Labor in Contemporary Art

Warhol’s Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism’s assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers’ conditions in the 1970s – these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labour as artistic activity, method and engagement. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labour from oppression to liberation.

Artists surveyed include Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Jeremy Deller, Harun Farocki, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Gulf Labour Coalition, Goshka Macuga, Annette Messager, Gustav Metzger, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Artur Zmjiewski.

Writers include Claire Bishop, Luc Boltanski, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sabeth Buchmann, Kodwo Eshun, Maurizio Lazzarato, Achille Mbembe, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Dietmar Rübel, Paolo Virno.

A series of remarkable gains by organized museum workers in the United States is now in danger of being erased. I am writing this on April 11 2020, as all "non-essential" businesses, including museums, have been physically shuttered in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The result over the past few weeks is that hundreds of museum workers, many who are newly unionized, have being furloughed, or layed-off, even as the depth and longevity of the crisis remains uncertain. This short paper was generated during a far more hopeful moment as museum staff from the New Museum and Guggenheim to the LA Museum of Contemporary were unionizing in an effort to secure and protect their typically precarious jobs from the uncertainties of the marketplace. It was also a time, only weeks ago now, that sales of art soared into the billions. And what I argued then is that the cultural workers' drive to self-organize can in part be traced back  to the practice of institutional critique, an artistic methodology studied by this generation of museum staff as they pursued their degrees in art or art history (BFA, MFA, MA or PhD).  First presented at the University of Nicosia Research Foundation in Cyprus, this text was written for the "UnConference" organized by Evanthia Tselika and her associates in the summer of 2019. More about that event and other presentations can be found here:  http://www.unrf.ac.cy/files/unconference-proceedings-phygital.pdf

In Art Work, Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as an activity done out of love, a passion for self-expression, and without any concern for financial aspects – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour.

This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions of Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.

Obwohl sich die neue Arbeitswelt laut zahlreicher Theorien an künstlerischer Arbeit – autonom, flexibel, kreativ – orientiert, blieben vertiefende Untersuchungen über das Verhältnis von Kunst und Arbeit in der Kunstgeschichte bisher aus. Die Dissertation bietet erstmals einen solchen Ein- und Überblick über künstlerische Positionen und ihre Verfahren, sich mit dem komplexen Themengebiet Arbeit ausgehend von den 1970er Jahren zu beschäftigen. An der Schwelle, an der die industrielle Arbeit beginnt, sukzessive der neuen Dienstleistungsgesellschaft zu weichen, und erneut um die Jahrtausendwende, an der sich neoliberale Politiken und globale Ungleichheiten zuspitzen, interessieren sich Künstler*innen verstärkt für Arbeit. Sie lokalisieren, so die These, die Eigenschaften, aber auch die Schattenseiten der Arbeitswelt und entwickeln komplexe Verfahren, um diese sichtbar zu machen. Dazu greifen sie auf eine spezifische künstlerische Praxis zurück, mit der sie Arbeit auf inhaltlicher und technischer Ebene zugleich adressieren.
Entlang dieser Verschränkungen ist die Untersuchung in drei große Kapitel aufgeteilt, die zugleich den künstlerischen Strategien des Sichtbarmachens entsprechen: Streiken, Arbeiten und Delegieren. Analysiert werden diese Strategien an der Praxis verschiedener Arbeits- und Streikkünstler*innen von Gustav Metzger über Jeremy Deller, Chantal Akerman und Mierle Laderman Ukeles bis zu Harun Farocki und Santiago Sierra.

"(...)It would be tempting to conclude that what the manifesto was for the avant-garde,  the artist agreement/contract was for conceptual art(...)

The genealogy of the manifesto in the arts can be traced back to political proclamations – documents which put forth an agenda of certain political programs and goals. This is not surprising as artists and intellectuals have been increasingly involved in political affairs since the 19th century. Agitating for political/artistic claims was therefore a natural process embraced by avant-garde artists who arguably inaugurated the use of manifestos in the arts. Art manifestos have become so important that the avant-garde was canonized largely relying on the self-identification scriptural practices of different artistic groups expressing their programs and goals. For example, Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 diagram for the MoMA exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” which presented the development of modern art in the West, singled out several early modernist and avant-garde movements, at least half of which were self-identified groups around their respective manifestos.
Even though they were developed from the rhetoric of social and political agitation, the proclamations espoused in art manifestos have been largely embraced by the art world – perhaps as a consequence of their straightforward way of address. Indeed, art manifestos have come to be more commonly perceived as art ephemera or as art works in and of themselves, rather than operative ideas to be put into practice in order to achieve certain goals. To be sure the manifesto reflects individual or group agendas of what the art world and even the world is and what it should become, often using agitational rhetoric to prescribe future developments. 
Approximately at the same time as the art manifesto emerged, a different type of textual promotion of artistic practices arose in the context of the Russian avant-garde. In line with the ideals of the 1917 Russian revolution, Kazimir Malevich drafted one of the earliest documents dealing with artists rights entitled “Deklaratsiya prav khudozhnika: Zhizn’ khudozhnika” (Artists Rights Declaration: The Artist’s Life) published in Anarchya (Anarchy) in June 1918. Oriented towards art as labor and artists as workers, Malevich’s text defines artistic practice in the context of the legal and economic frameworks at play after the art work leaves the possession of its producer. This type of agreement, even though in many ways similarly utopian in its goals as the art manifesto, was nonetheless grounded in a
legal rhetoric. "

Français : Le succès d'un certain nombre d'artistes contemporain indiens sur la scène internationale depuis le début des années 2000 a donné lieu à l'évolution de leurs pratiques artistiques vers des installations de grandes dimensions et à une progressive réorganisation de la production de leurs oeuvres. S'inscrivant dans une tendance internationale, la création d'oeuvres d'art contemporain en Inde est devenue un processus collectif dans lequel les artistes sollicitent un nombre croissant d'assistants de production. Dans les villes indiennes, en raison du faible coût de la main-d'oeuvre, la fabrication des oeuvres a souvent lieu hors de l'atelier de l'artiste, chez un fabricant, artisan ou autre technicien spécialisé dans des quartiers industriels, parfois informels, qualifiés de bidonvilles. Cet article propose une étude du marché de l'art indien au prisme des logiques de production des oeuvres d'art et amène à intégrer les travailleurs de quartiers rarement associés au monde de l'art bien que participant pleinement aux dynamiques artistiques urbaines. Prenant pour cas d'étude la métropole culturelle de Bombay/Mumbai, cette approche de géographie sociale du monde de l'art contemporain indien permet de mettre en lumière d'autres territoires de l'art et d'interroger des tensions et des rapports de forces liés aux nouvelles formes de division du travail dans l'art contemporain.

English: The success of numerous Indian artists on the international art market brought some evolution in their artistic practices towards the making of large installations and a progressive reorganization of their artwork production process. Following a global trend, contemporary art creation in India has become a collective process where artists are soliciting a growing number of assistants. In Indian cities, due to the low cost of labor, the production of artworks often happens outside the 1 Courriel : christine.ithurbide@gmail.com 2 Je souhaite remercier tout particulièrement Aman Wadhan et Sumeet Kuhate pour leur présence sur le terrain en 2016 et la traduction de plusieurs entretiens en hindi et marathi vers l'anglais.

나는 최근 십여 년 사이 젊은 미술인들 중심으로 이런 현실에 근거한 새로운 미적 경향이 나타난 사실에 주목한다. 일상의 잡다한 유류품들/누군가 버리거나 여기저기 방치된 물건들 혹은 초저가로 유통되는 생활용품들을 대략 1평반에서 2평정도 공간에 쌓고 조립하고 펼쳐놓고 매만지고 전시하는 미술이 그것이다. 이름 붙이자면 ‘2000년대 한국적 삶의 정크아트’(문득 보들레르의 ‘현대적 삶의 화가’가 떠오르지만 그리 낭만적이지는 않)다. 거기서는 마치 고시원 방 한 칸의 내부처럼 궁핍하지만 성실하고 묘한 애정과 자기비애로 쌓아올린 사물들-미술의 절박함과 겨우 얻는 안락함이 동시에 느껴진다. 그에 대해서는 아서 단토가 뒤샹의 <병걸이>나 워홀의 <브릴로 박스> 미술을 두고 “일상적 존재의 생활세계에 속하는 대상 (...) 예술작품으로 변화시키는 미묘한 기적”이라 미학적으로 논변한 내용을 결코 반복할 수 없다. 예술지상주의와 고급미술 내적 논리를 반대 항으로 삼아 레디메이드미술과 팝아트 이후의 예술을 승인하는 그런 미학으로는 현재 한국 젊은 작가들의 정크아트를 비평할 수 없다는 뜻이다. 단토가 일상용품의 미적 변용과 슈퍼마켓 상품이 작품으로 승격되는 기적의 미술을 말할 수 있었다면, 지금 여기 우리는 생계가 다급한 작가들의 생활밀착형 변용과 자력 구원/위안으로서 가성비 미술을 논해야만 하는 것이다.

This paper calls into question the context in which artistic production related to industrial history may enter art official narratives. Drawing on the examples of the Voltron sculpture series by David Smith (1962); Yvonne Rainer's performance Carriage Discreteness (1966) and Stuart Brisley's work at the Hille Fellowship Poly Wheel factory (1970), I will propose that observing the production of artworks within industrial environments implies a twofold commitment for art history. On the one hand, investigating artworks relying on industrial materials and production modes calls for the analysis of the " concrete and direct evidence " that materials provide (Didi-Huberman, 2015; Domínguez Rubio, 2012). On the other, they invite consideration of informal archives and " suspect evidence " related to the tacit knowledge of production, subjective self-documentation and oral history (Rosnow and Fine, 1976). Seen from this perspective, artists' production in the context of industrial culture and workers' practices of self-managed time both contribute another point of view on how the inscription within the realm of high and low culture is done in art history. At a time when contemporary artistic and curatorial practices show a renewed interest in " outsiders' " artefacts, the different work models and modes adopted by the proposed case studies enable a reading of potential art historical narratives through the lens of working-class studies and the contemporary material turn.

EN MARCHE
UNTERWEGS
Faire un pas, c’est faire un choix
Texte von Céline Eidenbenz, Federica Martini, Antoine Baecque Gespräch mit Hamish Fulton
21 x 26,5 cm
136 Seiten/pages
8-seitige Falttafel / dépliant 8 pages 67 Farbabbildungen/ill. en couleur Klappenbroschur/Brochure avec rabats
Texte D/F

The « pérruque » is a tactic for diverting time from the factory work and indulge in creative no-profit labour. Like pirate radios, pérruques infiltrate production narratives with notions of desire and liberated time. Like quilts, the pérruques are a non-hegemonic class practice that is based on appropriation, storytelling and generosity. In resonance with Cora Piantoni's exhibition Buon Lavoro! Prose of The Day – Poetic Resistance at Corner College, in this talk the pérruque will play as a magnifying glass and a metaphor to read collaborations between artists and workers in factories in 1960s-1970s Italy. Focusing on proximities and correspondences between artistic processes, factory culture, and alternative radio strategies, context will be given to Gianfranco Baruchello, Gruppo N, Maria Lai, Olivetti and Italsider.

"Um das Kunstsystem zu Fall zu bringen, ist es notwendig eine Periode ohne Kunst zu fordern – und zwar für die Dauer von drei Jahren", schreibt der Künstler Gustav Metzger 1974. Wie ist diese Forderung zu verstehen? Als ein Aufruf zum Streik? Wie sieht ein solcher Streik in der Kunst aus? Geht es um das Aussetzen und Niederlegen; Kunst nach Vorschrift, also das Verschleppen oder gar das Überdrehen der künstlerischen Produktion? Können Künstler_innen überhaupt streiken?
Und muss, wenn vom Streiken die Rede ist, immer auch vom Arbeiten gesprochen werden?

Die Tagung widmet sich den beiden Kategorien Streik und Arbeit, die gegeneinander (oder miteinander) ausgespielt werden sollen. Ziel ist es, verschiedenste künstlerische Strategien zu versammeln, von der materiellen zur immateriellen Arbeit, von der Ent- bis zur Beschleunigung, vom Burnout bis zur Faulheit, vom Sichtbarmachen zum Verschwinden, vom Afformativen zum Performativen, vom Schreien zum Schweigen…