On May Day, I participated in a panel as part of the Work After Work exhibition curated by the USC Art/Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere graduate class of 2011. The exhibition was the first to come out of the program’s newly designed curatorial curriculum, and featured work by an interesting mix of artists including Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser, Alex Israel, Sharon Lockhart, Yvonne Rainer, Kenneth Tam, and Anton Vidokle among others. The work was installed at the Mak Center Garage, a small but pleasing space behind the Mackey Apartments, and was accompanied by a small catalogue and series of public programs and performances.
In the words of the 12 graduate students who organized it, the exhibition “is motivated by a keen awareness of how the current economic situation applies particular pressures on artistic labor and seeks to address how artistic production contends with these economic conditions. It is a crucial moment to reexamine the shifting values - both economic and cultural - of artistic labor and explore the ways in which artists navigate, resist, and reproduce these values.”
The work in the exhibition seemed somewhat disjointed and imbalanced in its interrelationship (it was very heavy on video and textual documentation, which is perhaps to be expected given the subject matter and some of the artists involved - Asher, Fraser and Vidokle particularly), and revealed the disjunctures that can arise from 12 curatorial perspectives on the same subject matter. Though compelling in and of themselves, Alex Israel’s Freeway sunglasses line was set in confusing juxtaposition to multiple videos (4 I believe), a garish set and costume rack belonging to Eternal Telethon, and some quiet, difficult text pieces by Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser. On a purely visual and conceptual level, curating such works into such a small space must have presented significant challenges that the students gamely took on. Beyond the physical exhibition, however, the accompanying programming and excellent little catalogue drew together some very timely conceptual stakes, and hit upon a hugely relevant topic once again trending in art world discussions - that of artistic labor, renumeration, practice, production, and professionalization.
There are clear precursors to this discussion, and plenty of forerunners who have attempted to address these issues in the past. Several of the self-identified “art workers” of the 60s and 70s who participated in the short-lived Art Workers’ Coalition to lobby for artists’ rights and expand the definition of creative labor are detailed in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s excellent recent book “Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era.” Yet since that time, we seem to have relapsed down the road to late-stage capitalism, become implicated in exploitative opacity and a culture of complicity.
In most art worlds, people don’t much like to talk about money. There is a persistent attitude that such discussions are rude, and that cultural producers should be grateful for opportunities alone (a delayed gratification model) which makes it okay to ask them to work for free. In addition, the fluidity between art and life, “artistic practice” and cultural production, leisure time and work and pleasure has muddied up how we might think about identifying and renumerating artistic labor. The friendly collaboration, the handshake deal, the Saturday night party/fundraiser, gift economies, mutual aid, volunteering, and unpaid internships all contribute to this confusion and reluctance to discuss the connection between cultural worth and a living wage.
There are many aspects to discuss in regards to artistic labor in the parallel but mutually inflected systems of art schools, non-profits, galleries, and art writers - the role of pedagogy, unpaid student labor, renumeration for object and non-object-based artworks - and I hope to explore each of these topics more in-depth in future posts. Many such topics were raised by my excellent co-panelists on May Day - A.L. Steiner of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) and Robby Herbst. Both are engaged in rigorous work to actively change in how cultural labor is renumerated and how alternative economies can be codified to counteract our complacency in insipid capitalist domination. Their work also deserves much deeper intellectual engagement.
Today though, I will end with a distinction that Andrea Phillips points out in her article “Education Aesthetics” between notions of artistic work vs. artistic practice. There is a de-skilling of artistic labor stemming from a collapsing of formal skills and informal modes of cultural production. Called “immaterial labor” by many post-Marxist thinkers, this labor results not in a good but in a “service, a cultural product, knowledge or communication” as Antonio Negri puts it. This labor is increasingly difficult to distinguish from life, as it becomes autonomous and self-defining - what Mauricio Lazzarato calls a “hyper-exploitative totalitarianism”; and this impacts our expectations of artistic labor, or practice. When we work, we expect renumeration and a discrete part in the production of an outcome. When we practice, we do not have these expectations - rather we participate in an ongoing flow or process. Practice, therefore, modifies our concept of work. Hopefully an awareness of these muddled expectations can help clarify new notions of artistic worth, but there is still much work to be done in this arena.
Last week I left off with a question that arose in the Open Engagement Conference in Portland - should social practice artists get rid of the “art” altogether in their practices? Watts House Project was recently counseled by a fundraising advisor to do just that. “You can raise way more money and have way more impact as just a community development organization rather than an arts organization,” were her words of advice. “Impact” is the key word in that sentence. Is it true? Is it the “art” label that holds us back from affecting real change?
There is an aspect other than monetary to consider as well, which I noticed in the furrowed brows and distraught expressions of social practice artists at the conference. To art or not to art, that is the morally-inflected question many of these young artists are trying to work through. Certainly, works that are inherently participatory and aim to be expansive or community-based or even (gasp) aim to affect real social and political change, will involve audience and participants that do not have an art historical background or language, or indeed any way of locating what they are encountering as “art.” This was precisely the reason that Ted Purves’s project Temescal Amity Works presented itself as “storefront” or “clubhouse” rather than artwork. I heard from several artists that they shied away from even calling themselves “artists” when working in communities, even if they considered the work part of their practices, because they inevitably encountered intense distrust. The insularity of the art world, the unwillingness or the inability to rationally explain things in an accessible manner, the “sceney-ness” that another colleague told me he despised (and that’s from someone inexorably entrenched in the art world!), this culture of obfuscation has brought us to this place. No wonder artists are wondering if they should even call themselves artists, or what they do, art.
I return to Ted Purves, and his answer when confronted with this question. “Yes, it makes it more complicated [to call it an art project],” he said. “But it is what it is.” This was a little unsatisfying at the time, and I mulled over the question for about a week. Last Tuesday, I attended yet another conference, this time the enormous American Association of Museums conference in downtown LA’s convention center. One of the keynote speakers at that conference was Peter Sellars - UCLA professor and theater director extraordinaire who gave a well-known talk (but one that I had never heard before) entitled “Art and Social Action.” Besides just being an incredibly engaging and passionate speaker, Mr. Sellars made the important point that the deepest things in life must be addressed culturally - you cannot legislate or mitigate them. His example was a recent rash of teen suicides in the bush of Australia, and that neither cops nor judges nor social workers could affect the pattern, but that artists could. What art provides is meaningful empowerment, a reason to live, and a future shaped by vision rather than fear. This process is not a mass experience, but a person to person encounter, which art can also provide.
He spoke about how our culture privileges the “objective gaze” of neutrality and indifference - from journalism to public schools. Art, he argued, provides the ability to turn an “eye of equality” on our world, a transformative gaze of love that sees with moral energy and understands one’s responsibility to the world. He also said:
Art touches the deep chord of the thing you always knew, inside of you.
Art is the act of recovering your humanity.
Art can create the safe place that empowers people to face and recognize their fears.
This poetic vision of art as being core to the way we live in the world rather than additive or privileged, encapsulates the value of art to social practice. Some things, indeed, can only be addressed culturally, and this interior value provides distinction that give these practices the potential for deeper meaning and wider breadth than projects that exist without the “art.”
This past Wednesday, I gave a brief talk on Joseph Beuys, an artist I find endlessly fascinating because of his hugely influential pedagogical ideas that extend far beyond the physical objects he produced. The talk was a part of the Hammer’s Lunchtime Art Talks, little 30 minute curator-led talks that occur every Wednesday at 12:30pm and are quite popular with the many office building employees around Westwood. The talks are mostly made up of both regulars and those who just wander in … two straight-laced graying men come in regularly, a few well-dressed female employees from the Occidental Petroleum office tower above the Hammer, a youngish 30-something guy in a business suit, a few retirees, some foreign tourists. Some students, scruffy and clutching moleskine notebooks to top it off. The audience for my Beuys talk was fairly representative of this group, and I chose to orient the talk around one of Beuys’ best-known multiples, the Noiseless Eraser (Schnellman No. 101).
Joseph Beuys, Noiseless Blackboard Eraser, 1974
The object was small, literally an eraser that Beuys had signed and then stamped with the seal of his “Organization for Direct Democracy,” originally produced by New York Blackboard, Inc. It was made of pressed felt, a material Beuys knew well, and was surprisingly multicolored, with lovely bits of colored wool running throughout. One of our registrars pulled it out of the depths of our Grunwald Collection, surprising even herself as the collection is mostly works on paper. Since it was so small, we all gathered around a table in the Grunwald center to look at it, and the looks ran the gamut from surprise to confusion to aggression. One woman shocked me by picking up the eraser and shoving it in her friend’s face, “Hey, get a good look!” she cried, laughing.
I launched into my talk after the eraser was returned safely back to the table. I spoke about Beuys’ view on multiples, his idea that the art object represented mutability rather than permanence, that materiality was tenuous and constantly changing due to chemical processes. He saw multiples as objects of condensation for his ideas, as vehicles for distribution. This explained why he made so many (Noiseless Eraser had 550 editions), and why he dreamed of someday creating multiples in the 10s and 20 thousands. He wanted these objects to reach a wide number of people, but also had enough fascination in the methods of distribution in the art world that he accepted the object might only ever be possessed by the world’s elite collectors. In his own words:
“It’s a sort of prop for the memory, yes, a sort of prop in case something different happens in the future.
I’m interested in the distribution of physical vehicles in the form of editions because I’m interested in spreading ideas.
The objects are only understandable in relations to my ideas. The work I do politically has a different effect on people because such a product exists than it would have if the means of expression were only the written word.
Although these products may not seem suitable for bringing about political change, I think more emanates from them than if the ideas behind them were revealed directly.”
I then connected this object to Beuys’ philosophical ideas about the application of heat as initiating change, whether it be Erotic, metaphorical, or physical heat. He believed that one could achieve symbolic acts of transcendence through these chemical conversions. Felt was a material closely connected to heat for Beuys, and hearkens back to his own origin myth, the famous and controversial story of himself being wrapped in felt and fat by Tartar tribesmen in Crimea after his airplane was shot down in World War II. He also had an elevated understanding of the parameters of art, and saw his role in society as that of a shaman or teacher who could guide society in new directions. These “actions” were a different kind of application of heat, and just as much a part of his art practice as his installations, drawings, or sculptures.
Several of Beuys’ well-known sculptures from the 70s were blackboards covered in his scrawls about reform and political activism, the products left behind from his didactic lectures. He saw the lectures as the creative process through which these works were formed. Many of his central concepts and mottos could be found in this work, like “Capital = Art” and “Everyone is an artist.” This “deep pedagogical impulse” as Ina Blom calls it, separated him from other artists in the avant-garde project like Duchamp and Brecht. Whereas these artists believed that the art object itself was imbued with the ability to shock and transform society, Beuys preferred to supplement this intrinsic power by explicitly teaching lessons of artistic and political changed. For Beuys, seeing an unrealized potential in the world and trying to enact it pedagogically was a very different way of viewing the avant-garde project than the chance-based and passive tactics of Brecht and other Fluxus artists.
There I ended the talk by citing my belief in Beuys ongoing influence on generations of younger pedagogically and socially-oriented artists. “Any questions?” I asked.
Hands shot up immediately, first from one of the straight-laced older guys. He asked me first how much the eraser cost (I didn’t know, turns out it goes for around $600-$1000). He asked me who produced the eraser, then he came out with this: “Beuys is playing a joke on us. Capital=art, he said it himself. He’s not being serious, he’s doing this to play up the market, sell this junk as art and pull one over on us.” His frustration with Beuys was palpable. Before I could answer, though, a young guy with a scruffy beard who looked riled up himself said, “No, I think Beuys is completely serious. He sees these objects as imbued with a spiritual power, the ability to spark thoughts and ideas, to initiate change, to shake us out of our complacency.” A British tourist turned to her friend and asked, “Do you think it’s art, Sheila?” Sheila answered, “I think art is anything that an artist can imbue with meaning. And Beuys imbued this with meaning, so yes, I think it’s art.” Someone else said, “It’s like a party favor, a small reminder of some of his more radical ideas.” The straightlaced guy shook his head angrily.
That was about the extent of the conversation, but it was by far one of the more lively discussions we’d had at a Lunchtime Art Talk in a while. It hit me that Beuys’ eraser had acted as a provocation in precisely the fashion he had intended, and for a moment, the museum had become a dynamic place of learning rather than a cemetery for dead things. In Beuys’ words, it was for a moment, more like “a university, with a special department for objects.” To provoke such situations was, to him, the true pedagogical role of the artist.
“The “Incidental Person” was coined by the British artist John Latham (1921-2006) to qualify the status of an artist involved in non-art contexts such as government or large corporations. This exhibition expands on Latham’s original definition of the Incidental Person to include those persons for whom all aspects of life – political, social, esthetic, professional – are integrated into a unified whole. The new Incidental Person can be an artist, but does not need to be since for her or him meaningful production is not the exclusive property of any one member of society: the Incidental Person can be anyone as long as each of her or his actions partakes of a larger, unified life practice.
The exhibition argues that the Incidental Person stakes out a new position, outside of the 20th-century triad Joseph Beuys-Marcel Duchamp-John Cage. Unlike the latter, the Incidental Person does not seek to solve the “art-life” or “mind-body” problems. Instead, she or he fails to see them as problems at all, since for the Incidental Person art, life, mind, and body cannot be understood in opposition to one another. But this does not mean that the Incidental Person declares that anything can be art, as Duchamp suggested with the readymade. Rather art itself becomes subsumed under a larger, all-inclusive category of motions or things that bear the elusive imprint of Incidentality. And while the Incidental Person shares Beuys’ interest in pedagogy, she or he eschews the self-mythologizing of the avant-garde: if you do not recognize the Incidental Person walking past you in the street, this is probably because you have yet to learn what makes their life-practice Incidental - and vice-versa. This exhibition bring together persons formerly known as “artists”, “writers”, “technicians”, and “bureaucrats”, who imbue their everyday existence with Incidentality. In particular, the exhibition will underscore aspects of the Incidental Person’s life-work that do not appear obviously “artistic”, thus becoming a pedagogical forum to learn how to recognize and act out the potential behind seemingly disparate gestures, regardless of their professional or aesthetic tags.”
Interesting thought, this idea of “incidentality” and life-practice. I’ve been reading a bit about the fascinating Lygia Clark, who like Latham, brought together conceptions of time, mortality, metaphysics and the body in her practices. She said she “longed to live like the hand of a clock; passing a thousand times through the same route.” Ever concerned with divisions between the past and the future, this sense of time defined the wholistic conception of her practice. She said, “With me it is always like this - while I live a thousand turns of the earth the rest of the people here are marking out time, with rare exceptions, going backwards, and nothing is dynamic, everything is pause or death.”
Lygia Clark
A language of critique can be formed around life-practices such as these, as evidenced in the truly stunning survey of conceptual art curated by Peter Eeley at the Walker Art Center, “The Quick and the Dead.” Eeley’s cogent essay on the works of artists like Clark, Robert Barry, George Brecht, On Kawara, James Lee Byars, Tacita Dean and others highlight these concerns with death, time, and the metaphorical object.
Yet the notion of the Incidental Person that Latham puts forth and Hudek will attempt to expand upon in this exhibition might be more problematic to discuss in such a manner. Many artists concerned with social practice are “incidental people” inserted into political and social arenas as problem-solvers, but where do the parameters and limits of their artistic practices exist? It is problematic to call everything that an artist does in a social or political realm an “artwork.” Are the workings of government or community or social service utilized only as the context for performativity? Are the artists actually “solving problems,” somehow pointing out problems that no one else can see? I could cite many examples, from Merle Laderman Ukeles’s “Touch Sanitation,” during which the artist was in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, to John Latham’s stint at the Scottish Office’s Development Agency (through the Artist Placement Group). Besides these insertions, there is also the question of artist-conceived organizational structures that are called artworks, like Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses or Watts House Project. Is this a strategic in some way, positioning these entities in an “innovative” categorization (not to mention funding and development), or is there a larger intellectual and conceptual artistic process at work? Something special and unique that an artist brings that no one else can, a revelatory experience?
It’s certainly a romantic notion, but I struggle with it. And if it’s true, what about these other “incidental people” that Hudek speaks of? The engineers, the scientists, the technicians, and the bureaucrats? I can’t help but believe that there is some hierarchy, some question of authorship, and general muddiness about shoehorning these artists/non-artists into a curated art show that is not being addressed here.
(Thanks to Aimee Chang for the conversation that led to some of these questions).
