In 1973 the Arts Council of Great Britain's 'New Activities Committee' produced the 'Baldry Commission report' which set out to describe and then provide funding for 'Community Arts'. Unfortunately, in the commissions's eagerness to make the movement palatable to funders, it excluded the radical elements of these practices, presenting it as a movement that 'worked with children' and 'disadvantaged elements of society'.
This was a defining moment, when funding for non-commercial arts was relegated to the recreation departments of local government, where it proved so useful that 'community art' took its place alongside institutional and commercial arts practices which have always been used as political-cultural tools.
More recently, socially engaged artists have attempted to redefine their practices outside of this instrumental bind by looking to other areas of cultural production, particularly the Free Software strategies of computer programmers, natives of the so-called 'Information Society'.
Free Software (FS), the practice of producing non-proprietary software products that can be reused and redistributed by successive authors, collaborating (mostly) via the Internet has become a model for 'autonomous', collaborative art practices. In the current recession, after the hyperbole and hysteria that marketed FS as 'Open Source'; a venture-capital friendly software development paradigm, the mechanisms and strategies of FS are still useful.
The production of FS takes place within an open group of developers, who gain reputation value from their participation. Authorship remains vitally important, but is distributed amongst many authors, and remains open to further distribution. There have been attempts to produce a similar effect in the art world, such as Joseph Beuys' 'social sculpture' that invited viewers to use his materials and ideas in their own interpretation of his artwork, or Sol Lewitt's instruction-based art that simply provided a pattern for anyone to follow to become the 'art maker'. However, as these practices were rolled into art history, they became 'authored' systems that could be followed, but whose authorship was always strongly associated with the originator, the 'conceptual artist' who orchestrated and controlled the process. The narrative forms of FS such as 'Request for Comments' (RFC) documents, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and versionning systems like CVS (Concurrent Version System) bind the production and evaluation of FS together into an on-going production and re-production process that avoids closing the authorship off to newcomers. Projects do 'fork', split into factions of developers that have disagreed on the development process, but it is always the project itself, rather than the fetishised body of the author, around which the evaluation and peer-review of the product is based.[1] This same shift of focus, from author to cultural product, has been achieved to some extent by the long tradition of the pseudonym. Thrust out of the narrative of art history, the anonymous or multiply authored artwork does demand to be assessed on its merits, rather than its provenance, but it has proved difficult to sustain that approach in what is largely a reputation-based economy.
The FS paradigm has also been criticised in that its reputation economy is dependent on remuneration through the existing market for proprietary software and proprietary software developers. In spite its 'revolutionary' claims and overt political agenda, FS (as the 'Open Source' marketeers pointed out) is basically a useful and economically efficient way of regulating labour in the production of information-based products. The benefit is that FS developed by a programmer in their spare time as an adjunct to their employment in the corporate sector could be used and redeveloped by programmers from very different contexts, for example, from countries where purchasing proprietary software is economically unfeasible. In this de-politicised model, there is no inherent opposition between FS and commercial software, just a healthy symbiosis in which the two practices regulate and feed into each other.
This view of FS actually provides one of the most compelling reasons for artists to take its lead. In some ways the oppositional character of art's 'radical' practices has undermined their autonomous aspirations, providing a set of compelling binary contrasts: institutional and non-institutional, commercial, and non-commercial, object-based and concept-based, which could be woven together into the reductive narrative of art history. In the FS model, cultural producers can define their own practices as 'the norm' without the neurotic 'anti-this' and 'anti-that' posturing of oppositional practices.
'Not Just Art', a term coined by Matthew Fuller can be used to describe these practices which can mingle with art, survive on its economies for a while, but can just as easily support themselves, and move out of the art context to engage with collaborators from a wider cultural and social field.
The strength of FS is that it is multiply useful across many contexts. A piece of code from my mail server might be exactly the bit you need to complete your Content Management System, or the Operating System from my UNIX-driven palm pilot might be just the thing to run your networked toaster. The use, not just the beauty, is in the eye, or rather the hands of the beholder, turning the beholder back into a producer, busying away with my piece of code in a context and with aims and intentions I might never have thought of.
This is an instrumentality that art can feel more comfortable with, where the artwork becomes a system, a site of conversation between user/authors of equal (or potentially equal) standing. Recently, as evidenced by some of the projects in the Kingdom of Piracy, artists concentrate on constructing their artworks as infrastructures for collaboration.
Combining the positions of author and user, the modernist trajectory of meaning; from author to artwork to user, and its oppositional inverse; from user to artwork to author, both disintegrate. What is left is a mutually dependent and potentially rich dialogue dialogue between the user/author and the artwork.
Saul Albert
saul@twenteenthcentury.com 11/02/2003