Introduction: 

On the shadow side of nearly every artistic practice, a PDF looms. Hidden in folders, on email servers, saved as monthly versions, this file often exists as multiples, each with a specific function. It is a document that is deeply individual to each person who maintains one, referring mostly to personal achievements and creative undertakings. It is also a type of work that nearly every artist performs, free of charge, yet it conditions access to funding, sales, and other monetary opportunities. It contains mostly two to three pages, summarising exhibitions, awards and prizes. 

This format is of course otherwise known as the CV. From the start of the twenty-first century onwards, it has become unimaginable to conceive of a professional artistic practice that is not captured in one. The artists’ CV has become a widely instituted standard, providing an overview of the production and exposure of an artists’ work. It is both a shadow and a forecast, travelling  ahead of where artists may go. Theorist Boris Groys has gone so far as to claim that “the actual work of the contemporary artist is his or her CV.” 

In spite of its central role in circulating contemporary artistic practices, the art history of the CV itself has hardly been considered. This text attempts to expand this history, showing how the canonisation of the first CV privileged it as a representation of artistic practice. In the second part, the text will address the role of the institutionalisation of CV’s in the Dutch funding system. What forms of practice are excluded through this standardisation? Then finally, it will explore alternative approaches to representation and inclusion. While stopping short of providing an alternative guide on how to craft an artists’ CV, we hope to expose some of the internal contradictions in the very term, in order to work towards a better practice on how to represent, circulate, and assess what these documents do, and how they may reward particular types of practices over others. 

As the economy has become increasingly based on freelance gigs, the cultural field has borne the brunt as the ‘avant garde’ of precaritisation, whereby activities across various institutions and semi-related fields are combined by individual workers, whom keep multiple, unconsolidated CV’s. These workers now may experience something of a crystallised form of schizophrenia under capitalism, in which they are rewarded for externalising their daily activities basis by presenting different personas to various institutions. The blurring of lines between fields formerly conceived of as distinct, from visual arts, design, to social practices, activism, and community work, has diluted the criteria once known as ‘professional’. Cultural CV’s are now often patchworks of income-generating activities, volunteer labour, interests and achievements. Workers are their weavers.

How Art Became Professional

Leonardo da Vinci is canonised as the inventor of the CV. In 1482, he drafted a letter to Ludovico Sforza, the Count of Milan, in search of employment within the Count’s protectorate. It contained 10 points projecting into this possible future, summarising his abilities and skills. Nine addressed weapons of warfare, such as techniques to make bombs, mines, even sketching an idea for what would now be called a tank. The very last of those ten points is dispassionately dedicated to Leonardo’s artistic skills (‘I can do in painting whatever may be done’), rendering the world’s first CV an artists’ CV. Although historians would conceive of this letter now as a classic patronage letter, akin to the requests made to powerful mecenates like de Medici, it is remarkable how often business history guides refer to this document as the ‘world’s first CV’, and copy its format of ‘bullet’ points and its liberal mixing of skill, forecasting, and achievement, to model the CV in its current form.

The CV as we now know it was first widely used starting in the 1950s, when labour held the promise of social mobility. Processes of automation and outsourcing to the Global South set the process of deindustrialisation in motion, skewing work in Western economies towards knowledge- and managerial labour. CV researcher Eva Forsberg identifies this moment as one of ‘tapping the talent reserve’ – matching the right man to the right job. At the same time, artistic practice moves towards an emphasis on conceptualism and the appreciation of ideas over craft, resulting in the proliferation of readymades. Additionally, these developments allowed for the privileging of documentation as a work of art – opening the door to a renewed canon of performance art, as well as land art. 

The Latin term ‘curriculum vitae’, abbreviated into CV, translates to ‘the course of life’. At its very definition, the CV implies the entanglement of life and work; this makes it rife as a mode of representation for artists. In the Modernist canon, artistic practice is often thought of as departing from internal struggle, unencumbered by social influence. The mode of representation that the CV offers to artistic practice undercuts this ancient withdrawal: it externalises personal interests and professional experiences, revealing them for public circulation. CV’s are a means of representational control that work both inward and outward. In terms of form, we may place the PDFs that many CV’s circulate in within the category of ‘gray literature’: technical manuals, government documents, and college coursepacks. Yet as a literary genre, the CV is akin to diaries and love letters; a type of confessional literature. It’s a way in which nearly every worker is rendered a creative: each CV requires a basic engagement with graphic design, in templated, vernacular form. This universally recognised, ubiquitous standard, has become the main way for artists to represent their practice; a sign shadowing various achievements undertaken. This shadow at the center has become both the main mode of circulation, as well as the main rewards mechanism in many parts of the formalised field of artistic practice. In the Netherlands, access to funding is more often than not conditioned by the provision of a CV. This reliance may hold certain pitfalls – and inadvertently shape what type of practice is supported through this system. 

Measuring Practice Professionally

CV’s provide a measure of productivity that can be compared to others. But what does it mean to be productive as an artist? In contemporary artistic practices, time is interspersed. Time spent working in the studio necessarily precedes the time to manifest the work. Books are published months after they are edited, exhibitions materialize after the seeds of an idea have been planted for years, performances are staged after thorough try-outs and rehearsals. Exposure is also reliant on the opportunity to expose at all – as during the first few years of the covid-19 pandemic, the amount of physical gatherings was radically reduced. Yet the artists’ CV indexes,– usually chronologically, backwards – processes that are deeply fragmented, revisited, a mix of past realisations and future intents. 

CV’s are retrospective. Where a general CV accounts for qualifications and experience, the artists’ CV focuses more specifically on achievements. As such, the artists’ CV provides less space to project into a possible future (as a curriculum would), instead giving an overview of the past, with the implicit promise for those achievements to be repeatable. The risk here is that this implicit promise disincentivises experimentation – which is crucial to the long-term development of any artistic practice. 

In 1997, Maria Pask submitted a CV to the catalogue of an exhibition at SMBA that recorded her illnesses, meanderings, and mundane jobs, instead of listing artistic achievements. It details walks in the Welsh valleys, a turn away from religion, and hospital stays. The document reclaims episodes otherwise known as ‘CV gaps’, periods of activity not generally acknowledged as work. Many artists incur such periods. Illness, (child)care, incarceration, and a myriad of other reasons will have the course of life take greater priority than the measure of work. What may look like a ‘gap’ in time on a CV, may actively contribute to an artist’s practice, and even alter the issues and conditions that shape the work they do. It’s not hard to draw conclusions on who will face such gaps – people with caring duties, people with chronic illnesses or disabilities – and as such, the groups of people who are excluded from opportunities when the CV is applied as a comparative measure. 

CV’s account for individual achievements, whereas artistic practice often happens fundamentally in collaboration and conversation with peers. The CV is a tool that underpins the idea of a society where “access to a given occupation was determined (supposedly) neither by family background, nor social status, but formal merits.” Yet is it undeniable that artistic practices develop through social contacts, friendships, and personal bonds built over time. As a matter of fact, the way art history is written is more often than not framed through ‘movements’ of artists who worked in close proximity to each other, responding to similar social developments within a particular time span. Moreover, artistic practice has placed more emphasis on collaboration, legitimising the collective practices unfolding within social networks and communities. This tendency was centred at the 2022 edition of Documenta, which took  lumbung, an Indonesian term for rice barn, as a commons from which collectives could draw and make deposits.

CV’s insist that their indexing is of activities deemed ‘professional’. This presupposes a value that is deeply entangled in the world of art, a networked, gatekept field, where professionality is a self-affirming system. The measure of whether an artistic practice is deemed ‘professional’ has historically often been delayed, sometimes even until after the death of the artist themselves. The time of amateurs is always now, the time of recognition points to future histories to come. And in the Dutch institutional arts circuit, professionality is looped: institutions are professional because they work with accoladed artists, who in turn are seen as professional because of the institutions where they have presented. The very criterium of professionality is often run through the hard quantities of money, either through the mechanism of wages or sales. In the case of institutions, the involvement of a waged curator becomes a hallmark of ‘professionality’: their involvement gives the impression that there are enough resources for the work of selection to be outsourced to someone who maintains this as their main task. In the case of sales, professionality is affirmed as recognition, through the cold hard cash provided by collectors and collections. Here, galleries form the interface that determines whether the artist is ‘professional’: the Sunday painter may not be recognised as part of the art world, but the artist who sells exclusively to private collectors is affirmed as professional exactly because of their recognition outside of the field. Professionality in the arts is either dependent on a loop of mutual recognition or on the movements of capital surrounding an artistic practice. As such, an artists’ CV counts as more of a positioning tool that displays an artists’ networking abilities, than a tool that provides the ability to distinguish between ‘professionality’ and its counterparts.

At their worst, artists’ CV’s provide an exclusionary mechanism for people who spend periods outside of normative productivity, regardless of how those experiences impact their creative output; disincentivise experimentation and collaboration; and affirm capital as an interface that recognises the measure of professionality. In all of these challenges, a common denominator perseveres: the time recorded on CV’s is out of whack. How do Dutch funding institutions deal with these challenges in their handling of the CV?

‘Lifelines’ to Funding

In the context of the Dutch arts, CV’s have been the beating heart to access public funding. As interlocutors between public and private money and the daily practice of artists’ life and work, they form the quantified authentication that adheres to the juridical requirements for ‘professional artists’. Most funds that provide subsidies to individuals require some form of CV. This section will consider three Dutch visual arts funders who each have artists’ CV’s take a different role within their mandate: The Mondrian Fund, the state fund for visual artists, whom subsidise practices as a whole as well as projects; The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, whom distinguish between- and offer opportunities to both ‘professional’ artists and ‘culture makers’; and Art Office, part of CBK Rotterdam, who have done away with the standardised CV requirement.

CV’s have been a part of individual funding application to the Mondrian Fund since its inception in 2012, when the Mondriaan Stichting and Fonds BKVB (Beeldende Kunst, Vormgeving, and Bouwkunst) fused. They subsidise artistic practices as a whole, as well as time-bound projects. The Mondrian Fund employs a commission model based on an ‘intersubjective assessment system’. This system operates from the notion that the CV provides ‘the most objective voice’ in a subjective system. The CV paints a picture on the judgement of artistic quality of an artist by third parties. Among other values, this way the document verifies an artist’s ‘integration into Dutch professional visual arts.’ These values help enforce the mission of each commission member – to ‘step over’ their own preconceptions, and to be able to pick through euphemistic language. CV’s are judged individually, according to the overall picture of an artists’ practice, profile, and overall artistic activities. An artist who works on bronze statues, each taking years, is assessed differently than an illustrator or a photographer, whom would have a qualitatively higher output, for instance. 

On the Mondriaan application portal, you can find a written expectation for an artists’ CV – to categorise in solo and group exhibitions, and make it recede from most recent to oldest. A ‘paper’ CV, provided as a PDf file, is considered the most concise overview; video interviews have been considered in the past but have been found to be more time intensive to assess. According to the Fund, space is made within the application process to avoid any judgement of CV gaps. The advice, given during information sessions, is to address them straightforwardly, as an activity on the CV: to be honest about doing care work, illness, or leave, as a noted activity during a span of time. The Fund also allows for artistic collaborations, but differentiates in this between ‘temporary’ collaborations and permanent artistic collaborations. As the fund provides individual funding, even collaborations necessitate two applications multiple CV’s Additionally, the fund observes that what is considered the ‘professional field’ has changed. Where 20 years ago CV’s would contain mostly if not all gallery shows- and representation, today a much wider definition of the professional field is applied – one that includes various forms of community-based art, for instance. 

Over at the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), the ambition is to provide a fund for all creative Amsterdammers – and so their schemes discern between those who make culture in their spare time and those who do so professionally. The CV counts as a document held in juxtaposition with the rest of a subsidy application to provide context to earlier accomplishments by those makers – a key document to decipher the overall picture of a practice. At this moment, the AFK is piloting a programme called ‘Nieuw Bereik’ (New Reach), which does away with the CV as part of an application. This simplified procedure is supposed to provide a more accessible way to apply to their funding, through an in-person pitch, providing only a budget and no project plan. The AFK is experimenting with this new approach after finding that funding was neither reaching all the city’s districts, nor young groups of makers proportionally. First sessions have been held recently in Amsterdam South East, and are pending evaluation.

Art Office, the funding arm of CBK Rotterdam, does not ask for updated CV’s with each application. Since 2018/19, they provide a custom page for each registered artist through the interface of their website. CV’s are still requested when first registering. Each of these pages displays an embedded list of activities relevant to an artists’ professional artistic practice. Professionality is tested by two factors: whether the artists are active as autonomous visual artists, either individually or as part of collectives, and whether they have a demonstrably current practice, including presentations, exhibitions, residencies and other relevant activities. The requirement is for artists to have a “current” page, with data “no older than six months”. This can either be achieved through uploading a recent project but also through uploading older projects, as it implies that artists are still ‘active’ in their practice even if they’re not ‘achieving’ projects or presentations in the formal sense. Not asking for a CV has allowed Art Office to make a broader group of visual artists visible, including those with hybrid or interdisciplinary professional practices and those who have become visual artists through means other than formal training. Those practices are increasingly present, and so being able to accommodate this wide variety is important to supporting an inclusive array of artists that mirrors the city of Rotterdam. 

The role of the CV to provide ‘context’, or ‘judgment by third parties’, underlines its role as a tool to situate an artist within a network of people and institutions. This privileges networking as a skill to gain access to public funding. As much as funds may encourage the ‘filling’ of gaps, even the acknowledgement of a time spent not working does not count towards professional development of an artist – and so the question of how to make up for time ‘lost’ remains. Nearly all the applications mentioned above require CV’s of a fairly recent time span – the Mondrian Fund keeps to 2-4 years, for instance, while Art Office is the only one to make an exception that activity of uploading an older projects counts as ‘recent’. This builds an art world that works in project cycles, akin to corporate projects and in step with governmental periods – a maximum of 4 years at a time. This system is result-oriented: projects undertaken at the pace of decades, without presenting ‘results’ in the meantime, can not necessarily find their footing in this field. We are not building cathedrals here; we are filing applications, formal updates, and evaluation reports, to be filed on ever-growing archives and servers.

Good faith efforts are made by funds to navigate between their legal requirements and the operations of contemporary artistic practices. The argument here is not to promote the CV to the site of the ‘circular file’ – the waste bin – but to make space to imagine CVs that hold only gaps, CVs that hold only decades-long projects, CVs that only operate as the representation of a community instead of a listicle of individual achievements. This can only be achieved when funds provide more input and transparency on what they ask for when they ask for a CV. Why should artists stick to templates used in corporate life, to undertake a life’s work marginalised within that dominant system? 

Escaping the PDF

Perhaps the best indication of the fate of the artists’ CV can be found in the very first CV to be published. Based on his letter, Da Vinci was commissioned by Count Sforza to build the world’s largest horse sculpture. Leonardo spent ten years in Milan sketching horses – significantly longer than any contemporary artist can be expected to be funded to work on successive sketchbooks – and bronze was purchased for the realisation of the horse. Before the sculpture could be finished, though, a war broke out, and the metals were melted into bullets and cannonballs – ammunition for the renewed war effort. Leonardo’s CV lives on to evidence his Milan career move, the efforts of an artist whose resources were redirected to the more lucrative war industries. With a government again putting historical pressure on the income streams of the Dutch art world, while overseeing a wholesale expansion of various defense budgets, this is perhaps a historical juncture where artists based in the Netherlands once again find themselves. Artists’ CV’s make history repeatable; and so the history of the artists’ CV repeats.

The transformation of the use of the CV was itself a deeply modernist project – in which professional achievements are externalised as an ‘objective’ category to be contrasted and compared. They have become characteristic of a political ideology that has drawn artists’ into a class of precarious, low-waged workers. That ideology is meritocracy: the outdated idea that skills can be translated into measurable qualities and that the merits that are accorded value are rewarded according to their usefulness. In the case of the arts, this has meant a foregrounding of networking, measurable productivity, and templated quantification. Rewards are held out for those who make their work look better on paper. CV’s are part of the attempt to remake artists as part of the professional managerial class (PMC), a concept first coined by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1977 and expanded upon recently by Catherine Liu. As part of the PMC, the allegiance of artists shifts from identifying as workers to aligning with capital. This shift is perhaps best illustrated by the hurdle of ‘professionalism’, a code-word for capital ensconced between the lines of each CV item. While “giving a voice” to “work itself”, the format of the CV, screen-readable, fixed-in-time PDfs, align to the division of labour between printer and receiver, writer and reader. 

To be clear: public funding necessitates public access. There is no desire here to hark back to the times of sleeping poets and unseen geniuses.  In the context of the Dutch funding system, CV’s template an imagination of what an artistic practice can be. Especially a critical view on the time cycles of the project-based artistic field, always in step with- or lesser than the election cycles to which the funds are subject, is worth foregrounding when shaping up alternatives. Especially in a system that has been under immense political threat for more than ten years, with bigger challenges yet to come, it is worth publicly noting what the trade-off is that artists are making by being co-opted in a semi-corporate churn. Can the art history of the CV point towards a future that represents the values of artistic practice in their community, their refusal, their aspirations for a world to come? 

To me, the ‘consolidation’ of my CV onto those two PDf pages felt like the start of my career; the paper trail that paved the way. Yet my working life had by then long started, and some of the most valuable working experiences I now have are nowhere to be found in the professional identity I present. Every time I update my CV, I look forward to its abolition, its weirding, to find space to share the long-term commitments, seeds for ideas, hard-fought collaborations and not the least, the abject failures. These continue to drive my place and my desire to act creatively in the documented world. 

By Lua Vollaard and Platform BK. 

Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. She has recently incurred a CV gap on the occasion of the birth of her first child. Earlier versions of a research project into CV’s were presented by Art Goss under the name ‘Curriculum Veto’, at Het Nationale Theater and Mistral Amsterdam in 2022. 

Platform BK researches the role of art in society and takes action for a better art policy. We represent artists, curators, designers, critics and other art workers.