art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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Dawicki’s colleagues from Southern Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal, Marcin Maciejowski
and Rafał Bujnowski, contribute to the media on a regular basis. After graduating
from the Cracow Academy, they formed a group called Ładnie (Beautiful) and at the
moment all three of them enjoy quite successful careers abroad.[26] But, Sasnal and
Maciejowski continue to draw cartoons for the weekly magazine Przekroj and Rafał
Bujnowski has been producing a weekly program for a local TV station in Cracow
called “Once a week I go to Cracow.” Bujnowski and Sasnal left Cracow soon after
their graduation to live in small towns. The decision to move away from the center
of artistic life was made consciously to reduce living expenses.
Romanian artist and contemporary art activist Dan Perjovschi regards grants and
residencies in western countries as an efficient tool for making a living in Romania
where the average monthly income is around 100 Euros. So, given an accordingly
relatively modest expenditure in Romania, Perjovschi suggests: “You get a fellowship
in Vienna, let’s say, you live low and save enough money to live okay in Romania for
the next four months.”[27] Among the more ordinary means of self support, Perjovschi
mentions, rather sarcastically, that young artists either just leave the country for the
more promising West or else join advertising companies, work as web designers or
turn to art therapy.[28]
As for his personal strategies and for being an acclaimed Romanian artist, Perjovschi
can certainly rely on the aforementioned sources, which are grants and stipends in
Austria, Germany or the UK. But in addition to these more exclusive opportunities,
he has been working for a political weekly magazine since 1990.[29] As Kristine
Stiles discusses, Perjovschi’s “drawing political comments for major Romanian
oppositional newspapers” can be considered his “public art” and therefore “the
same as his ‘employment’, wherein his actual wage-earning labour functions in a
collective social context in which heterogeneous individuals grapple with shared
homogenous past in the reconstruction of a desired and developing heterogeneous
present and future.”[30] Actually, he has been exhibiting the same works he did for
the magazines named Contrapunct and 22 at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and other
venues for Contemporary art.
Another example of job and artwork being almost inextricably intertwined[31] is
Bulgarian artist Ilian Lalev who has produced the video piece Postgraduate Qualification
(2003). His personal “postgraduate qualification” as an artist consisted of becoming
a boxing trainer at the National Sports Academy in Sofia. In his film, he performs his
final examination for his audience and comments on the procedure as following “in
the conditions of a grave economic crisis and the lack of a sympathetic attitude in
the society and its institutions towards art and also through the complete change of
the values, people are constantly obliged to attain different qualifications.“[32]
Ilian Lalev’s compatriot Kamen Stoyanov reflects upon the fact that the dire
necessity of making a living as an artist can also lead to serious temptations and
irreversible deviations. Stoyanov went to the coast of the Black Sea in summer
2003 and filmed artists who paint instant portraits for tourists and sell their scenic
drawings and paintings to the passers-by. Those of his colleagues, Kamen Stoyanov
explains, are able to sustain a decent life style for the rest of the year after having
done this job for one summer season. He understands that for some of these artists