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\begin{document}

\hypertarget{diy}{%
\section{DIY}\label{diy}}

The term and concept ``Do-It-Yourself'' has been (re-)invented several
times throughout the 20th and 21st century, retroactively applied to the
past, and gained new meaning.

In its most conventional definition, DIY is a North American term for
home improvement that has been in use since the 1950s.\footnote{(Hertz,
  2020).} Its close cousin is the French ``bricolage'' both in its
literal, quotidian sense (of ``bricolage'' hardware shops) and in its
wider application to culture.\footnote{Such as the concepts of
  philosophical ``bricolage'' by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques
  Derrida.}

The most literal meaning of DIY is: a material practice done by someone
without professional training, typically in makeshift or even crude
ways.

Precursors to contemporary DIY culture existed in the 19th century Arts
and Crafts movement and its self-built communities, in 1920s Berlin
Dadaism with its slogan ``Dilettantes - rise up against art!'', in
1960s/1970s counter-culture experiments such as the \emph{Survival
Chapbooks} of UK artist/musician/activist Stefan Szczelkun that taught
readers how to build one's own shelter, grow one's own food and generate
one's own energy or the media activism of the Raindance Corporation
artist collective that published DIY instruction manuals for building
one's own radio and television broadcasting technology. This DIY poetics
were continued by the UK artists heath bunting and Kate Rich in the
1990s and in the contemporary zine series \emph{Self-Reliance Library}
of the Chicago-based Temporary Services collective.

Alternative DIY culture became commodified as early as in the 1970s with
the \emph{Whole Earth Catalogue} that propagated DIY as a lifestyle and
product range. In the 1980s, its focus shifted to home computing, early
electronic social media and ultimately the Californian Internet
economy.\footnote{(Diederichsen and Franke, 2013), (Turner, 2010).}

\hypertarget{diy-since-punk}{%
\subsection{DIY since punk}\label{diy-since-punk}}

In more recent understandings of term, DIY stands for an alternative
poetics and aesthetics to industrial capitalism and its products, and
for the convergence of what used to be called ``alternative culture''
and ``self-organized arts''.

Amy Spencer's 2005 book \emph{DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture} tells a
long - retrofitted - history of DIY that begins with zines,
i.e.~photocopied or cheaply printed, non-professionally made, personal
micro publications. Although zines existed since the 1930s, they were
not identified with DIY before the punk movement of the late 1970s, and
not described as a culture of their own before the late
1990s.\footnote{(Gunderloy)} The idea that everyone could be a musician
by playing only three guitar chords, and that anyone - no matter the
skill level - could be a simultaneous writer, graphic designer, printer,
bookbinder and publisher by typewriting, collaging, photocopying and
stapling their zine, that every punk was their own fashion designer,
turned DIY from merely a poetics (in the literal sense of \emph{poiesis}
as → ``making'') into a simultaneous poetics, aesthetics and politics.

As opposed to the more established terms `artist-run space' and `artists
collective/initiative', contemporary ``DIY spaces'' (that exist
particularly in the USA) imply no clear-cut separation between artists
and non-artists, professionals and non-professionals, and include
artists of all trades, musicians, community organizers, political
activists, squatters, bohemians, artists and their audiences.

``DIY culture'', in this contemporary meaning, has the same connotation
of cultural work that can no longer be firmly placed under the moniker
``art'', at least not fine art. (Although, historically, many
contemporary art careers grew out of DIY collectives. Examples include
Gordon Matta Clark and the FOOD restaurant collective of the early 1970s
and Sherry Levine and Jenny Holzer as members of New York's \emph{Colab}
collective in the late 1970s to mid-1980s.{]}

In punk and countercultures that preceded it, DIY thus constitutes a
poetics, aesthetics and ethos of unalienated production and community;
ultimately, of removing the difference between ``production'' and
``consumption''.

Between the two extremes of DIY as (a) counterculture and (b) home
improvement stores exists the technological DIY of hacker and `maker'
culture (→ Critical Making). With the boom of fab labs and maker
spacers, ``DIY'' in this particular sense has become its own industry
(where, as in the American gold rush period, outfitters made most
profit).

Aside from overlooking hacker culture, histories of DIY such as Amy
Spencer's that focus on its punk legacy also tend to overlook hip hop
whose early music production technology of scratching vinyl records was
born out of poverty and DIY improvisation. The white bias of DIY culture
becomes even more problematic as soon as one extends the perspective to
non-Western and non-industrialized countries. The question is whether
DIY even makes sense as a term or category in any culture where
self-making and makeshift improvisation is not an exception but the
default.

\hypertarget{present}{%
\section{present}\label{present}}

The Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa has been characterized as
being driven by ``a strong DIY ethos'', born out of the necessity of
creating one's own structures in post-dictatorship Indonesia and
affinity and vicinity to ``punk and street cultures''.\footnote{(Teh,
  2012)}

Subcultures and artist projects can converge in radical DIY practices
that are: self-taught, self-built, self-funded, happening in
self-organized spaces using self-built infrastructure, with
self-organized communication and distribution. ``Self'' may refer to an
individual, a collective or a community.

This makes DIY a phenomenon that is concerned with autonomy.
``Autonomy'', when translated literally from Greek to English, means
``self-governance''. In the context of artists' DIY, autonomy is a
poetics, and hence a categorically different notion of autonomy than
that of aesthetic philosophy from Kant and Schiller to Adorno and
Rancière. Instead of an idealist concept, autonomy becomes a material
practice. Or perhaps more precisely: in DIY culture, autonomy is being
actively created - and permanently negotiated - in and through the
material practice of its community members. Re-applied to art, this
means, to quote David Teh's characterization of ruangrupa, to further
``autonomy of artists, singular or plural, but not necessarily that of
the artwork''.\footnote{(Teh, 2012).}

Building upon an Arts and Crafts legacy, DIY culture is typically based
on an explicit or implicit critique of disembodied and alienated
industrial or institutional production for which it creates hands-on
alternatives. This critique and practice can have Marxist,
left-anarchist, religious-spiritual, green-ecologist, conservative,
liberal, libertarian and extreme right-wing ideological underpinnings.
Racist organic farmers, for example, neofascist squatters, Nazi rock
bands, motorbike repair shops of outlaw biker clubs, religious cult
communes and Alt-Right meme collectives are among those who practice and
make up radical DIY culture. This renders political-ethical claims for
DIY culture just as dubious as any other fundamental political-ethical
claim for subculture, let alone any romantization of minorities on the
pure grounds of their minority position.

\hypertarget{references}{%
\section{References}\label{references}}

Derrida, Jacques. \emph{Writing and Difference}. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978 (1967).

Diederichsen, Diedrich, and Anselm Franke. \emph{The Whole Earth:
California and the Disappearance of the Outside}. Sternberg Press, 2013.

Hertz, Garnet. ``Two Terms: Critical Making + D.I.Y.''
\emph{conceptlab.com}, 2020.
http://conceptlab.com/2terms/pdf/hertz-2terms-202011181901.pdf.

Spencer, Amy. \emph{DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture}. New York: Marion
Boyars, 2005.

Teh, David. ``Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship.''
\emph{Afterall}, 2012.
https://www.afterall.org/article/who-cares-a-lot-ruangrupa-as-curatorship.

Turner, Fred. \emph{From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand,
the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.} University
of Chicago Press, 2010.

\end{document}
