After Hours Art Imagination and the Residue of the Working Day (original) (raw)

From 'Means to Ends': Labour As Art Practice

2014

My thesis discusses labour from three different historical and theoretical viewpoints, namely Karl Marx's perspectives on labour, Hannah Arendt's Theory of Action and Jacques Rancière's radical view of workers as an aspirational class, including how their respective philosophies influenced discourse on labour in contemporary art. To examine the aesthetic consequences of these labour theories, my discussion of each writer is accompanied by a case study of a contemporary artist whose work operates in dialogue with the philosophical ideas presented. In conclusion, I bring these theories together by focusing on how they implicate art making as labour, and I point to my own art practice, which aims to collapse 'means' into 'ends' as a possible strategy to address some of the issues raised by the theorists I examine.

Artistic Labour: Seeking a Utopian Dimension

Cadernos de arte e antropologia, 2016

This article investigates the notion of artistic labour by elucidating how artists can create ethical social relations to perform "a new, possible world" by reinserting labour and advocacy into their practice. An examination of contemporary works by Ahmet Öğüt and Cevdet Erek who attempt to create micro-utopias by situating artistic labour at their core or by emphasising the power of networks and the "commons" to foster social integration are juxtaposed with the discussion of a possible genealogy of such utopian artistic attempts from the late 1960s and 1970s. The historical trajectory delineates the common denominators of artistic practices that proceed from utopian ideals such as anti-isolation, anti social division, anti self-reflexivity, process instead of object-based work, and investment in human value rather than materialistic value.

A Conversation on Art and Labour

A Conversation on Art and Labour 1. How can the economic exceptionalism of art be described? What is the "mode of production of art"? What do you mean when you write that "art has been commodified without being commodified"? My argument in Art and Value that art is economically exceptional came out of a critique of the twin Western Marxist ideas of the commodification of art and the culture industry. Marxists and mainstream economists alike have tended to apply the standard methods of economic analysis to art focusing on the operations of the market, collectors, dealers and instruments such as art fairs, rather than examining the differences between artistic production and capitalist commodity production. The emphasis on the consumption and distribution of art is realistic and urgent insofar as the global art market is enormous, powerful and dominant. However, the absence of the study of artistic production is a serious methodological error for a Marxist analysis of capitalism since, for Marx, capitalism is not a mode of consumption or a mode of distribution but a mode of production. My argument is that artistic production does not conform to the capitalist mode of production and that this fact should not be lost in the clamour for a politics of artistic consumption. Classical economists that subscribed to the labour theory of value (principally, Smith, Say, Ricardo, Malthus, Senior, De Quincey and Mill) argued that art was economically exceptional on the basis that the prices for art could not be regulated by the market because artworks, like antiques and rare books, cannot be produced in volumes to respond to increases in demand. This explained the 'fancy prices' that artworks fetched. Marx modified this argument by pointing out that artistic production is exceptional to the capitalist mode of production insofar as artists do not sell their labour-power for a wage but sell the products of their labour. Marx argued that artworks have no value in the strict sense of average socially necessary labour time because the labour that produces artworks cannot be replicated by others. The question for my critique of commodification theory, therefore, turned on whether the economics of art had transformed sufficiently between the middle of nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth to justify the switch from economic exceptionalism to the commodification of art. I tested the idea of art's commodification by subjecting art to the criteria developed within the so-called 'transition to capitalism' debate. I built my investigation on the principle that the transition from feudalism to capitalism is not brought about through changes in distribution or consumption but only through changes to the mode of production, specifically the formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. Following this, my analysis of the economics of art during and after this historical period of transition, demonstrated that artists did not become wage labourers for capitalist employers but that they continued to own their own means of production, owned their own products, controlled their own production processes, and so on. Capitalists, in the form of gallerists and dealers, entered art not at the point of production but at the point of distribution and consumption. As a result, artists had effectively won for themselves both the autonomous control of their own production and an independence from capital and developed a hostility to commerce. This, clearly, was exceptional to the capitalist mode of production. an audience whereas others can be produced by individuals with little or no outlay except the expenditure of their time. What this means is that some arts have in fact been commodified in ways that my principal case studies of painting and sculpture have not. There is, in fact, a job market for actors and musicians who are employed by profit-seeking commercial companies. At the same time, of course, there are counterexamples such as radical street theatre and self-organised musicians who go out of their way to avoid the economies of the capitalist mode of production that have transformed their disciplines. Your question about the division of labour in art, however, is very important. The technical division of labour typical of the capitalist mode of production takes two forms. First, skilled work is divided up into simple repetitive tasks performed by multiple workers, and second, production is increasingly divided among different firms, so that the manufacture of a single product might be produced over several stages across considerable distances. The first is usually called deskilling whereas the latter is called specialisation and includes outsourcing. What happens with the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the history of art is that the artisan workshop is dissolved. Usually, art historians talk about the transition from the workshop to the studio or the transition from the artisan to the artist, but the process was much more complex. The numerous activities that used to take place in the workshop do not all find a place within the studio. It is not a single linear development but a process of dispersal and specialisation. Whereas the artisans of the workshop were producers, teachers, shopkeepers and tool makers combined, with the rise of capitalism these various tasks are divided up in a social division of labour. Art's new social division of labour after the transition from feudalism to capitalism both establishes the distinction between art and craft and, at the same time, contains within it the highly charged distinctions between art and craft, intellectual and manual work, authorial and anonymous work, autonomous and heteronomous labour, blue collar and white collar (and no collar) workers, self-realizing and self-denying labour, etc. And, of course, various activities that constitute this fragmented whole of artistic labour are assigned to men and women, to bourgeois and proletariat, to the city and the country, to the advanced industrial nations and the neocolonial nations, and so on. These divisions have been largely excluded from mainstream art history until very recently because they are not visible in the works themselves and also because the divisions fall on either side of the walls of the studio. I wrote Art and Labour to show that the blindness to the social division of artistic labour was an historical achievement in their struggle to elevate painting and sculpture above handicraft. On the one hand, for instance, the Royal Academy under Joshua Reynolds protected the status of the Fine Arts by excluding water colour painting, pictures made from human hair, paper cutouts and other crafted objects from the annual salon exhibition, but on other hand, the purchasing of art supplies from commercial manufacturers converted the technical division of labour within the studio into a social division of labour that kept the artist at arm's length not only from handicraft but also industry and commerce. Ironically, the actual self-reliance of the artisan workshop, which made everything itself from raw materials, appears to be a shadow of the absolute self-reliance of the artist who pretends to work alone in the studio while buying all their artistic supplies from the marketplace. When art historians, aesthetic philosophers, economists and sociologists study artistic labour by considering only what happens in the studio, therefore, it appears as if the differences that matter are between the disciplines of paintings, sculpture, printmaking, dance, film, performance and poetry, whereas the differences that matter for a twenty-first century social history of art extend beyond the walls that demarcate the studio from the world. So, while it is important to conduct specific economic analyses of the various disciplines of art rather than imagining that the economy of art is unified across the whole sector, it is also necessary, in my opinion, to analyse the economics of artistic labour in full as including suppliers, assistants, fabricators, teachers and university staff, museum workers, and so on. What I wanted to underline in Art and Labour is that the mythic isolation of the artist in the studio depends on a social division of labour that includes processes of commodification, specialisation and industrialisation which are external to artistic labour itself but integral to the ensemble of economies that constitute the material condition for the artist to operate. This is why I have argued that it is misleading to talk about the deskilling of art. In my investigation of what happened to art in the transition to capitalism, there was, instead, a displacement of skill. 4. In Art and Value you write: "[…] the key to understanding art's relationship to capitalism must be derived from questioning whether art has gone through the transition from feudalism to capitalism." Is artistic labour a pre-modern form of labour? Art was never converted into the capitalist mode of production but, as I have indicated in my previous answer, it was not left alone during the transition to capitalism to continue in its feudal form. In my book Art and Labour I trace how the rise of capitalism radically transformed art through the commodification of certain phases of its production. The first things to be

Women on Work, Women at Work: Visual Artists on Labour Exploitation

British Journal of Management, 2008

The aim of this paper is to explore an organizational issue of gender inequality in labour, represented in visual arts, and illustrated by critical artistic practice of Lucy McKenzie, Julita Wo´jcik and Mary Kelly. The paper seeks alternatives to patriarchal constructions of the gendered identity at work and the associated notions of the idealized managerial masculinities. I attend to working strategies and art making processes that reflect managerial otherness. The artists discussed engage in relational activities that have replaced dominant masculine values of managing and producing by a focus on collectivism, play and relational transmission. Work here is envisaged as a political and cultural category that alters a meaning of value and is considered crucial in formation of identity and a lifestyle choice. The paper reflects on invisibility of alternative ways of working, contributing to on-going multidisciplinary debate, challenging disadvantage and discrimination at work context and a disproportionate participation and representation of women in arts, management and in society as a whole.

Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice

"Art Workers – Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice" presents case studies from the local art contexts of Estonia, Finland and Sweden, collects artist-testimonies, discusses activist practices and reflects on contemporary and historical forms of art workers’ organising within the international art contexts. The book is edited and co-written by Minna Henriksson, Erik Krikortz and Airi Triisberg, and includes further contributions by Corina L. Apostol, Michael Baers, Fokus Grupa, Minna Heikinaho, Vladan Jeremić, Elina Juopperi, Jussi Kivi, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Jussi Koitela, Raakel Kuukka, Marge Monko, Zoran Popović, Precarious Workers Brigade, Taaniel Raudsepp & Sigrid Viir, Krisdy Shindler, Tereza Stejskalová, and Lotta Tenhunen. Graphic design: Summer Studio ISBN 978–91–637–7946–6