Art S.E.A.L.S: A Survival Skills Training Guide is a multidisciplinary performance series developed by artists Alana Bartol and Andrew Lochhead aka “The A-Team”, that explores the relationships between artistic and non-artistic labour as engaged in by professional artists from Windsor and Hamilton, Ontario, through a series of inter-municipal artist exchanges, consisting of performance-based, interactive workshops and panel discussions.
The title of the work is a pun referencing the United States Navy SEAL program, an elite commando squad recognized for their ability to operate in harsh and unforgiving environments – much like the harsh and unforgiving labour market landscape of the 21st century. Rather than standing for Sea, Air and Land as the military acronym does, Art SEAL’s stands for Art Skills Exchange and Learning Series.
The project seeks to not only illuminate the economic challenges faced by artists in order to maintain their professional practices, but to relate these challenges to projects and discussions being held in artistic communities across the province. Specifically, Alana Bartol’s Artist For Hire Series held in Windsor, Ontario in 2013 and Market Value a project developed by the Hamilton Arts Council and the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre to be held in March 2014 in Hamilton, Ontario. Both projects focus(ed) on advocating for recognition of artistic practices as artistic labour, by demonstrating the non-arts skills associated with supporting creative practices, but also in the case of the Market Value to demonstrate the value of this labour by rendering public the often private and unpaid labour of the artist’s studio.
Art S.E.A.L.S: A Survival Skills Training Guide combines elements of these previous endeavours in the desire to create a more holistic approach to our advocacy on behalf of artists and their labour, while contributing to the growing discussion surrounding the employment, working and living conditions of artists and how they are determined, recognized and valued. The project evolves against the backdrop of increased focus on deploying the arts as an engine of economic development, particularly in “post-industrial cities” such as Hamilton and Windsor, Ontario, and the resumption of a new iteration (2013) of The Art Gallery of York University’s groundbreaking 2007 study on the economic status of practicing artists in Canada.
Art S.E.A.L.S: A Survival Skills Training Guide positions itself as skeptical of the motivations and claims of municipal politicians and economic boosters toward the development of “cultural industries” and endeavours to raise concerns about these particular economic trajectories vis a vis what we know through scholarship (such as the aforementioned York study), and what we as practicing musicians, visual artists, writers, media artists and arts administrators, have experienced directly.[3] Those concerns being a changing labour market that no longer guarantees steady employment, the rise of temporary labour and/or unpaid labour, and the reduction or elimination of workers benefits – a labour market, in other words, that looks a lot like the one lived in daily by artists and other cultural producers.
Furthermore, the events presented as part of Art S.E.A.L.S: A Survival Skills Training Guide will aim to challenge assumptions about, and break down barriers between; artists, arts communities and the general public, as well as de-mystify artistic practice and create a new and vibrant dialogue between arts practitioners in these similar, yet distinct regions of Southern Ontario.
Art S.E.A.L.S. Survival Skills Training was presented at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre and Hamilton Farmers Market, May 2 and 3, 2014. The program was also presented as part of Possible Futures: The Windsor-Essex Triennial at the Art Gallery of Windsor and Windsor Public Library, October 18 and 19, 2014
