Institutional Re-openings, or Arts Worker Returns? Thoughts on a bottom-up perspective and making a new normal.

Author’s note: This was originally delivered as part of NYU Skirball Center’s “RE:OPENING? Rethinking New York City’s Performance Infrastructures” symposium, as part of the “Institutional Imaging” panel on October 1st, 2021.

Today, in speaking about the process of re-openings, I will attempt to work at two ends: first, as an educator and organizer attempting to theoretically locate arts institutions within the inertia of our larger political economy, capitalism; and secondly, as an arts worker currently taking part in a reopening and feeling that inertia in real time. Even though this panel is about institutional imagining, with both frames, my primary subject and most hopeful audience is the arts worker, because it is that overwhelming majority of people upon which I believe all lasting change rests.

The questions grounding this event are as follows, and I quote: “How do we hold our cultural organizations accountable to real change? What is being “reopened?” How? And for whom?”

My instinct is to attempt to root out the political dimensions within those questions and orient them toward something approaching a theory of change.

The spectre haunting questions of “accountability” is power. One either has it, or one doesn’t. Making friends with this wayward spirit lays bare questions around who’s doing what for whom when talking about re-openings or any other collective event. Accountability, for instance, cannot mean raising a ruckus on social media only for an institution to eke out a boilerplate statement of acknowledgement, as so many did during their so-called racial reckonings. Accountability, in an institutional sense, must be a collective process whereupon all parties equitably participate, notably with the most affected party in the driving seat, and with transformative, material outcomes. For starters, this requires said affected party to have a meaningful impact on the working of the institution, and thus, some form of power.

So, one way to begin is with an honest appraisal of power: my power, your power, their power, and most importantly: our power, worker power, collective power. We must also take note of the various mechanisms that each party has to build and maintain power, and thus materialize or obstruct change. Whose interests and needs are primarily being served across each strata of the institution? Are institutions aligned with collective power — with communities of working people?

We must also pay some attention to “change” and admit that we seldom all have the same thing in mind when we utter the word. Is the change that we want to integrate into an existing order — the very thing that got us here? Do we want representation — to have our chance at being overworked and underpaid? Or do we want structural change? Systemic change? What is the different cost between structural or systemic, and representational or integrative change? Does focus on the one hamper progress on the others? How can we be sure we’re all heading toward the same horizon, with informed consent?

And this brings us to reopenings. We might first ask, what is the history of the initial opening; which is to say, how did these arts institutions come into being and who have they historically served? Did the event of closing have any effect on altering that trajectory, or is that merely our optimistic idealism? We might ask, not just what is re-opening, but why and how is the re-opening?

In my view, arts institutions have many uses, and thus many things are being reopened all at once: they are creative production facilities, a place where we make things that have never existed before, where we do what we love and find satisfaction and perhaps purpose. They are also, importantly, our workplaces, and thus where we procure the wages we put toward our survival under capitalism; they are often a source of our precious health insurance. Through the social interaction we encounter through our worklives and the heierachries in place, they are also sites of racial, gendered, and sexual violence, of on-going depression, anxiety, and trauma; of disinclusivity. Finally, they are places of commerce and commodity, the place where we sell those things that we make; they are tax sinks for the wealthy, celebratory play spaces for the elite, distant citadels that casually reproduce the structural inequalities coded into the social order outside their walls.

We should conceive of reopenings as a moment of on-going movement in line with the same general forces that govern the rest of our lives. Reopenings of our institutional workplaces are, much like the rest of our working lives, generally about unrestricting the barriers to the free-flow of capital. This process has taken place in many sectors with the arts being only one. In all cases there is a tension between allowing for the necessity of the free-flow of capital and the wants and needs of the workers who make the institution what it is. Due to reasons that always come down to power, the tendency has most commonly been to exert the least cost in subverting the effects of the pandemic (or whatever crisis beckons) so that the show can go on. None of this is provocative — this is what is required of enterprise under capitalism. And non-profits aren’t clear of this tendency, because they still must center the whims of capital in how they generate support, even if filtered through grants or donations.

Once we properly identify reopenings as an imbalanced outcome of the social relations of capital, the question becomes not how have institutions changed, but how have we, as workers? Not what will reopen, but how will we return?

I recently heard a mental health provider say of his work that “COVID is a devastating illness, but it’s also just one illness that complicated the existing treatment of many existing illnesses.” How does this track with the on-going work of equity and decolonization in arts and culture institutions? Let us be frank — COVID did huge swaths of damage to communities, the effects of which we will continue to feel for years to come. How did the majority of our cultural institutions show up beyond, at most, trying to “pivot” their production to the digital space? How have they created spaces for mourning, processing, and healing? As climate change continues to become the crisis event of our time, how has the pandemic revealed what portends for the institution under crisis? The answer must be found in the time between so-called crises, in the work being done now.

Arts institutions concerned with change must ask themselves: who do they primarily serve, who primarily informs the work: community or capital? Capital shows up in donor worship, utilizing gatekeepers, opaque pay and salary structures, conventional hiring customs (which tend to favor proximity to social capital, etc), marketing (ie, where and how you say what you say, and where you say it), and the use of unpaid internships and debilitating work schedules. It is not just the work presented, but the way the work is made and presented. It’s ideological, even: like the trend of building bars and restaurants in the facility that most employees can’t afford to patronize. Community focus looks like developing workplace democracy, providing elder and childcare for workers and audiences alike, making living wages the baseline, improving the quality of work, increasing benefits, developing models of cooperative ownership, and integrating the institution into the fabric of the community through open, unrestricted access. It means giving the most essential and invisibilized workers at our institutions — cleaning staff, security, maintenance, etc — the power to shape the healthy functioning of the collective right alongside creative laborers and administration. A friend remarked “theatres should be like libraries.” Right now they’re trending rather like Amazon, basking in neoliberal decadence.

To accomplish this, institutional administration and management must dare to be “in, but not of” their workplaces. From their position of power, they must respect the labor that, most of all, gives meaning to their existence. They have to boldly solicit and listen to the calls coming from their workers, and build the institution from the bottom up along these lines.

And arts workers: we have a responsibility to speak up.

In preparing for this talk, I spoke with arts workers currently in the middle of re-openings and there are some obvious overarching themes. They all, myself included, feel thrust into the very normal everyone swore they would not go back to. And while this speed and quality of work may have felt intense before the pandemic, it creates the feeling of whiplash for the majority of us who have not revved our creative engines in 18 months. Workers are horrified by what they see as a lack of gentleness, of collective purpose after what the events of the past year and a half have destabilized. If anything, the biggest boon for the lucky few has been more days off and shorter days at work.

We are still in a pandemic. And most of us have not processed the pandemic we have experienced so far. The stakes are high. This is a crucial time for workers to vocalize the basic needs they have and organize around them. We have to root out the feelings of alienation, competitiveness, and individualism so endemic to our industries. For artists in particular, we have to draw a firm line between the pleasure of what we do and the labor of it. But all of us must dare to be disappointed and do something about it. Our dreaming can be so bold. We have to look past mobilizing around singular issues of the day and into organizing long-term campaigns that get at structural issues. To do this, we must study: gather together over events and information, consider history and theory, and strategize.

Workers and institutions need to collaborate in the work of structural transformation, in conversation with communities and in conjunction with other industries and sectors. What if institutions saw this as part of their prerogative? What if our spaces of shared creative labor opened themselves up to modeling the way things could be, rather than reflecting back the way they are? We would take care of each other a hell of a lot more. And believe it or not, there would be immense joy to be found. My short time embracing political education and organizing has been a great choice of my life, knowing that through the ups and downs, I am marching toward a clear horizon with other empowered workers. This is solidarity, the crucial element in changing paradigms. Arts institutions can be hotbeds of community development and worker empowerment, they can be sites of prefigurative transformation and generative struggle. This will undoubtedly be marked with failure and fear, but that is the only way we’ll learn how to do better. In the short term, it will produce stark outcomes: Soho Rep’s “Project Number One” did precisely this during the pandemic, putting its resident artists on salary with full benefits, like proper workers and not freelancers thrown into the winds of precarity during an unprecedented global crisis. And I am emboldened by the movement of art.coop as they gather resources on the solidarity economy and highlight how artists can participate in liberating their systems of work. I also must uplift “Reimagining Public Theatres as Collectively Organized Cultural Institutions” by Zenko Bogdan, a stunning proposal for what a truly public institution might look like. A better world is possible, and the work being done to make it happen is already happening around us.

Claudia Jones has given us the wisdom that “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.” This must not be limited to art in the commodity form. Cultural products, like art, come from a people’s given culture. This is the level at which we must work. By pivoting arts and cultural institutions away from the grasp of capital and centering the communities and workers that truly make them possible, we can manifest transformative possibilities for meeting the next crisis with collective power — the greatest power of all. Claudia Jones famously organized a historic carnival in England. That quote? It was the event slogan. I do suspect that our march towards transformation can be full of music, dancing, and art, too. And in a word: joy.