In reflecting on artists who address administrative logics in the arts, such irony is particularly crucial, if only because both administration<\/em> and logic<\/em> can be painfully boring subjects to consider. Yet, through this self-awareness, these artists call for an examination of the often-unquestioned structures within which they work, while undermining the authority that such structures attempt to project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a consideration of Jo-Anne Balcaen\u2019s and Anne-Marie Proulx\u2019s text-based works, I will explore the relationship between administration and authority, which has a profound impact on the working conditions of artists and arts professionals. Whereas Balcaen addresses the issue of status within major institutions, Anne-Marie Proulx offers a counterpoint, as she focuses on group dynamics within less-hierarchical organizations. Both of these artists critically reflect on ways that these dynamics can be questioned and challenged while acknowledging the tensions that exist in any collective project, where hierarchies often appear to emerge organ-ically, and the status that is conveyed by those at the top is similarly normalized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her recent work, Balcaen pays particular attention to these social dynamics, and her text-based project List of Job Titles by Rank and Alphabetical Order<\/em> (2014) is a pointed example. This work was completed during a residency in Brooklyn, and, as the title suggests, it fea-tures a list of job titles in the arts organized both by rank and in alphabetical order. These two lists are displayed in parallel columns running down a sheet of paper that is nearly eleven feet long. Rather than using the traditional organizational chart\u200a\u2014\u200awhich maps job titles based on rank and placement in the organization, often depicting them as a complicated, branching diagram\u200a\u2014\u200aBalcaen ranks all of the titles in the left-hand column based on her estimation of the position\u2019s power, and the titles in the right-hand column are simply arranged in alphabetical order. Red lines are scrawled across the lists, interrupting the tidy order and bureaucratic aesthetic of the document-like work on paper. These lines show adjustments and annotations made by visiting arts administrators, who were asked to reorganize the left-hand column based on their own assessment of each position\u2019s status. After a closer reading, the power and status communicated by each title begin to feel somewhat arbitrary, an impression that is only furthered by the many red lines disrupting what might otherwise communicate\u200a\u2014\u200aor attempt to convey\u200a\u2014\u200aabsolute order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This piece speaks to the subtle power of works that attempt to unpack the administrative logic of contemporary arts labour. Typically dry in nature and often drawn from, or placed in dialogue with, forms and documents, these works commonly gesture toward the harsh stratification and increasingly precarious nature of so much work in this field. Although they tend to focus closely on certain quotidian aspects of arts administration, these works can simultaneously convey the broader logic behind this labour. Here I am thinking of Clive Robertson\u2019s framing of administrative logics<\/em> as the \u201cmechanisms of bureaucratic power within alternative and mainstream art and culture organizations,\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Clive Robertson, Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture <\/em>(Toronto: YYZBOOKS, 2006), iii.<\/span> as well as David Graeber\u2019s writing on the broader social and political dimensions of bureaucratic systems. Precarity and systemic inequality are receiving more attention in the arts, but rarely are they positioned in relation to bureaucratic power\u200a\u2014\u200aa form of power that, as Graeber asserts throughout his recent book Utopia of Rules<\/em>, is actively concealed and promotes a lack of visibility and understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The look and feel of Balcaen\u2019s List of Job Titles<\/em> are emblematic of this obfuscation, with each position\u2019s title neatly rendered in a standard, sans-serif font that conveys a sense of neutrality, as though its status is inherent or preordained. It is the matter-of-fact nature of these documents that leaves them seemingly beyond rebuke. This is no accident. As Graeber argues, bureaucracies work hard to come across as ordered and authoritative, because they are often attempting to mask the deep, structural violence upon which they are founded. He writes that situations marked by \u201cpervasive social inequality,\u201d in which hierarchy is maintained by legally sanctioned violence, \u201cinvariably tend to create the kind of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures.\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules<\/em> (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015), 57.<\/span> This is not to say that the docents and gallery attendants at the bottom of Balcaen\u2019s list are not aware of their social position, but only that this status is maintained initially through a \u201cwillful blindness,\u201d which, if challenged, will be enforced by the sanctioned police violence that Graeber discusses\u200a\u2014\u200aas many who have been involved in direct action or wildcat strikes can attest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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