifer Maerz, “The Tipping Point.” S.F. Weekly, 7 July 2007, sec. Arts.
5. Bourdieu, Pierre . The Field of Cultural Production. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 42.
6. http://www.jsfoundation.org
7. Taken from an interview with the artist. See: http://www.jsfblog.org/
8. Donald V. Kurtz and Margaret Showman, “The Tanda: A Rotating Credit Association in Mexico.” Ethnology 17, no. 1 (1978), 65-74.
9. Ned Rossiter, “Autonomous Education, New Institutions and the Experimental Economy of Network Cultures,” (paper presented at the School of the Art Institute – Chicago Masters of Arts Administration and Policy, Chicago, IL, March 25, 2008

By Ben Schaafma