Lecture: Farid Rakun, Marnie Briggs, and Coco (Webinar)

From Jakarta to NYC via Cranbrook: on ruangrupa and Art Workers’ Inquiry

Farid Rakun (CAA Architecture, 2013) of ruangrupa (currently providing the artistic direction for the 2022 edition of Documenta in Kassel, Germany) is joined by Marnie Briggs (CAA Print Media, 2013) and Coco, members of the New York-based Art Workers’ Inquiry, to discuss the creation of ecosystems through artistic practice and organizing work.

ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication.

The Art Workers’ Inquiry is an organizing group of art workers seeking to build power across New York’s vast arts industry. We define art workers as anyone whose labor contributes to the artistic production process, from dancers to art handlers to bartenders at performance venues. We build connections and strengthen bonds of solidarity between art workers with the ultimate goal of building a new, worker-run model of artistic labor. The Art Workers’ Inquiry formed in 2019 when we decided to create a survey based on the original 1880 workers’ inquiry compiled by Karl Marx. In addition to gathering research and forming a kind of ethnography of workers under capitalism, the inquiry aimed to push and agitate—in its progression of questioning—the survey-taker to think about the political implications of revolt and revolution. Tailored to the concerns of art workers, the first survey developed by the Art Workers’ Inquiry consists of seventy questions divided into twelve sections, each centered on a topic such as labor, profession, or social reproduction. Our approach is interdisciplinary in order to expand our analysis of an industry that is extremely exploitative in part because it relies on the myth of “doing what you love.”