E C O N O M I ES
spring/summer 2018
Charitable partner
Join us! Arts Emergency is a charity and national support network for young people who don’t have influential contacts of their own. Founded with just a handful of mentors and donors, Arts Emergency now engages a community of over 3000 professionals from the arts sector; from professors to dancers, from journalists and best-selling authors to indie theatre makers and musicians. Join our network and support young people to get the mentoring, work experience, support, knowledge and real world connections they need to make the right choices for them in higher education, and break through into a career.
arts-emergency.org
SponSorShip partner
Company Drinks is an art project in the shape of a drinks company. It links the history of East Londoners ‘going hop picking’ in Kent to the formation of a new community enterprise, which brings people together to pick, process and produce drinks in east London today. Company Drinks is a new type of company, where the commercial supports the communal and cultural. Each year, we run a full drinks production cycle of growing, picking, processing, branding, bottling, trading and reinvesting.We create an open, inter-generational and cross-cultural public space, where we can meet to produce something useful with and for each other.
companydrinks.info
This is our first thematic edition, in it we aim to pull apart what ‘economy’ can mean for the non-profit sector 4
the embrace of commodification as a primary principle of society encourages us to value everything via its marketplace exchange-value. this results in the conflation of monetary and artistic worth. in statistics, when correlations between variables appear it’s tempting to assume that one causes the other. however, to guard against spurious assumptions we must always remain aware that correlation does not imply causation. to many of us, it seems obvious that the market position of a particular artist bears no connection to their artistic validity. this is because of the various capitals an artwork possesses, its financial value is not necessarily tethered to any of its other values. the artistic landscape is strewn with creative practices that have traded credibility for financial viability, but to cast creativity and economics as oppositional is to do no favours to either. the spring/summer 2018 issue of the Sluice magazine is our first thematic edition, in it we aim to pull apart what ‘economy’ can mean for the non-profit sector as well as examine both financial, conceptual and ethical modes of sustainability. how artists and artist-run and non-profit initiatives factor in the broader ecology of the art industry and how artists and curators pay their rent is every bit as urgent as purely artistic concerns. in this edition of the magazine, we hope to shed light on a traditionally difficult subject but to also perhaps provide real routes to viability and also to look at what we may gain or lose by adopting different models. 5
8 Love Art To Death an interview with Postmasters’ Magda Sawon Jack Smurthwaite
14 Infrastructural Culture Karl England
20 Don’t Look Down Alistair Gentry
26 Disclaimer Gallery Profile DOLPH
30 Centre for Innovative and Radical Fishmongery
The embrace of commodification as a primary principle of society encourages us to value everything via its marketplace exchange-value
Sam Curtis
42 The Value of Nothing… Perspectives on the Artist-led Kerry Harker
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publishing Director Karl england guest Advisory editor nicole sansone Associate editor Ben street proof and sub-editor Tash Kahn editor@sluice.info Book review editor rosanna van mierlo rosie@sluice.info publisher sluice sluice.info Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters margherita sabbioneda Barbara nassisi info@chkdesign.com chkdesign.com Lettering All fonts by Colophon colophon-foundry.org Distribution Central Books centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info sluice.info unsolicited material cannot be returned, though all correspondence will be passed on to the editor. The views expressed in sluice are not necessarily those of the publishers ©2018 issn 2398-8398 eAn 9772398839005
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unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited but ask us nicely and we’ll see what we can do. subscriptions: subscribe online at www.sluice.info
Sluice magazine is at all times a companion publication to a Sluice initiated project, whether our biennial, expo or simply a programme of associated events, as such the magazine, is positioned as a crucial document of record of art as Praxis. Sluice magazine is concerned with applied theory, we examine how the arts impact our societal and economic environment and vice versa. At Sluice we aim to publish writing that we perceive to have an unmistakable disruptive quality, which might open up traditional art discourse to unexpected ideas, approaches and methods. In this way, our contributor’s backgrounds are not important: we encourage contributions from any and all disciplines. At its best, Sluice magazine should be a site of artistic creation and theoretical reflection that creates confrontations, sparks, and unexpected alliances. Sluice is open to arguments from different (contextually merited) ideological quarters. Sluice magazine is a forum for debate not an echo chamber of assumed rectitude.
52 Company Drinks Interview Sluice
62 Capitalising Capital Cultural Philanthropy Andreas Backoefer
68 Abolishing the Distributaries of Value Nick Srnicek
72 Fellowship of Citizens Saemundur Thor Helgason
74 Artist-run Index: C Acknowledgements Guy Nicholson Jack Basrawy Sarah England Sanjay Bremakumar Lucy Cobb Nicole Sansone
Under our current mode of production, we find ourselves socially recognised through monetary sums
80 Precarious workers self care checklist Rachael Dobbs
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