Offstage F(r)ight
Why we must support the SAG-AFTRA strike—and learn from actors.
This past July 14th, the American actor’s union SAG-AFTRA went on strike over a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. I am very sympathetic to their cause and share a strong affinity with actors— not least because my own roots as an artist have to do with a key experience where community theater and the history of organized labor intersected.
In 1995, two years after having graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was a 24-year old trying to figure out my first chapter as a professional artist. I was working at the then-called Mexican Fine Arts Museum, a small organization in the Mexican immigrant neighborhood of Pilsen. My full-time job allowed me to pay rent for a small studio where I was making strange paintings and getting not much traction or interest in them. But while I struggled to find exhibition venues, in a city like Chicago performance venues instead were plentiful and offered a great platform where to experiment. A friend and fellow SAIC student, Matthew Kopp, reached out to me to invite me to a performance festival he was organizing at the Blue Rider Theater, a small venue located on 18th Street and Halsted. I thus spent that whole summer putting together my first major performance work, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. After that presentation, the director of the Blue Rider, Tim Fiori, invited me to perform again the following year at the same venue. I was very interested in writing a piece that dealt with Chicago’s history, in particular with two peculiar local urban myths: one, that the Blue Rider theater existed on the same location where a grand cinema theater known as The Palace once stood, and a local rumor about an anarchist ghost that haunted the Pilsen neighborhood. The intersection of 18th and Halsted was only a dozen or so to where they Haymarket Riots once took place, the famous labor demonstration that culminated in the In the conviction and execution of 7 anarchist leaders. As I was researching the period, I found an obscure anecdote narrated by Jane Addams in her book 20 years at Hull House ( Hull House also being a few blocks away from the site). In her book, Addams describes that early one morning in 1907, a young Russian Jew named Averbuch showed up at the home of the Chicago chief of police on an “obscure errand”. The police chief apparently mistook Averbuch for an anarchist bent on murder and he was shot on the spot. This anecdote became the basis for the performance I developed.
As I turned in my proposal to Fiori (and, I believe, a text I had started writing about it), he told me that he thought this work should be a play. I had never written a play before, but I set to work immediately. The play, The Palace (and Other Pilsen Ghost Stories) was directed by Fiori and the late Chicago actor Scott Heckman and opened to the public in January of 1996. Needless to say, I had never worked with actors before either, and the experience was transformative. I was coming from performance art, where the artist was at the center without a fourth wall. On opening night, I vividly recall being backstage, seeing the 8 or so actors standing next to me with their costumes, ready to go on, and me thinking about how extraordinary it was that these where characters that had come out of my mind, now taking physical shape.
Ever since that time I have had a deep admiration for actors. Today I teach at the College of the Performing Arts at The New School where I’ve had further exposure to the world of drama and inevitably have reflected on the relationship between the art world and the theater world.
When one thinks of screen actors, the most common perception is that they are Hollywood stars, such as those who make millions of dollars for a single picture. The reality of course is that the acting profession is one of the most competitive of all, where in the United States only 1 in every 50 actors is able to make a living from acting, which is about only 2% of all actors . If one considers that SAG-AFTRA has 160,000 members, this means that 156,800 of those screen actors have to find other means of survival.
As a result, especially in a city like New York City, it is common to see actors moonlighting as bartenders, waiters, receptionists, paralegal assistants and beyond. Ever since that first play I did in Chicago I was impressed by how normal it was for actors to do auditions, how well they handled rejection, and how the question of honorarium was not at the forefront of the deal for them—not because they did not need the money, on the contrary, but because they really wanted the experience. One of those Chicago actors who I cast for a performance the following year told me on one occasion that he would be happy to do the piece if I just paid his subway fare.
But of course, professional actors eventually get to a point in their career when they have to join a union (Equity in the case of stage actors, SAG in the case of those who do film and television). Unions help protect the actor’s interests, setting standards for pay, insurance and other aspects of a production.
In my case, as a single artist usually engaged in presenting small pieces that would at most run for three or four evenings, it would be burdensome to meet the demands of the union, but we often found ways to produce a short-run play by using the Actor’s Equity Showcase code which allows for a limited-run show without a contract. The arrangement was also favored by my actors who wanted to be part of an interesting art project instead of, say, being an extra in another episode of Law and Order (something that practically every single emerging New York actor has done) or do a paid gig like an anodyne toothpaste commercial. So visual artists and actors do sometimes share a symbiotic relationship. One day someone needs to write an art history of how actors have played a key role (pun intended) in the support of many artist projects over the years.
Actors are resilient and flexible. They are sponges of human experience, able to learn, absorb and embody the essence of anything and anyone and project it onstage. I was often fascinated to see how malleable they can be, how some have photographic memory and/or can cry on command. Most important to me, they understand the importance of collaboration: the success of a performance is completely dependent of everyone doing their part, so helping each other is also key. The acting community is strong and empathetic. I have no doubt that it is due to those traits that their labor unions are so strong.
This brings me to the question of why is it that visual artists do not have an equivalent union. A couple days ago an artist friend of mine, Mary Valverde, recently posted on Instagram: “ Visual artists should consider joining/starting a union alongside @sagaftra to ensure visual artists residual rights for their sold and resold works!”
While I claim no specialty on the matter, I will attempt to offer a few distinctions from experience, as I think it is useful to compare and contrast both industries.
The first distinction involves the practical definitions of artistic labor. The work of the actor involves long hours of in-person work, ranging from readings and rehearsals to the actual performance. The sine qua non requirement of being physically present for extended periods of time makes it logical for this kind of work being understood as labor that needs to be remunerated as well as protected (e.g. observing safety standards and providing health insurance for the period when the actor works). For visual artists, artistic labor can’t meaningfully be measured as hourly work, unless perhaps if an artist is engaged in doing professional engagements such as like lectures, teaching, and so forth. Secondly, in the art world authorship is much more clear-cut than in theater: a visual artist is (ostensibly) the author of the work that they exhibit, while in a theatrical production the words might belong to someone (the playwright) but the interpretation of it (actor, director) has a proprietary aspect of its own. As a result, the artist as the sole author/owner of the work can eventually market it and sell it. Even in the case of performance art works, artists like Tino Sehgal figured out ways to turn them into collectable art works which is something that does not exist (so far) in theater. Partially because of this distinction, the work that actor invests in a production makes it even more critical for it to receive proper remuneration.
The right to receiving a percentage from the resale of an art work has been for many years a central demand amongst visual artists, as we know that when historic artworks rise in value we do not benefit from their increment when they are resold. I remember Dannielle telling me about being at an auction years ago when she saw Marisol Escobar, the famous highly reclusive late Venezuelan artist, sitting by herself. That evening, an early work of hers (likely from the 1960s) was auctioned for an enormous amount. When the final selling price was announced, Marisol wept in silence.
Because of these inequities, it is logical to argue that artist union could help correct them. The challenge, however, is that resale rights (also known as Droit de Suite) is a legislative issue for which lobbying would be needed. The California Resale Royalty Act in 1977 imposed a 5% royalty to every artwork of $1000 or more sold, but it was struck down in 2012 as unconstitutional and ultimately in 2018 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Act was preempted by the federal Copyright Act, which does not recognized an artist’s right to resale royalties.
The idea of a visual artists union algo brings up the question of whether we in the visual arts would be willing to reconstitute our business world by following the collective rules created by a union. Because of the deregulated way in which the art world economy functions and the solitary nature of the artist’s profession, it might take time for artists to coalesce in a common cause or appreciate its potential benefits.
In the meantime, we have to resort to other alternatives outside the legal realm in order to improve the artworld practices. For the last three years or so I have been working with a group known as Ethics of Collecting, an organization that seeks to establish a collectively agreed-upon code of conduct for contemporary art collectors for them to become “good citizens” of the art world and help improve the culture of philanthropy in the arts.
But even while the model offered by theater world might not be fully applicable to the art world, we would be well-served by learning from their fight, their spirit of solidarity and their commitment to supporting artists at every level of their development, advocating for fair wages and other rights.
And they deserve our support. I am certain that the Haymarket ghosts of the Palace theater are rooting for them.
Visit this site to support the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Actors are resilient and flexible. They are sponges of human experience, able to learn, absorb and embody the essence of anything and anyone and project it onstage.
This is the clearest and most cogent description I have ever read. Thank you.