Responding to Wayne Burrows: Further Adventures in Class and Contemporary Art, 12th December 2019

An online bitching writing session for CAMP members took place a few evenings after Wayne Burrows’s talk on election night in December. Several members simultaneously wrote that complaining about working or not working as an artist in Plymouth was missing the point; as one member put it ‘”as an artist” could easily be swapped out for “as a precarious freelancer”’. If flexibility and precarity are inherent to contemporary working practices, rather than confined to a particular sector, in what ways are working artists creating solidarity with one another and other workers confronting the same structural issues?

A bit later, someone else posted: ‘Artists wouldn’t dare speak out about them in Plymouth’, “them” being the ‘military, football, popular local ‘institutions’ …’. I should have asked the person posting what they thought artists’ not daring is down to. There must be many possible answers; I’ve been wondering how artists’ economies interact with Plymouth’s “them” and how I talk to artists about their experiences of working or not working in Plymouth, in ways that take account of the “them” and the sort of silence they impose.

Wayne Burrows talked about the “pathologies of neoliberalism”, especially managerial bureaucracy, which under neoliberalism has seen a ‘mad, cancerous proliferation’. Artists are paid little for projects whose budgets are used up paying the running costs of organisations managing and administering funds, which, if and when they reach artists, are often allocated according to narrowly defined criteria regarding age, process and outcome. He drew a comparison with the NHS, in which internal marketisation has produced a bureaucratic load requiring expensive layers of

management, draining resources from essential services and caregivers.

The text on class and the contemporary arts for The Double Negative, referenced in his talk, effectively demystifies what working artists do, the social and economic forces determining this work, its conditions and who gets to do it. (Read it here.) In this piece, Wayne Burrows follows a definition of working class as ‘[dependent] on waged labour for day-to-day survival’, which deliberately short-circuits the ‘tendency to view class through a cultural filter’. Such a focus on ‘our ways of life, our habits, our feelings, our more or less idiosyncratic enjoyments’, according to Alenka Zupancic, ‘tends to “naturalize” differences’ in a politico-ideological process ‘that aims at establishing an immediate connection between being (“bare life”) and a socioeconomic value. […] Our present socioeconomic reality is increasingly being presented as an immediate natural fact, or fact of nature, and thus a fact to which we can only try to adapt as successfully as possible.”

In the other half of his talk, Wayne Burrows described projects he does as a writer and artist, which owe much to a Surrealist mindset, procedures, types of collecting and sociality. Towards the end of our conversation, he emphasised the necessity of paradox, at the heart of André Breton’s thinking: ‘He wants the strawberries in the wood to be there for him alone and for everyone.’

I spoke to Wayne Burrows the morning after his talk, and Labour’s general election defeat, at my home in Plymouth. If I’m working here on Monday mornings, I hear the nuclear siren being tested and I shut all the windows. The city’s graveyard of nuclear submarines seems to be like a dormant volcano that may or may not one day radioactively erupt. I shut the windows. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

This text should already have been finished. Like many others, I’ve been juggling various forms of waged and unwaged work over the school holidays. In my mind, ideas have mingled: a few of Wayne Burrows terms—working artist, enthusiast, vitrine, collage, hallucination—the potency of paradox, posts from the Slack bitching writing session, and other things, including a smoking Beryl Cook figure straddling a decaying nuclear submarine, and a CND report, published in December, on Devonport Naval Base’s Nuclear Role. It concludes:

The people of Plymouth have the right to live in a safe environment — a city-centre location, on a site a few hundred metres from homes and schools, is no place to store redundant nuclear submarines. The health risks posed by this project are potentially enormous, especially on a site which already has a troubled history of radioactive leaks. […] The financial and social cost of the nuclear dock appears to far outweigh any benefits to Plymouth over time.

The government should instead invest in a regenerative strategy for the city, providing long-term sustainable jobs. Listening to Wayne Burrows, I was struck by the combination of his reasoned, informed analyses of dysfunctional neoliberal systems and his embrace of the nether side of rational thought, argumentation and presentation. Surrealist “sensibility” can, he said, be a counter to capitalist realism, which, writes Mark Fisher, as ‘a pathology of the Left […] isn’t the direct endorsement of neoliberal doctrine; it’s the idea that, whether we like it or not, the world is governed by neoliberal ideas, and that won’t change. […] This sense of resignation, of fatalism, is crucial to the ‘realism’.” What I took from Wayne Burrows’s visit, reflected in the structure of his talk, was a sense of possibility opened up in the paradoxical pairing of strategies of demystification with techniques of re-enchantment, especially in joint or collaborative projects. In his description, Surrealism relates back to other kinds of magical thinking, esotericism, visionary and folk art, “fringe beliefs”, which can be invoked and drawn together to challenge the objectivity of capitalist “reality” and conjure up alternative pasts and futures. Drawing—or collaging—together, as a repeated operation, forms intricate patterns of creative reverberation, camaraderie and promise across time and other divides. A curated installation, such as Works from The Hallucinated Archive, would seem to shrink the interval between collecting and collectivity, and inversely swell the category of art as its insides are turned over for disregarded, disparaged and imagined participants. Scans of pages from Taras Young, Nuclear War in the UK (Four Corners Books, 2019) and Beryl Cook Smoker’s Delight in Louise Benson and Lorena Lohr ed. Scenic Views: A Journal of Overlooked Interiors, Issue 1, 2019

#writer_residency channel, Slack messaging app for groups of people who work together, 16th December 2019, 6-7pm

Amelia Horgan, ‘Universities have driven their workers into the ground. That’s why I’m striking’, The Guardian, 29th November 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/28/universities-workers-strike-marketised-sector-money-staff

‘At its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives.’ Silvia Federici, ‘Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet’ (1984) https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/338/

Wayne Burrows, ‘Notes on Class and Contemporary Art’, The Double Negative http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2019/01/notes-on-class-and-the-contemporary-arts-class-is-a-big-deal/

Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT, 2008)

Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue’, Neoliberal Culture 80/81, New Formations Autumn/Winter 2013 https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/nf8081_07fisher_gilbert.pdf

Paradox: ‘An apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one, which […] may nevertheless prove to be well-founded or true.’ (OED)

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver/Helen Lane (University of Michigan Press, 1970) https://monoskop.org/File:Breton_Andre_Manifestoes_of_Surrealism.pdf

Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975) https://monoskop.org/File:Federici_Silvia_Wages_Against_Housework_1975.pdf

‘Devonport naval base’s nuclear role’, 17th December 2019, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, https://cnduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Devonport-1.pdf

Wayne Burrows, ‘Works From The Hallucinated Archive’ blogpost, November 2019 https://wayneburrows.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/works-from-the-hallucinated-archive-bonington-gallery-27-sept-16-nov-2019/