Sweet & Tender

Presented by Tommy Noonan

Good Afternoon. I would first like to thank the Independent Network and the Association for Contemporary Arts and Performance Initiative for inviting me. I must first admit that I am not intimately familiar with the developing cultural scene in Turkey. I have spent a bit of time here, and I have several friends who have been or are active in the scene, but my own horizon of experience is that of working in New York city and much of Western Europe. By way of introduction I will say that I am based in Southern Germany at the moment, where I am paid a full time salary by a state funded theater in Freiburg. Inside this city theater is a group called pvc-Tanz – it is a group of performance professionals who are working to use the city theater resources to create a space for collaboration and experimentation, and also to find creative ways of connecting the old and often dusty public theater with the local city population who is increasingly apathetic towards the theater in general. My activities in Germany include working variously as a´ dancer, choreographer, director, curator, dramaturg, actor and a sometimes-amateur technician.

Additionally I have been active in founding and developing a world-wide network of artists, called Sweet and Tender Collaborations. This is a light, user-driven network of young artists. It has no official structure, and active membership fluctuates around 30 people from roughly 22 countries on 6 continents. We are organized around no particular aesthetic or type of work – rather we are organized around a shared philosophy for production and exchange. Our work, our ideas, our aesthetics are quite different, and so we are connected by a common how instead of a common what.

Sweet and Tender began with a conversation in 2006, when a number of artists from many countries, present for the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, began to discuss the difficulties that we as artists faced. Difficulties in finding time and space and money to work, and the difficulties in finding meaningful ways to exchange, as artists. In this conversation, we realized how easy it would be, given current technology and communication, to stay in touch, to form a network of support, and to act and communicate quickly and easily. We talked about forming a network of artists, and of resources that each was connected with and could share with other artists. We began to ask ourselves: what exactly could a network give us as individual artists? How would we and could we each want to use the possibilities of creating an artist-network? What could this organization look like?  

For many of us, what grew out of these questions has been Sweet and Tender Collaborations – not a fixed form, but a continually evolving experiment in process, which is now just over a year old. As we began to exchange our information various projects and exchanges were launched between artists in 2006 in Portugal, Berlin, Greece and Belgrade. In 2007, the network partnered with SKITe association in France to create an open-space residency, and a meeting of 30 artists in Jan Ritsema’s space: Performing Arts Forum. Since then, we have dispersed and re-organized again, and created more exchanges in France, Norway, London, and now I am personally launching a project in the fall, which is supported by the theater in Freiburg, which will travel to several other countries as well to create a performance and to conduct an ongoing discussion on decentralization and collectivity. This summer, we will also cooperate again with SKITe association to create a meeting of 40 artists in Portugal.

So this is, in brief, the narrative of Sweet and Tender. As I said before, it is my personal horizon of experience, which no doubt, is borne out of different contexts and conditions than those which may exist here in Istanbul, or in Turkey in general. Though Sweet and Tender is a global network, it evolved from artists who are mostly familiar with conditions in Western Europe. I am aware, in general, that Turkey has begun to show up on the map of certain trans-national artistic networks such as IETM, Balkan Express and BTM, and that some artists in Turkey have noted a lack of unified Turkish cultural policy due to a general weakness in the public notion of civil society, and this makes it difficult for these trans-national networks to partner with Turkey on an institutional level. I am aware that these conditions have been said to produce a rather conservative and individualistic cultural environment, which tends to support more populist agendas rather than sheltering progressive ones, unless of course those progressive tendencies originate from outside Turkey. Furthermore, I am aware that it is claimed that there is little effort to link educational structures with art practices, and that this relates to a lack of healthy critical discourse within the community.

No doubt, these are claims of difficult conditions. In some way I have experienced conditions that can relate to this, but I cannot pretend to understand what it means to be an artist working in Turkey, so I cannot propose something that directly addresses these issues. But I would like to speak about Sweet and Tender, as I have been asked to speak about Sweet and Tender, and specifically about several principals behind the network itself – principals specific to how artists can act and interact with one-another in order to empower themselves in general; I am not proposing these principals as ones that must or should be followed, and I am especially not proposing a solid model – there are many problems and unanswered questions about Sweet and Tender – many inconsistencies. It is itself is little more than a collection of varied people that make up the network. There is no consensus on what it is. There is no center. There is only discussion, and what I would call, uncontrolled, emergent behavior. It is above all an experiment and a work-in-progress between artists. Therefore what I speak about today is partly the result of real discussions and agreements, and partly my own, idealistic, proposal for what Sweet and Tender can be – what any network of artists can be. What I present to you is my personal manifesto for this project. What I hope for you, is that you as artists can take from this narrative and from these principals, anything that may be of value and that you may apply to your own context.

To begin, I think we can all agree that we as artists need several things in order to learn and grow and to produce art. We need time, space and money. Perhaps our art itself doesn’t require money, but money is at least required for the creation of the necessary conditions in which to create art: which are time and space. We need to eat, before we can create art. An opening of space, however that opening is created, is done with the help of whatever resources we as individuals can win, negotiate, apply for, discover, steal or invent ourselves. We as artists need space, and we as artists have, from time to time, and depending on our location and our economic conditions, more or less resources to open different forms of space.

Another thing that can be said is that most of us live in one or another form of capitalist society. Whether or not there is public or private funding, no funding at all, a lively public scene, structures for education and exchange, discourse or none, subsidies, policies, or no policy at all, we live in a system where there are Market forces. We know this, we feel it, as many of us who seek to do work without the protection of subsidies, complain about the Market. I hear it wherever there are artists who consider their work as somehow at or beyond the horizons of mainstream art consumption. Many of us feel that there are naturally the same market forces of supply and demand, which put pressure on us to deliver particular kinds of products in particular kinds of conditions, which are often in conflict with our individual interests. Many of us hate the fact that populist agendas fueled by demand, create conditions in which work that seeks to break barriers has little or no support or funding. I found this often in New York.

In my personal experience with such conditions as in New York, there are two modes of behavior, which are produced. The first mode is productive, where individuals are creative, motivated and intelligent about how they will achieve their goals. If an artist wants to produce his or her work, they will not stop if they do not receive a grant; they will simply take another job, eat instant noodles, rehearse in the empty garage down the street, and make their posters out of Burger Kind napkins if they must. My experience is that these conditions produce creativity and intelligence in terms of production. This is a very useful force.

The second mode, is not so useful for a rich artistic community. It is a competitive, individualistic and production-oriented environment, in which artists tend to hoard relatively small amounts of time, space and money for themselves in order to advance their own agendas; the result is a community in which variety, depth of quality, artistic rigor, and criticality is relatively diminished. So I can say that in my experience, the heavy presence of market forces, of populist and conservative agendas, produces two different and opposing tendencies in individuals for the creation and production of contemporary art: one very useful, creative and productive in general, and one very destructive and limiting for the cultural field in general.

However, complaining is too easy. I would like to avoid thinking in these terms, which are a bit too simple. When we complain about the market, implicit in our complaints is the idea that we as artists deserve to operate outside of market forces. I don’t believe that we have such an inherent privilege. This idea that we are privileged is also very specific to capitalist ideas of the artist and her position in society – it is a constructed idea of she who occupies a special position outside the normal codes of capitalist organization. We as artists all to easily fall into the rhetoric of this belief, which rises in the ease of thinking that we should not be attached to market forces. Yet in communist organizations, the act of making art is simply labor for society, just as is the act of making shoes or heavy machinery. Much more simply, it’s not going to happen. We are part of the market, we are part of the system. The artist is not special.

But additionally, I don’t think protection from the market allows us real dynamic spaces for exchange either. First of all, too much artistic policy and subsidy is not necessarily a good thing. It can, in my experience, produce not only lazy-ness and inaction in individuals, but also, ironically, just as much selfish behavior and isolation as environments with free-market forces and no subsidies. As for the notion that public funding allows richer processes through more publicly supported research space – this is an idea I am suspicious of.

The existence of supported research or laboratory spaces, as conditions within European arts funding, has been more or less supported by institutions in Western Europe for the past 10 years. This was a result, as Martin Spangberg tells us, of the necessity for contemporary dance artists to find ways to protect themselves from Market Forces, which were threatening European contemporary dance in the mid 1990’s. The result was a wide-scale argument and an articulation for what we call ‘research’ and the need of its necessary space.

While this has been a welcome development in the protection of work that seeks to challenge the mainstream, it has also institutionalized ideas of research, collaboration and laboratory so that these notions of process have become commodified spaces themselves – the idea of work to be bought and traded in the dominant production structure, or to be homogenized by a ‘policy’ that determines what and where is free space for research. This is another product of institutionalization, in which artists do not take the initiative to connect directly to one-another. I maintain that the creation of space is more dynamic, when artists are active in creating it and its frame, rather than hoping it will be designed for them.

I would argue that we should not think in these binaries of Public funding being better than the Market, or the Market being more productive than publicly funded scenes. We should not spend our time believing we are somehow special, and that the market or the institution is an oppressive force.

I propose that we give up thinking in revolutionary terms, and start thinking in terms of insurrection: e.g., instead of thinking: ‘how do we overturn or escape the tyranny of market forces’? How do we create a new system?’ We instead work together and within systems to carve out spaces inside of them, spaces in which we may live – what Hakim Bey calles the Temporary Autonomous Zone – these zones do not attempt to overthrow, but instead create a dynamic and ever-shifting series of micro-communities, spaces, and creative intersections, which are driven and opened by artists themselves. We must think constructively, and we must think about what markets and institutions have to offer us, and we must think more in terms of creating conditions for ourselves in which we have more control over how we relate to market conditions. We must think creatively, wildly, with a mix of awareness and idealistic naiveté, but with a sense of impossible vision. I believe that by actively always looking for opportunities in this way benefits both artists, institutions, as well as a cultural scene in the long term.

So this is the question at the heart of Sweet and Tender, and it also perhaps the first question to put forward here: For artists, how can we work together to create conditions in which the artist is not wishing to escape from the Market and is not relying only on existing structures as the sole provider for his or her time, space and money? How can we as artists utilize the productive and creative power that market systems create each of us, while resisting the urge to fall into a competitive environment of art production? How can we be active in our relationship to the structures of production as they currently exist? What can we do towards creating Temporary Autonomous Zones.

The first principle I will put forward, which is central to the operation of our network, is the very simple and personal principle of generosity. It is the belief that artists can, themselves be very generous, and can create spaces – spaces of education, spaces of information exchange, of research and of visibility, of money, of couch-surfing. This may sound simple (and it is) but I find that all too often, in our thinking, we as artists tent to look up towards the structures of production, whether these have a coherent policy or not: we think of theaters, subsidies, grants, competitions as the route towards gathering the necessary resources of time, space and money, and the only actors capable of developing our careers and creating a lively scene. In fact, each of us that is active in the arts scene, can already be said to have a certain amount of resources – whether they be a studio, a festival, a wealthy individual or a grant at one time or another, or some extra money, or a really nice couch. But we always want and need access to more and different resources and avenues in order to develop – and we deserve these things. But in fact, if we think of being generous with our resources, instead of only needy, we create a culture in which more options open to each of us. A greater number of spaces open on a horizontal plane of multiple interconnected actors, than do on a vertical or hierarchical plane. This is based on the idea that whenever we as individuals come across the opportunity to open a space for ourselves, it is almost always possible to open that space a little more, to include someone else as well.

This idea is nothing particularly novel. As Florian Schneider asserts, working together in fact does occur frequently in many situations, both artistic as well as corporate. It is not as though we don’t work together to achieve our own goals. However this work is not often generous, since the act of working together is often in the greater service of individuals, wishing to advance their own careers and ambitions in an environment of necessity – and often these forms of working together create a false leveling of the playing field. In such situations, when we simply say we are cooperating and exchanging, or learning, in a neutral and non-hierarchical exchange, we are simply being hypocritical. Creating a non-hierarchical network for collaboration is of course possible. What is not possible is vanquishing the real hierarchies of knowledge, information and experience that will always exists between artists.

If we look at the model of collaborative education proposed by Schneider, we should not privilege this natural inequality of knowledge through supporting it with a structural hierarchy, but we also do not deny it. If we accept the natural hierarchies of our knowledge and experience, yet seek to be generous in the desire to work together, to transgress our own boundaries, to not necessarily seek a common ground, but rather to boldly and generously open spaces to confront and collaborate without having to understand, then a mutual growth and real exchange can take place. So generosity in this context means not only giving and opening space, it also means working to find a frame that can acknowledge existing inequalities, and still create an equal interaction on equal terms between them
 
But to return to the simple and individual philosophy of opening space and being generous, let me bring this down to earth again. In 2006 I wanted to live in Europe, and I wanted to have money to eat, and space in which I could play and rehearse and develop my work. The reality was that I was sleeping in a field, on an illegal visa, covered by my dirty underwear, and I had 200 Euros total. At this point, a Portuguese artist named Gui, whom I had met in Vienna previously, and with whom we had together discussed these ideas of a network, contacted me (though I didn’t get email in the field, I still made use of a nearby internet café). Gui had seen a bit of my work and I had seen his. They had little in common. We also hardly knew one another, we had no real basis for deep friendship, much less artistic cooperation, but he was aware of my personal wishes and we had the common ground of this conversation – this idea that artists can support one-another.

He had recently spoken to a small venue in Porto, which was interested in showing some of his work. In one conversation with the director of the venue, Gui managed to convince the theater to show his own works, in addition to those three other people, with the same amount of money overall – these people, which included myself, were each from different continents and were interested in confronting each other’s differences. Gui also had access to a nearly run-down building, which he was turning into a cultural center with little private funds and no public funds. With the use of this space for sleeping, another for rehearsing, and the venue to show our work, the four of us developed pieces and showed them. I made just enough money to stay in Europe. Gui and the institution also benefited from the sudden input and contact with more artists from more places.

At this point, another artist whom had spoken with me in Vienna called me to tell me that he might be able to convince a choreographer he was working with, who had come across some private funds, to hire me as a dancer in Germany. With this job, I was able to make enough money to live and to eat, but a perk of my situation was that I had access to studio space in a public theater. I technically did not have a job or real support, but was able to use the studio at night as I wished. Over the coarse of two months, I used the night-time access to the studio to make a solo, which has since been invited in several festivals.

Since showing this solo, I also developed a more secure relationship to the group and the theater. ‘pvc’, where I was and still am based, in southern Germany. Like Sweet and Tender, pvc seeks to make use of resources to open a space for experimentation, exchange and collaboration. These ideals are not always reached, but since then I have managed to create a frame based around the format of ‘performance/lectures’, in which other artists come to use the space to work, talk, give workshops and lectures and present. I have used my connection to that structure to open spaces in terms of studio time and my own couch for surfing; several artists have been able to use those resources to find their own footing in Europe. In the fall I am launching a project there, which is a research on collectivity in the digital age, and I have managed to negotiate with the institution to give contracts to six other artists to come to Freiburg and do research and present and develop their work. These instances are not about personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. They are about being proactive and generous..

This is not meant to be some inspiration story. Believe me, many things about relationships between Sweet and Tender, and many things about pvc are genuinely not functioning, or are confusing or un-clear. I am not proposing the ultimate way things should be, and I am not proposing something new. People have been taking advantage of space and of open spaces, creating their own open spaces, helping one another in different ways. What is important about the narrative I have shared with you, and similar or very different narratives of artists opening spaces for one another, is that things tend to flourish -- in weird, roundabout, unexpected, indirect ways. Interacting in this way, things flourish, ideas travel, work spreads, disappears and multiplies elsewhere. It is not something that can really be quantified, but the philosophy behind this network and this way of working, is that individual action of generosity in this way, produces dynamic learning environments, produces work, produces discourse and knowledge. It is not usually a short term investment, when spaces produce direct results, but something more long-term in its scale and reward.

To revisit this point, what is of first and foremost importance here is of course the creation of space. The creative carving of enclaves, of Temporary Autonomous Zones, the sharing and combining of resources to create micro-communities for the purposes of collaboration, confrontation and exchange. Also important to remember, is that everyone has something to give. Even if its not space or money or even ideas, perhaps its labor and experience, or a book, everyone can open a space for someone else.

And secondly the notion that this is not to be some new way – it is not a revolution aimed at creating a new system; rather it is an option for personal interaction between artists – constant disruption and insurrection as a way of life, the flourishing of micro-communities in these spaces – ones which do not seek a common ground, but rather develop their own laws and codes according to the particular dynamics and differences of that particular moment and that particular context. After which, it is allowed to die and dissolve so that something else can form.

So a question: if there is nothing new about the idea that open spaces can be created and utilized for exchange and research, why are we talking about it? (other than the fact that it’s always nice to be reminded?) It is important to address because there is a new dimension opening to these possibilities. This has to do of course with technology. With a good internet connection, masses of people can exchange knowledge and information easily, entire communities can form and dissolve online, and certain collective notions of WE can gather a multitude of people along disparate points of a decentralized network, and these people can move to coordinated action from various points along that network, freed from the constraints of traditional telecommunications. Collectivity as a form is no longer bound by strictly geographic notions of place. Collectivity can move in a form where the center is only a pure mass of people.

The possibility to use simple user-operated systems for communication, makes the building of networks easier and quicker. Databases of information can be shared between artists. In the earlier story I shared with you, the interactions of my colleagues were certainly generous, but they were also little more than helping someone out. However, larger and more mobile networks of artists are able to act the same way, to exchanging knowledge information, contact, funding opportunity, and if this is based on real collaborative relationships, then this powerful flow of knowledge can open possibilities for collaboration in real time and space.

The empowerment of the artist who engages with a network of his or her peers may also draw upon a greater range of other artists, which he may propose to his or her institutions. Institutions looking to broaden the work that they support, may gain from and begin to look for artists who are more connected to a wide and disparate network peers, and thus the artist has more to offer the institution than simply his or her own work and within the immediate community.

Looking towards the internet, certain examples offer us quite inspiring models for network organization. Many of these can be said to be user-driven or peer-to-peer in their format. Any ‘wiki’ site for example, is a kind of center of a given network, which is constructed and self-regulated entirely by its members. The online dictionary, Wikipedia, is an enormously constructed base of knowledge, written and edited by users, that has been shown to be nearly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its structure is light and mobile, emphasizing easy-use and easy construction from its users. It does not burden itself with ‘heavy’ attempts to regulate and avoid errors through excessive rules and codes; rather it emphasizes a structure that allows quick correction and self-regulation from its community of users.

Sweet and Tender maintains a wiki site. It is facilitated by a webmaster, but the communication and content is entirely user-built. Spaces and pages can be easily and quickly created and accessed by members of the network. Photos, images and texts can be uploaded and downloaded easily. Theoretically, this space exists as the ‘center’ of the Sweet and Tender network, yet it is a center without a center of authority – a virtual center that is actually spread all over six continents, which thrives on the individual desire to interact. This notion of center, which many of use everyday online, is not concerned with old binaries of center and periphery, but restructures the whole concept of centrality itself.

Of course networks exist. Many institutions have begun to network in order to increase possibilities for co-Production and to distribute and multiply funds. However the model of Sweet and Tender is both informal in nature, and is entirely artist-driven. This brings me back to the point that this structure is not only a useful tool, but also an interesting model for social organization between artists in general. As I spoke about earlier, Capitalist structures of production generate enormous productive energy from individual artists hungry to do their work. This is a flat, non-hierarchical model that supports individualism and production-oriented competition. On the other hand, Communist structures propose a social organization that is clearly highly authoritative and hierarchical in structure, yet for the purpose of serving the idea of a community.

If we look to organize artist networks around the use of user-built and peer-to-peer structures, what we can begin to see is what Tomislaw Medak describes as a ‘third-way’ of social organization. A flat hierarchy of exchange and individual action that still emphasizes collectivity and collaboration, and a system in which the line between producer and consumer of culture is no longer so clear. All involved are players in active exchange.

As I have said before, several things are important to this philosophy. One in particular is structural lightness and informality. The network of Sweet and Tender is not intended to be an engine for production of work. It is not meant to gather funds. It is not meant to be a thing separate from the users that compose it. It is not an entity or a legal body. It has no fixed codes of operation or procedure. Many systems and codes arise as they are generated in the space of each project. The artists that create a meeting point in Portugal create a different Sweet and Tender Collaboration from the one I will create in Freiburg, different from the one that Marko Milic creates in Belgrade, from Montserrat Payro in Mexico City, from Tim Darbyshire in Melbourne Australia. Sweet and Tender exists only as a cluster, a grouping of these individual moments and communities. There is no center that grows extremities, only various extremities, which find use value in connecting with one-another, and thus a center is formed, but not owned.

There is no single kind of work that is produced from such a structure. The network of Sweet and Tender is also very specific and useful to artists who are looking to ‘find their footing’ artists for whatever reason, who are both in need of resources and have resources to share. Most importantly, it is a tool and an experiment. The ideals I have shared with you, again, are partly floating between 30 people, and are partly my own polemic towards the possibilities of this, or similar artist-driven networks.