Kathrin Böhm’s Art on the Scale of Life
In the marketplace, including the art market, capital usually comes before ethics. Fortunately, that does not apply to everyone. For her entire working life, Kathrin Böhm has been organizing gatherings that break with the competitive ethos of the market economy by contrasting it with other working relationships. Following a recent compilation of Böhm’s work, Gerardo Gomez Tonda tests her alternative, explicitly noncompetitive and socially motivated economy for viability. GO TO THE DUTCH VERSION
I heard of Company Drinks for the first time back in 2018. I remember Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder imparting a workshop I took called Unlearning Art Economy at the assembly Elephants in the Room co-convened by Annette Krauss and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons team as part of their collaborative project Site for Unlearning Art Organization. At the time I remember to be dazzled by the project, even confused by all the relations and connections between actors and participants. Although I felt inspired by its relational depth and tangibility, as a first year student of the MaFA HKU then and barely acquainted with relational, socially engaged or collective practices I couldn’t really make heads or tails of it all, let alone wrapping my mind around a soft drinks company as artistic project. In a sense, I look back at this experience somewhat as confusing, but it was nevertheless very generative for me in terms of learning and unlearning.
A bit more than 5 years later, I came across Art on the Scale of Life, the last book from Katherin Böhm and I was dazzled again. However, this time I experienced her work differently. I found in her book a tool-box, a repository of actionable knowledge, a resource for those interested in working with the conditions of artistic practices in the context of western capitalist societies.
The book is a kind of heap or pile. Böhm’s work of the past 20-something years lays in this heap through the relations of the people she has touched with her practice, that have been involved in one or more of her many projects. In my opinion, this book is as any good composting pile, a relational pottage carefully interwoven with conversations, accounts and knowledges situated in the real.
More than a collection of collaborative or collective practices, her work seems to me a space (or spaces) to gather, threaded by collective efforts to build projects with sustainable change(s).
Recalling my encounters with something like this (an artistic practice as assembly, to put it in some way), about a year later from the assembly at Casco I joined a couple of trainings at the exhibition Trainings for the Not-Yet, convened by Jeanne van Heeswijk at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2018-2019). Where many people with their practices gathered around the practice of Jeanne van Heeswijk to work (train) towards a future we could long for. I remember this as a life-changing experience, especially the workshop from Patricia Kaersenhout (New) Formats of Care in Times of Violence, where I sat together with other bodies who identified as men to embroider and talk about men’s violence towards women. To date, embroidery is still part of my art practice, something about the doing in the company of others anchored the knowing in my body.
Perhaps in this regard, as life changing event(s), I should also mention here the practice of Annette Krauss. The project Elephants in the Room, among other encounters (assemblies, meetings, performances) infused with her practice in the fringe of life-art-pedagogy have been for many of us – involved in learning trajectories with her, also a space to gather and find change.
Life over profit
This kind of practices, where people come to learn, to share, to make and to make use, are to me breaths of fresh air in a competitive society, where public spaces are being privatized and capital comes before ethics, among other disasters. Experimental methods for prioritizing life over profit (Böhm 2023, 264), in the words of Dave Beech referring to Böhm’s practice, seem a brilliant way to phrase a common thread I see in crowded practices like those of Heeswijk, Krauss and Böhm. Not to mention Jinxiao Zhou’s practice with his exhibition Arriving Not-Yet, where his facilitation and organization as much as his work formed the condition for the participants, the users and audience to meet and transform together. This way of prioritization, as I have experienced through not only the discourse but the methods, facilitations, exercises, images, etc. have affected me the participant/audience/user in a way that neutralizes tendencies to compete and its individuating side-effects, bringing cohesion with the group.
I’m not competitive in particular, I actually try not to compete at all. However, the art field, and perhaps the cultural field in general, has so little positions and resources to sustain our practices that stakes quickly go high bringing out rivalry into relations. Sadly, I have experienced relations with colleagues turning sour at the sight of risk. Existential, psychological, and ideological pressures converge within this society of risk whose circumstances sociologist Ulrich Beck ominously describes as “no longer trust/security, not yet destruction/disaster” from the lexicon Glorypedia of Socially Engaged Art under RISK (Böhm 2023, 141).
If competing was relevant to an activity, whenever possible I’d be looking for the door right away. I have participated in competitions, though I always felt a kind of deception in the efforts to win, an insurmountable distance between the meanings of labor and reward. In the rare cases that I’ve won, I didn’t feel the expected sense of achievement I thought I was supposed to feel.
Of course, experiencing my firs 15 years of life as a lonely child didn’t help me much in gathering the necessary tools to navigate the perils of competition. Anyhow, what I fear in competition (competitive contexts, and competitions like grants and art prices) is what is at stake: that which lays beyond the clear descriptions of the competition’s field, the conditions and its rules. This undefined space, outlined by (unspoken) social values, ethics, care (mutual and selfcare), bias (including favoritism, nepotism, self-perpetuating politics, etc.) and privilege, is where I think the actual dealbreakers take place. What I want to say is not only that the game is rigged towards sacrifice with merits, privilege and friends, but that the artistic and cultural practices grow toxicity in the face of competition. Again, I feel relief with these practices that bring a sense of cohesion in working together from the conditions we are contending, to de-condition, as Irit Rogoff would put it in one of her conferences (Rogoff 2018).
Scale
For some time now, definitely after becoming a parent, I’ve made my limits clear towards what I can and can’t put on the line for/with work. I decided that devoting myself to my artistic practice won’t go against spending time and caring for my family. In one of the conversations in her book, Kathrin Böhm mentions, one of the reasons I survived (speaking of her practice) is that at the three points when I had children, I worked in collectives that compensated me while not being around (Böhm 2023, 87). I can totally relate to this, the times I have worked with collectives I have experienced the same thing, also in relation to having children by the way, which is a kind of support infrastructure that the individual practices fending for themselves can’t afford. These self-imposed limits, are thoroughly shaping my artistic practice, defining a scale of engagement, of action, of reach, which I don’t experience as bad news at all: they feel grounding and real. And for both cases, engaging with my studio practice (to call it in a way, although in my case more than a studio, it’s a kind of workshop), or the work with groups, my limits either release me from the madness of competing for a spotlight or create a bond with the group. I see this as connection to the real that shapes, a scale dimensioning the practice within life. Perhaps laterally connected to this idea of scale, not only the bounding conditions, but what is actively sought in the practice as something that affects, interacts, and works in the real is what Böhm and various contributors of Art in the Scale of Life refer to as 1:1 scale: art oriented to usership. For Böhm , art has to happen as a real thing (Böhm 2023, 197), relatable beyond art interested partners or audiences, beyond experts, as something that can be reflected on by everyone immediately (Böhm 2023, 203). The value of the work is not in the concept, or the beautiful solution, but in the hands of a user that will do what they decide to do with it.
Compost
Here is where I feel composting actively processing, doing its thing. The plethora of relations that composting invokes, maximized by the inclusion of diversity and then shuffling the pile, opens up a multiplicity of braking points, of access paths. Its capacity for dissolving something into nutrients for the future, makes use of a rich relational activity that breaks, tears, appropriates, displaces, swaps, consumes, cares, shapes, and more, tearing new holes to grab (or bite, hang, hold, pull, push). This hectic soup, turning hot from its overactive pace and changing conditions in a hype that brings about other users. Eventually it cools down and heads for a long period of processing that in time deals with toxic organisms. Patiance and a lot of processing labor.
For some years now, I’ve been working with composting as a learning model or method, to find a way to build new senses of belonging, to renew soils to root with. In 2021, as part of the Family Dinner Residency organized by Charli Herrington and Gordon Williams, they facilitated the group reading of the text The Right to Be a Host by Sandy Hilal. This text helped me to understand one of the most personally significant questions I’ve been asking to composting, which is: how does the magic of turning waste into fertilizer happen in the process of composting? Or perhaps, how are new belongings confected? Hilal speaks about the processes that took place in the making of The Living Room, a project dedicated to the socio-political research of hospitality. She argues that the dissolution of the private into a public gathering space (or semi-public, as she puts it), comes with the challenge of how to create a sense of ownership and right to participate as a host (Ariadad, et al. 2020, 192) What I hear then, is that fertilizer (or new belonging) can begin to unfold when the freedom of usership equals the freedom of ownership.
Böhm speaks of this too in various parts of the book, she says …that’s why Compost is really good, because I’m watching whether I get upset about things; for instance, when someone takes something really good that I like and I’m attached to … but actually I want that, I’m happy about it. (Böhm 2023, 83) The magic of composting happens in the letting go, which is of course not forsaking it, but witnessing how it becomes with/for someone else.
I’m in awe with the way the book closes its argumentative sections. The text by Joon-Lynn Goh Ready for Another Season? Exit-Planning for Founders, speaks of the “Founder’s Syndrome”, a phenomenon describing how the passion and charisma of a founder, often the creative force and initial success of an organization, becomes obstructive to an organization’s capacity to change. (Böhm 2023, 299) This text even contains a seasonal calendar to consider your -the founder’s- exit.
As we know, everything decays and at a certain point it naturally decomposes. Composting is an acceleration of that process, a multispecies technology that answers to the urgency of feeding a soil that didn’t have enough time to recover from the last harvest. It works within a context that demands certain productivity in the conditions of settler economies. It has the potential to open pathways to deal with urgencies, working from conditions as it changes them.
Thank you for the book Kathrin Böhm and company.
THIS TEXT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN METROPOLIS M No 4 2024 COMPETITION
References
Ariadad, Samira , et al. Home Works – A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work. Edited by Jenny Richards and Jens Strandberg. Vol. 187. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2020.
Böhm, Kathrin. Art on the Scale of Life. London: Sternberg Press, 2023.
Rogoff, Irit. «Becoming Research: The Way We Work Now.» ACTMIT. 2018. https://vimeo.com/271887079 (último acceso: 1 de 12 de 2019).
Ulrich, Beck. A Critical Introduction to Risk Society. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
