Feel Goods // Paul Robert
An essay response to Paul Robert’s Teinture de Bukavu
Since 2015 I have been collaborating with a contact, Bagalwa Baliahamwabo, in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To be straightforward, I am outsourcing beadwork to his family. I order the supplies online, organize and label them with detailed instructions, and ship them. Each swatch is 128 by 128 beads and is woven on a bead loom for a wage of one US cent per bead ($163.84/swatch). I estimate this works out to $1.50-$3.00/hour. For comparison, a plantation worker in the DRC makes about $2.00 a day.
The choice of colours is pre-determined. Each spring and fall, Pantone (the American colour company) publishes the Pantone Fashion Color Report, part speculative anticipation and part authoritative determination of what will be the next season’s top colours. Each of the swatches represents one of these.
The swatches’ “average” colours are produced through an optical mixture of the previous season’s colours. A dithering algorithm arranges them into perplexing patterns. I have written software (using python and bash on Linux) to automate the various translations. The bases, or risers on which the swatches rest, are made (by me, in Canada) of corrugated cardboard coated with plaster.
My late father, in his volunteer vocation, answered theological questions from African students taking correspondence courses. Since 1991, Mr. Bagalwa was one of his most faithful correspondents, and persisted in writing our family even after my father’s death. I rarely wrote back. In 2015, I suggested this project without knowing whether he or anyone in his vicinity had prior experience or skill in beadwork. I only knew that he was a committed correspondent. We communicate in French by email (which he accesses from a cyber café). I plan to pursue this project indefinitely, until my collaborator in the DRC refuses, or until he or I are unable to continue. Every spring and fall, there are between 10 and 16 new colours.
These bead swatches belong to a class of commodities we might label “feel goods”: fairly-traded products, part of whose value to the consumer is a feeling that they are doing some good in the world, or at least are not complicit in doing bad. Like locally-produced, handcrafted goods, these objects stand out as authentic and presumably ethical exceptions to the rule of corporate branding, mass-production and conspicuous consumption. Even better in the public imagination is when artisans are able to express something of their culture through the work, although sustainability requires that this match consumer demand.
Relative to the dominant system, such goods are, on the surface, a welcome presence. Modestly effective, consumer activism may seem like a better-than-nothing strategy among limited options. While it may not level the playing field, it promises to at least reduce poverty for a not insignificant number. In absolute terms however, the fact that there are people who are grateful to work for $1.50 per hour just points to deeper systemic issues, to how dire the reference point really is.
One problem with consumer activism is that it implicitly reinforces the belief that inequality is a problem of consumer choice rather than of marketplace deregulation. It blames the masses who line up at big box stores for discounts and the greedy one-percenters who own them. The problem, and therefore also the solution, is cast in terms of personal morality rather than the collective responsibility our institutions should embody. The current neoliberal version of capitalism (in which wealth is tied as much to financial investment and corporations’ ability to lobby governments as it is to savvy business practices) benefits from a system in which responsibility for inequality is left to charity and consumer ethics rather than government regulation. Many of the super-rich are well aware that as much as their companies benefit from free markets, their personal reputations suffer. Many have turned to big philanthropy as a way of performing their morality, which Linsey McGoey[i] has likened to an arsonist hosing down a house they’ve set on fire.
An analogy can be drawn between the consumption of ethically-produced craft objects (such as these ones) and certain socially engaged practices in contemporary art (such as this one—read a certain way). Practices that seek to go beyond art’s purely contemplative function and directly effectuate social and economic transformation usually have their origins in the moral prerogative of individual artists. They imply disillusionment with institutions, and the need for individuals (including artists who have the benefit of access to grant money) to circumvent them to provide relief to the victims of broken systems. At worst, socially-concerned practices, like the community arts movement in the 1980s, devolve into what Claire Bishop has termed “a harmless branch of the welfare state ... the kindly folk who can be relied upon to mop up wherever the government wishes to absolve itself of responsibility”[ii]. The salient point here is that the more individuals, including artists, step in, the more they can be relied upon to keep doing so. This just happens to dovetail with the neoliberal agenda stated above.
It is an unfortunate reality that anecdotes in which clearly-defined victims and clearly-defined perpetrators are waiting, respectively, to be saved and punished tend to excite our imaginations and mobilize us to action more than complex situations where people don't fit neatly into pre-defined archetypes or perform the narrative functions we want them to. The long-term, collaborative, institutionalized, often glamourless, and unheroic tasks that evidence-based research lays out as the most effective routes to large-scale change have a hard time competing with promises of immediate results accompanied by bias-confirming stories. Even less motivating, the most effective change is often so incremental and prosaic that is only noticed and acknowledged by a few who analyze year-over-year data. Conversely, impressive displays of justice, magnanimous donations, and satisfying political wins sometimes—and not rarely—result in impacts that fall short of, or even run contrary, to the expectations built around them[iii]. The same is often true of socially-engaged art practices. An artistic project that benefits a vulnerable population draws a lot more public attention and satisfies society’s sentimental needs to a much higher degree, with far less cost (and therefore far less actual material impact) than a government project with the same mandate.
The point of drawing attention to socially-engaged art’s pitfalls is to draw attention away from the more problematic expectations we tend to have for it and clarify where its value can be more reliably located. Ironically, this is back in art’s contemplative function. Our concepts of fairness and justice are continually re-built and reinforced by the narratives we construct, whether we are agents in them or observers. Emotional responses, prone as they are to bias and faulty reasoning, are nevertheless a pre-condition to the seemingly colder task of embedding these values in our institutions. Teinture de Bukavu is a reflection on socially-engaged art’s conditions and limitations. While, like many similar projects, it does result in marginally ameliorative measures for one family—their livelihood is supplemented by an unlikely source of income—elements that show the limits of such an outcome are also emphasized:
1. Framing wages as “one US cent per bead” as well as “$163.84/swatch” elicits ambivalence about whether this is fair and according to what frame of reference.
2. The use of seed beads evokes the history of colonization, both in Africa and the Americas. From the 14th to the 18th century, beads were fabricated in massive quantities in Venice (Murano specifically), Holland, and Bohemia. Appetite for them in Europe was virtually non-existent as they were seen to be mere imitations of the precious stones imported from the colonies[iv]. Rather they were produced specifically for trade with the inhabitants of the newly-discovered territories. In Africa, bead types were intimately linked with the products exchanged for each: gold, ivory, palm oil, and slaves[v]. The magnitude of this history and its insidious variants that continue today provides a sobering counterpoint to the optimism conveyed by positive personal anecdotes.
3. The project keeps pace with a biannual fashion report: while it may be argued that the churning out of manufactured needs generates continual employment for the vulnerable, it is capitalism’s constant drive for lower production costs that is responsible for the creation of extreme inequality in the first place. The corollary to manufactured needs is the manufacture of need. Fashion may be an easy target, but the world of contemporary art, with its galleries, fairs, and biennials is no less immune to criticism in this respect (even when a large proportion of exchanges are in the currency of social capital).
4. The swatches rest on low supports: roughly, yet laboriously crafted plinths, layers upon layers of corrugated cardboard with plastered tops. The swatches’ exquisite delicacy is contrasted with an illegitimate form of craft, the evidence of well-intentioned industriousness, but doomed to limited success by shoddy materials and a haphazard process.
5. The project accentuates the global division of labour. Immaterial labour in information economies, including both its technical and affective forms, results in very material effects all along the supply chain.
Teinture de Bukavu, while paying homage to the field of socially-engaged practice in contemporary art, also seeks to reveal its ideological underpinnings. Highlighting associations with fashion, fairly-traded craft goods, and colonial histories helps demonstrate that the desire for immediate action and its actual results can sometimes be at odds with one another. Projects like this one often have their impetus in a frustration that art is too contemplative, its effects too indirect, unpredictable, and ineffectual. Viewed from a distance however, the positive effects often amount to little more than symbolic gestures, locating art’s—even socially engaged art’s—function back into the narrative and contemplative.
[i] McGoey, Linsey. Bezos, billionaires, and the problem with big philanthropy. IAI News. https://iai.tv/articles/bezos-billionaires-and-the-problem-with-big-philanthropy-auid-1378
[ii] Bishop, Claire. Claire Bishop - Creative Times Lecture. Youtube. https://youtu.be/MdKniMT46tg?t=2010.
[iii] Chase, Seth. We Will Win Peace. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wewillwinpeace
[iv] Sciama, Lidia D. “Gender in the Making, Trading and Uses of Beads,” in Beads and Bead Makers: Gender, Material Culture and Meaning, Sciama, Lidia D. and Joanne B. Eicher, eds, Berg, 1998.
[v] Trivallato, Francesca. “Venetian Glass Beads, Female Labour and International Trades,” in Beads and Bead Makers: Gender, Material Culture and Meaning, Sciama, Lidia D. and Joanne B. Eicher, eds, Berg, 1998.