IN THIS ISSUE: $7 • £5 • €5 • Nina Power on Women’s Work ( p.3 ) • Being s er ious : Henr y V I I I’s Wives ( p.3 ) • Lisette Smits  Meredy t h Sparks talk about The Female Dandy (p.6) • ‘I don’t sing, no really I don’t sing, Contributors: not profes sionally any way ( in B flat )’; Rachal Bradley & Jessica Wiesner, Emma Hedditch, Henry VIII’s Wives, Kaisa Lassinaro, Avigail Moss, Nina Power, script by Rachal Bradley  Jes sica Wiesner ( p.11) Lisette Smits, Claudia Sola, Meredyth Sparks, Marina Vishmidt Editors: • Align Spend 2011 (p.14) Melissa Gordon, Marina Vishmidt Layout: Kaisa Lassinaro • Marina Vishmidt on Working Artists Printing: Linco Press, Long Island, NY in t he Greater E conomy ( p.14 ) Cover image: Originally back cover of Heresies #7, ‘Women Working Together’, 1979 • Avigail Moss on What We Talk About Courtesy of Joan Braderman and the Heresies Collective Pagination images: When We Talk About Painting (p.22) Claudia Sola – p.2 afghan women at work in a garment factory in Kunduz. • Lizzie Borden speaks about the p.3 Michigan State policewoman officer guards a road block. p.4 angolan woman cuts maize. making of ‘B or n in F lames’ ( p.22 ) p.5 Denmark’s member of the European Parliament Hanne Dahl and her baby attend a voting session. p.6 French female commandant, Virginie Guyot, the first woman who leads the French aerobatic team “Patrouille de France”. p.7 Cuban Cigars’ marketing director Ana Lopez smokes a cigar. LABOUR is the first and foremost concern change it’s title, format, editorial team p.8 Plant protective forces in India. that arose during a series of female artist and subject with each manifestation, wants p.9 Swedish sailor seeking pirates in the Indian Ocean off Somalia’s coast. meetings in New York, Amsterdam and Berlin to bring such questions about ‘women’ to p.10 Employees inspect newly made products at an automobile components factory in Suining, throughout 2010–11. These meetings, orga- the forefront of a discussion about ‘art’. China. nized under the title ‘A conversation to know The subject of LABOUR is being p.11 american journalist Roxana Saberi shoots footage in Tehran. if there is a conversation to be had’, attempted approached here from a number of angles and p.12 Polish fencer Katarzyna Piekarska during (and continue to attempt) an operation to formats. Writers and artists who are critically the women’s fencing individual epee semi-final. p.13 German farmer Gerda Schmitt has six create a level and open field to ask if there investigating the question of production have cows. p.14 Patti Burkel and Tasha Livingston install is anything to discuss as a group of women been invited because their work addresses wiring in a car door at GM’s assembly plant. artists, lacking the appeal of any form of the very pertinent problems surrounding the p.15 Iran’s only woman truck and coach driver, Massoumeh Soltan-Blaghi. art-world promotional event, or pre-deter- figure of the (feminized) artist as producer. p.16 Israeli combat soldiers put mud on each other’s faces during a training exercise. mined prerogative of a discussion group or The intent is not to define or multiply p.17 Doctor in Kabul giving a vaccination seminar. What became apparent from long a singular ‘topic’, but allowing, as Lizzie to mark the World Health Day. p.18 Woman working in a brick factory in periods of talking without a director or Borden describes in her interview, La Paz Centro, Nicaragua. specific question was that not only is there ‘a cacophony of voices’. The wage-worker, p.19 Italian author and journalist Oriana Fallaci. p.20 Palestinian policewoman directing the plenty to talk about, but what there is to talk the dandy, the ‘woman who chooses to live traffic in the streets of the WestB ank town of Ramallah. about is not just about gender, but rather alone’, the painter with multiple personalities, p.21 real estate agent Shellie Young puts up systems at work: systems that are in place a sculpture with high anxiety, a post-socialist an ‘Available’ sign in the U.S. p.22 Palestinian woman carrying sacks of olives. within the economy of production. A figure feminist revolutionary, and a collective p.23 Women rebuilding Berlin after WWII. p.24 a firefighter rests halfway through emerged of the dislocated subject; when who has put one of their members through a 24-hour shift in the Witch Fire area, California. trying to sketch the parameters of women a plastic Christmas tree wrapper and and working, one realized that the conditions dumped them on the corner. These are apply to all artistic workers; that the femini- the voices represented to do the job of talking zation of labour both requires a reading about LABOUR. A motley crew for a messy of ‘women’s work’, and at the same time subject. validates the current symptom which is Melissa Gordon perpetuating the very precarious situation we (art-workers) are in, now. LABOUR, and each For upcoming events, see: subsequent issue of this journal, which will amotleycrew.wordpress.com Letters to the editor: [email protected]

2 Issue #1 Labour Without the bodily has spent so much time and energy working out where women’s work begins and ends, if “We March labour and the it ever does. But what of the role of creative work in all of this, the female artist? Federici’s Under The labour of the body list of female subjects that capitalism needed of women, artists to demonise (the figure of the ‘witch’ and the Banner of brutal and terrifying witch hunts at the end or ot her w is e, t here of the feudal era are the central features of Visual Art her history) possess talents of healing but is no understanding also of antagonism and disobedience. The Henry VIII’s Wives are Rachel Dagnall, of labour in general ‘woman who dared to live alone’ is the one Bob Grieve, Sirko Knupfer, Simon Polli, who exits the circuits of male-dominated Per Sander and Lucy Skaer. In her 2004 study of the transition from economic relations, and perhaps refuses to The collective’s projects are discussed feudalism to capitalism Caliban and the Witch: have children. Is the female artist, in some in an interview with Lucy Skaer with Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia sense, the one who refuses to subsume her Jovana Stokic at Location 1, NY Federici redefines work from, as we might labour to capitalism and to the reproduction (February 4, 2010) usually understand it, waged labour, to a of the labour force in the name of an entirely much more inclusive notion that incorporates different order of creativity and production? We March Under the Banner of Visual as well the ‘production and reproduction One of the clichés of contemporary capi- Art (published by Tramway 2001) of the worker as a socio-economic activity’. talism is the idea that all ideas are assimilable, We studied together in an art school Thus unpaid work (including birth, childcare, that any new mode of creation and resistance department strongly based in public art domestic labour) becomes part and parcel will ultimately be swallowed up and its which started off as quite a utopian left-wing idea of giving art to the people, and then over the ten years that it ran it became more convoluted, twisted, probably in some ways despairing. But Women’s work, what remained about it was that every year the students had to make a project Artwork in public, which led to a lot of hilarious, Nina Power ridiculous and brilliant moments. What it taught us most of all was to be fairly of Federici’s expanded notion of labour, original force muted by the speed and ability opportunistic, and to work together. carefully avoiding the mysticisms of contem- of capital to turn anything into profit.O nce porary descriptions of ‘affective’ labour in subversive images and ideas are today’s An Attempt to Make Fire (1997) particular, which seem to hint at feminist normality; the far out becomes all the all- This is a performance we made; it was contributions to ideas of work, but only in too-close. At the same time, those modes the first show we did at Transmission a gestural and ultimately unsatisfying way. of activity we would most want to remain Gallery in 1997, which is an artist-run Federici, through serious historical anal- outside of the circuits of capture become the space in Glasgow. The gallery had no ysis, seeks to identify ‘a world’ of female things most taken from us, then as now: work heating and our show was in the winter subjects that capitalism had to destroy in performed out of love or affection turns out to months so our first performance order to proceed: ‘the heretic, the healer, the be the pillar upon which work in general can together was an attempt to make fire. disobedient wife, the woman who dared to continue – children are future workers, taking We started off by using traditional live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned care of one’s family is at the same time materials like the bow and the rod and the master’s food and inspired the slaves to ensuring that workers are well-fed, slept and two bits of wood trying to make sparks, revolt’. Federici identifies the destruction of emotionally stable enough to participate and then we ended up with electric drills female subjects as integral to the systematic productively as employees. Seen this way, and it was an 8 hour video epic. The subjugation of women’s labour and reproduc- one could become cynical and desire to reason we started to work performa- tive function to the reproduction of the withdraw completely – and become like tively together was because it was the work-force, the construction of a new patriar- Melville’s Bartleby: I would prefer not to easiest thing to do – if you start a task chal order based on the exclusion of women (work, have kids, keep capitalism rolling). then everyone can join in. The way that from waged-worked and their subordination But there are always other modes of being, we worked for the first 4 or 5 years was to men, and the mechanisation of the prole- other ways of living, real or imaginary – the to go into the gallery and to take up tarian body which entails that women ecologically-friendly self-sufficiency model residency there, live there and make become ‘a machine for the production of recent decades has more than a passing all the work on site within the 3-week of new workers’. attraction for many, not only for the sake period, so everything was quite sponta- Women then, have historically been of the planet but also for the sake of human neous and anarchistic in a sense. stripped of particular knowledges they relations as such, for the desire for contact possessed, and particular modes of being, not mediated through conditions of competi- and turned into workers, domestic workers, tion, employability and so on. baby-making workers. No wonder feminism Continued on page five » 

Issue #1 Labour 3 Poppy, 16mm film, Austria (commissioned of God into people but it is actually a sound, for Spike Island, 2007) which causes hallucinations and damage to We made a silent film in a poppy field in the internal organs if you are exposed to it Austria where they grow de-opiated poppies for too long. It was pioneered as a weapon for bagels and oil. It is a kind of loose remake at some point. It’s really a beautiful object of the scene from the Wizard of Oz, of Dorothy in itself, with oak and leather seals. We also crossing the poppy field but with the family made a film in the organ builder’s house. who owned the field and some of the neigh- bours who lived close by. When we were Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century, making the film we decided that we’d show (Glasgow 1999)  the old people in it the unedited rushes of the These images are staged reenactments. film and then film them trying to interpret it. These were events that had happened within these people’s lifetimes. We were interested The Lowest Note (‘Populism’, CAC Vilnius 2005) in finding a group of people who were under a Mummification (2000)  The Lowest Note is a live performance of the generic heading, like ‘the elderly’ or ‘the blind’. was a performative piece made for the exhibi- lowest note on a church organ. The note is only tion ‘The Desert Beautiful’ at Gallery 59 in included in very few church organs, about eight Gothenburg. The video shows one member in the world. We had been visiting the Cathe- of the group being passed repeatedly through dral at Cambridge and spotted some disused a Christmas tree wrapping machine and oversized pipes up in the eaves. These pipes ‘mummified’ before being carried in a ceremo- were used during the Middle Ages to induce nial manner through the streets, and then the experience of physical hysteria or elation dumped. during religious ceremonies.

Tatlin’s Tower and the World (2005–)  This is perhaps our most ambitious project to date. We are trying to build Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, but we are trying to build it full size, in steel and the original intended materials, but in small pieces in different locations around the world until the whole thing exists. The idea for each exhibition is to make as large a piece of the tower as the budget allows. “We are serious” is the slogan we adopted for our manifesto 

We were curious to see if this would be Religious Leaders (Oslo 1999)  possible within the concrete constraints of This was the first time we started to work with the museum, so we found an organ maker in people outside of the group in a performative Lithuania who was able to make a functioning sort of way. We invited different leaders or pipe with the same dimensions, and it worked! representatives to meet in this disused airport The staff at the museum complained of nausea control tower. The image is montage, as we for the duration of the show… didn’t manage to get a single image with The organ makes an eight megahertz rumble everybody in it, which is symptomatic of and it’s an oppressive white noise, it’s actually the way we approached projects, with a kind subsonic and if you were to play it now, all of ‘make do attitude’. other noises would be cancelled out, you wouldn’t exactly hear it, but chairs would start to rumble. We equated it with putting the fear

4 Issue #1 Labour « Continued from page three of being from one person to another, or one type of reproduction in favour of Does being an artist necessitate a group of others. How can art, and an art another). A certain analytic withdrawal certain kind of withdrawal from the world, that addresses these issues from the stand- from one-sided understandings of these and from the circuits of capitalism, in so far point of women or from specifically feminist terms and concepts may link the female as this is possible? The contemporary art concerns avoid the too-blunt division artist back with the skills of the women who world hardly seems to indicate that this is between matter and that-which-isn’t-matter, historically had them stripped from them, desirable: of all the figures of the ‘immate- whether the latter be perceived as words, denounced and ridiculed. Because what rial worker’, the ‘affective labourer’, the ideas, concepts, emotions or so on? does the female artist do but generate new ‘precariat’ and so on, the artist seems skills, design and make novel and unique peculiarly describable using these terms, creations? All artists do, for sure, but the and the way in which he or she is compelled … to understand female artist has an implicit double-job to to operate in a frenzy of networking, what we mean undertake, if she is willing – to rethinking communicativity, self-promotion amidst an production and reproduction in such a way almost total lack of remuneration, stability when we talk about that the material and the immaterial, the and certainty makes the artist the new face personal and the objective are no longer of flexible labour for many. How do we link creativity, production, stark opposites, to ensure that the body of up the material conditions of the female labour, and hear the artist is not the body for another artist, body and the enclosures made upon it that as women have for so long been in art. The Federici describes and the supposedly the resonances of work of the female artist is to go beyond immaterial nature of much aesthetic ‘work’ as we currently understand it – the labour? Is it possible? Part of the difficult t he words as t hey double-burden of which has characterised here is the way in which ‘immaterial’ has play out acros s the lives of women for a very long time – to sometimes been understood, as lacking use artistic practice to rethinking the notion reality, as somehow exempt from produc- the borders between of practice as such. The productive female tion. However conceptual one’s work is as knowledge-economy, jeered at and savaged an artist, the material conditions of this ‘pr ivate’ life and by capitalism, if seized and understood, work are not easily placed to one side. Like ‘public’ life however obscurely, could force us to rethink other knowledge economy workers, ‘intel- what we mean when we say ‘art’ at all, when lectuals’, critics and the like, we are We need to reformulate this question, to we talk about ‘work’ and the ‘artwork’ – sometimes supposed to forget that our spin it around and break it off from familiar who or what is working, and for who, to abstractions and our ideas are filtered axes: to refuse the mystification of produc- generate what value, to exercise which through an environment that is all too tion and reproduction. Without the bodily affects, emotions and bodily responses? dependent on real, practical conditions. labour and the labour of the body of women, Much feminist art has been ‘about’ or Artists who take up the matter, the material artists or otherwise, there is no under- sometimes ‘in’ the body, marvelling in its world, the mess of things – working in a standing of labour in general. There is no weirdness, its capacities, its ability or not considered way with waste, the products sense in didactically saying that all feminist to live up to what it is supposed to be: but of industry and exposing the links that tie art must address this issue – though there in a way this body can be seen as infinitely us to production overseas, for example – is much work that does – but to understand productive, if the body of the female artist are reminding us that one never thinks what we mean when we talk about is understood to be necessarily in a critical in a vacuum, and one never can. creativity, production, labour, and hear relation vis-a-vis our usual definitions of The ‘immaterial’ ‘affective dimension the resonances of the words as they play work and labour. The artwork is not of contemporary work – whether it be in out across the borders between ‘private’ life complete until we have exhausted what we call centres or in art studios depends upon and ‘public’ life, the life of employment and mean by work – and historically no one’s a condensed and solidified mass of really employability (which often depends upon work has been most abused, denigrated and existing hardware, both human and manu- renouncing, frequently against one’s will, yet depended upon than that of women  factured – the wires that carry soundwaves, the computers that process information, the body that sits in a chair for hours connected to whichever set of machines carries command and information that flows through the worker. The ‘immaterial’, ‘affective’ component of this work like the whistling of the wind across a field of barley, with all the work and resources that field involves. The bodily dimension of affective or emotional labour – the specific tone, the disposition, the posture, the friendliness or otherwise of the worker engaged in paid-for service work – is apt to be neglected if we see this work as solely about the communication of a certain mode

Nina Power teaches Philosophy at Roehampton University, London, and is the author of ‘One-Dimensional Woman’ (2009, Zer0 Books). She writes on many topics including, most recently, police and protesting. She is a founding 5 Issue #1 member of the Defend the Right to Protest campaign. Labour making work for only a few years. Like the a libertarian lifestyle with a form of conser- Baroness, Parsons also collected debris that vative populism, quite a contrast to the she exhibited in small “scattered” composi- “traditional” dandy, who withdrew from the tions and later in large installations in any kind of consensus apart from a reliance gallery spaces. on class and being part of a certain estab- female Filling the generational gap between lishment, of course. these two, Lee Lozano is another artist that However, throughout the last century dandy comes to my mind. She stepped out of the the dandy has been de-politicized, it seems, art world in 1971 with her well-known and pretty much reduced to a self-obsessed, Lisette Smits and Dropout Piece. Moreover, there is a stunning decadent, privileged, anti-social and, there- Meredyth Sparks similarity between the Baroness’ God and fore, a-political figure.B ut historically the in conversation Lozano’s tool drawings. And not just dandy has been embodied by all kinds of because of the subject matter. For the rest, individuals struggling with the limits of a I think the Baroness’ life story is tremen- given identity – of race, gender or sexuality Meredyth Sparks: While researching dously tragic (her early years) and – and by introducing the notion of ‘female the work of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag- unbelievably adventurous (the years after). dandy’ in the context of my exhibition, Loringhoven, I was struck by her public An extremely short career is what all three Madame Realism, I aimed at a more political persona, both in her life (which she presum- women have in common, whether deliber- interpretation of the dandy. ably dictated) and how she, more recently, ately, or through an undesirable fatal has been historicized, especially in compar- ending. MS: Using the term “traditional” does seem ison with her fellow Dadaist, Marcel problematic in relation to the dandy and Duchamp. When thinking about these two I agree that there are multiple strains and artists in relation to the “dandy” as a characteristics associated with the dandy, persona, some distinctions between their both then and now, which make for a respective projects become quite stark, complicated subject. I would like to try and as well as how their public identities were parse out different uses of the term in order received by their contemporaries and to establish what is at stake in applying the within modernist histories. Even though label “dandy” to women. Precisely because critics have noted similarities in their work, it is such an abstract concept and, when put Lee Lozano, No Title, 1964 Duchamp is uniformly considered one  The Baroness, God, 1917 into action – by either men or women – is of the most significant artists of the 20th Lee Lozano in 1963  received in different ways. Because of this, century, while the Baroness has been MS: There is a curious parallel among these the female dandy cannot be merely the relegated, perhaps until recently, to artists, both in their work and in the institu- flipping of the standards associated with the “dustbin of history”. I recognize this tional limits they experienced in their the male dandy, but perhaps the creation disparity is common within the writing respective careers. of a new persona altogether. of art history, but as it pertains to your To get us started in attempting to define LS: Indeed, the intention of introducing research, Lisette, these two figures might the female dandy, what do you consider the character of female dandy in my exhibi- provide a useful means of approaching to be the key differences and similarities tion was very much a gesture of directly the differences and similarities between between the male and female dandy? Given flipping the roles. To balance this male the male and female dandy. that women hold a different social position hegemony and exclusive right of ‘gender than men, do you see women as capable of play’ by presenting works by only female Lisette Smits: It’s great to be introduced embracing the traditional role of the dandy? artists; to counter this, to obtain for women to the Baroness. I knew vaguely about her, LS: I would like to point out that today it the same “running room” to transgress but refreshing my mind through an Internet is complicated to talk about a traditional strict notions of identity. To me, this is search, I found some wonderful works role of the dandy (and for one thing, tradi- really still a matter of women’s emancipa- fitting the category “readymade,” which tional is something the dandy never is!) tion, despite the achievements of feminist must have definitely inspired Duchamp.O r Today, “dandy” has become a trope much movements throughout the 20th century. rather, one has to presume, they more likely more generically describing a certain way That’s why I exclusively chose female influenced each other. I suppose, to decon- of behaving or dressing, whether or not struct the myth of the male genius cannot performed in the public arena, but histori- simply mean replacing it by a female genius cally I think it is a more complex “behind” him, if one is critical of that notion phenomenon. Today a dandy seems to be in the first place. a label for anyone fitting the look. In the What struck me more though in the Dutch context there was the politician, Pim Baroness’ biography, and this doesn’t have Fortuyn, who lived up to all the characteris- so much to do with her dandyism, is the tics of a dandy (he was later assassinated apparent scatological nature of her work. but that’s another story). But one may ask She made her works from other people’s what this 21st century politician has to do rubbish, which reminds me of the work of with that historical taste-and-beauty- Laurie Parsons almost seventy years later. obsessed man, apart from their love for Little is known of Parsons; she consciously sartorial fashion? Interestingly, the Dutch left behind the art world in 1994 after politician’s political preference combined

6 Issue #1 Labour artists, writers and designers for this exhibi- To balance this male THE BARONESS AND DUCHAMP tion, and decided not to involve, for instance, Sometimes criticized for transforming gay artists – a question that was often posed hegemony and exclusive the work of the artist into leisure activity to me – I mean, I didn’t ask the invited women through his infamous “rejection” of art about their sexuality either. I guess sexual right of ‘gender play’ … in favor of chess, and for his gender- orientation or sexual identity in itself was not to obtain for women bending alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, Marcel primarily at stake here, nor a wider under- Duchamp’s status as an art-world standing of being a woman – beyond the the same “running room” provocateur provides an avant-garde biological and including other marginalized variation on the dandy. groups – a political strand that I have always to transgress strict no- perceived as the opposite of liberating for t ions of ident it y women. In the exhibition, the notion of the (domestic) interior being identified as a to an image of David Bowie, dressed in a gold woman’s domain was central and one should suit, that he saw in the pages of Artforum. see my choice of only female artists also in LS: I don’t think the apolitical can be this light: the interior as another trope to be considered as something political after all. deconstructed, and a highly political one. Both Warhol and Bowie were so much And that is not just about women rejecting engulfed in pop culture – a product of it, housework or – perhaps even worse – to get in fact – that it’s hard to locate the political properly paid for it… it was really about the in their work. It was more about being social and cultural limitations for women successful and about a relation to audience. Like other controversial figures from born as women. Here Madame Realism entered. Both also had an addiction, the first to diet Dada, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag- pills and the latter to cocaine, something that Loringhoven was a polymath of sorts, MS: You’ve put forward a concept that, in the probably also influenced their experiments inserting herself into social situations context of the show, provided you with a way with looks and transformations. I think their in elaborate, gender-bending costumes to curate in the larger framework established appearances were more received as scan- to “upstage” others and to disrupt by Marres, and offered a feminist means of dalous than political. standards of decorum. exploring various 19th century characters, such as the Collector, the Flâneur and the MS: Drug use and fashion both carry a Dilettante. If we talk about the female dandy political significance, whether among those outside of the parameters of Madame Realism, French dandies who consumed absinthe in fin it might help to better unpack this idea even de siècle bohemia or Bowie’s use of cocaine in further. Speaking more broadly, the more Berlin. I also think we need to acknowledge mainstream and contemporary interpretation the confusion – a productive and political of the dandy is sometimes limited to one who confusion – that exists between fashion and has a certain flair for fashion, but we also performance. If the dandy is a political figure have seen dandyism taken up in the LGBT because s/he plays with assigned gender roles, community as a way of challenging strict and the way a dandy looks is one of the ways notions of gender and sexuality. If we talk that indicates this play, then fashion has the about the dandy more broadly, as an arbiter potential to be political. It is difficult for me of taste or as a connoisseur and collector, we to dismiss this aspect of dandyism because can point to more recent manifestations of style is such an integral part of the concept the dandy in Andy Warhol and perhaps David as a whole. Bowie, both of whom affect an apolitical air, If we are talking about the dichotomies but to my mind, are highly political for that that arise when considering gender and the very reason. dandy in general, the political/ apolitical is My work has been circling around the one, but I am not sure the female body can concept of the male dandy for some time, ever be depoliticized. In considering having been included in group shows that Continued on page eight » Images of the Baroness in several addressed different aspects of this persona. costumes of her own design (a walking One exhibition was called, “Dracularising,” Dada sculpture), as well as an image Lisette Smits is a curator living in the Netherlands. She (curated by Matt Williams, Neue Alte curated ‘Madame Realism’, an exhibition that took place of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, (both sets at Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, Bruecke, Berlin, 2007), which presented The Netherlands in spring 2011, positioning the usually male taken by Man Ray) appeared in the April the dandy as a cultural vampire, pointing construct of the dandy – the most idiosyncratic ‘home curator’ 1921 issue of New York Dada. In these – against a counterpart, presenting the works of female artists towards Jeff Koons’ early attempts to co-opt and designers within the context of the interior. images, both artists play with bourgeois

pop culture as an example. Koons used Meredyth Sparks is an artist who lives and works in New York. notions of male and female identity. himself as subject matter for a series of Her work considers, among other things, the contemporary The Baroness’ apartment-studio in relevance of the politics and aesthetics of musical and political photographs that tried to compete with subcultures, the historical avant-garde, and the ever-evolving New York was filled with detritus she Hollywood imagery that was then being legacies of labor and gender. Sparks’ most recent exhibition collected in making her work. If ‘Striped Bare, Even and Again’ is on view at Elizabeth Dee produced. His photographs were in response Gallery, NY, September 15 – October 29, 2011. Duchamp elevated the every-day, the Baroness, in this sense, might be said to have curated trash.

Issue #1 Labour 7 If the dandy is a political the pants” is from James M. Harding’s book for the marginal, for the socially unac- Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist cepted, and for minorities of all kinds. It is figure because s/he Artists and the American Avant-Garde. In it a place to hide the dissident and the illegal. plays with assigned Harding argues, “Since those portraits stopped at the shoulders, there is no reason MS: I’m thinking about another type of gender roles, and the to believe that Duchamp didn’t keep his interiority – mental interiority and the way pants on.” For me, this quote articulates that “prison diaries,” for example, Oscar way a dandy looks is the divergent aspects of both of Duchamp Wilde’s prison letter, De Profundis, was a one of the ways that and the Baroness’ respective gender soul-searching autobiography of sorts that experiments. became political when published. Wilde indicates this play, might not be the best example here because MS: There is also a disparity that arises he was first and foremost an early exploiter then fashion has the between the public and private, the interior of the mass media and likely knew his work potential to be political and the exterior, where “public” and “exte- would be read sooner or later, but hopefully rior” are privileged over “interior” and you take my point. « Continued from page seven “private” space. I am particularly interested LS: Well, to think that revolutions start Duchamp and the Baroness’s respective in how the dandy and, historically a bit in the living room, or any kind of secret, experiments with gender – Duchamp’s later, the flâneur, might act in contradistinc- private place, is not new. Prison writings Rrose Sélavy and the Baroness’s “lived” tion to one another in terms of an interior/ such as Wilde’s, or other literary works, gender provocations – it seems clear that exterior tendency and how these two even if they are not published or read by Duchamp is creating a character, an character types in conjunction might a large public, represent a latent disobedi- alter-ego he can bring out and use to what- complicate the idea of the female dandy. ence, a critical voice which, suppressed or ever end he sees fit, whereas theB aroness A contemporary manifestation of a female not, can be raised at some point and there- embodies her position. No matter how much dandy might be able to move between home fore is a threat to the ruling powers. We one would like to challenge gender roles, and public life, occupying either space and have just seen today how social media, a discrepancy exists between performing thereby disrupting the meanings associated and embodying gender in these examples. with both spaces. A contemporary This is not to say there isn’t a challenge LS: This ambivalence is part of the to perceived norms at work in both, but dandy’s characteristics I would say. We manifestation of the social reception and impact just isn’t need only think of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ a female dandy might the same. Des Esseintes, who is repelled by the idea LS: Yes, Duchamp in reference to of having to deal with the reality of real be able to move between Rrose Sélavy, is always photographed as people, while at the same time living up a portrait so one can never see what she’s his particularities. Of course, the dandy is home and public life, wearing below the waist – suggesting that an opportunist. But so is the flâneur. Even occupying either space she (who’s a he) is probably still “wearing though the flâneur immerses himself the pants.” in society, he is not a participant either. and thereby disrupting MS: I am glad you brought that point into To address the dandy as someone who’s the conversation. This line about “wearing mainly concerned with the domain of the the meanings associated interior is the archetypical idea of the with both spaces dandy – and one that we know mainly as the literary character brought to life by used by individuals sitting behind Huysmans. In my exhibition I was more computers in domestic environments, interested how the 18th and 19th century can bring about forces that make interior had been primarily the man’s an Arab Spring! domain, whereas in modernity it suddenly MS: Yes, all media was new at some point becomes the woman’s domain. in history and, in this sense, today’s social Modern life, according to Walter media feels different only by degree, but Benjamin, is identified by the separation not by kind. of the living and working environment and I’d like to continue with our discussion since women at the beginning of the 20th of the separation of living and working century were still in very limited ways part environments as one of the effects of of a working environment, they were modernity because that seems to dovetail condemned to the home. More than re- nicely with the focus of this publication in purposing a domestic role, however, I have terms of divisions of labor. Suffice it to say proposed to consider the interior as a space that ‘modernity’ covers a huge swathe of from where emancipation can be estab- time and has many iterations. To talk about lished – an emancipation from within a woman’s domain being “in the home” the interior; the interior as a potential for seems more in keeping with a 1950s house- subversive or clandestine activities. And wife than, say, women’s roles in early again, the interior has also been a refuge 20th century modernism, which included

8

Issue #1 Labour the art-historical avant-garde and the towards women moving out of the interior women’s suffrage and labor movements. and into the public realm, though there It comes as no surprise In the early 20th century, the idea of was another shift inwards that occurred modernity hadn’t been codified as a mono- in post-war America, and strangely this is t hat in t hes e early lithic and patriarchal concept and women now sometimes seen as the “starting point” modern times, ‘the mass- were recognized, even during modernity’s of the “modern woman.” infancy, as playing more than a supporting LS: I agree with you that modernity has es’ were considered fe - role in shaping radical, socio-political many faces and that to consider the home male – the female changes within culture. There is a New York as a woman’s domain seems to apply more Evening Sun article published in 1917 (this to the 1950s (or as you bring up, in post-war being perceived as being the same year that Duchamp intro- America) than today. On the other hand, duced the idea of the readymade at the modernity, if we define it as a form of uncontrollable, and Society of Independent Artists exhibition) modern capitalism, also brought about therefore potentially that conflates the public’s ambivalence a global society where domestic labor, regarding both the idea of modernism and for instance, in the two-earner household, a t hreat the “new woman.” In the article, a reporter is outsourced to other women (cleaners, interviewing Mina Loy states, “Some babysitters, nannies), so I guess it is not to now maneuver around in our discussion people think that women are the cause of an anachronism after all. of the female dandy? With that goal in mind modernism, whatever that is.” In this quote, In the Netherlands, for instance, day and in thinking about the domain of the the appearance of women in the public care for children still needs to be improved dandy as an “idiosyncratic ‘home curator’,” realm corresponds to a shift in thinking and is very expensive which makes it how might the female dandy influence the that the writer associates with modernism difficult to work as a parent anyway. I think exterior through the use of interior tropes? and it isn’t necessarily regarded as positive. the notion of the domestic and service is LS: I guess I have referred to the dandy If one extends this logic, if women are the still very much considered a woman’s as a curator in order to draw a parallel cause, then modernism is kind of a disease. responsibility. I find it interesting that you with myself curating an exhibition in a 19th The appearance of this disease also mark this moment when woman appear in century mansion. I deliberately wanted to carries an ethnographic and class-based public space at the beginning of the century confuse “decorating” and “curating” and, significance. The New Woman wasn’t being perceived as not necessarily positive. likewise, I stated that Madame Realism would exclusively an upper-middle or high-class There is a very interesting book on the be something between a private interior phenomenon. Although many women appearance of women in the 19th and 20th and public exhibition. I envisioned the involved in the arts had money, and with century city titled The Sphinx in the City by artists participating in the exhibition as that the freedom to push boundaries, there the sociologist and feminist writer Eliza- ‘female dandies’ but unlike the male 19th were also important examples of politically beth Wilson. In it she mentions how century dandy and his highly individual radical women emerging out of the poor, liberating the city is for women (as well universe, the female dandy is more analyt- immigrant and working classes. Women as how other marginal groups can survive ical and self-reflective … this was at least were rallying to gain the right to vote in more autonomously in cities than else- something that I claimed with Madame the U.S. and female textile workers were where). She positions the woman as a Realism, a title inspired by a character forming unions to advocate for better flâneuse, immersing herself in the city, as created by the American author, Lynne working conditions. One famous example, opposed to the male character who controls Tillman. The introspection of Madame the city, ruling the masses. So it comes as Realism, the character, is more of a dissec- More than re-purposing no surprise that in these early modern tion of a context, in this case the interior times, ‘the masses’ were considered female as a reflection of the outside world. a domest ic role, however, – the female being perceived as uncontrol- I have propos ed to consid - lable, and therefore potentially a threat. MS: The notion of the interior as a trope to be deconstructed is a very rich topic and it er the interior as a space MS: This brings us back to distinctions might be interesting, again, to go back to between the dandy and the flâneur. In the the beginnings of modernism to address from where emancipation past decade, the idea of an flâneuse, the the privileging of the public over the private can be established female equivalent of the flâneur, has been and fine art over craft, which can be viewed widely discussed, often pointing towards a as by-products, or another example, of the women working at the Triangle Shirt- figure like George Sand as an example.B ut gender inequality. In my most recent work, waist Company in New York had been I question if the idea of a flâneuse is even I use the avant-garde gesture of the “cut,” demonstrating for safer conditions for feasible for the very reasons you highlight and its relation to modernist collage, in several years prior to a fire that swept in Wilson’s argument. If the flâneur combination with stitching. The stitching through the floors of the factory in 1911, wanders aimlessly, aloof to their surround- in these paintings connects digital prints, killing 146 garment workers. The fire ings, this drift implies a form of power that often depicting subjects like a covered brought national attention to working was not afforded to women at the time, or radiator or window blinds, to traditional conditions widely prevalent within the even now, in public space. I wonder if it is fabric patterns. The decorative act is an garment industry and evinced a broad shift more productive to try and understand how aspect of these pieces, but it functions in public thinking about women in the the separation of living and working envi- primarily as a stand-in or signifier for workplace. All of these instances point ronments dictates the legacy we are trying decoration. Continued on page ten »

9

Issue #1 Labour and one that opens up a space for women to Confusing the role of participate in activities that have the poten- tial to then leave the home and enter a more “curator” with “decorator” public discourse. By extension, I’m wondering (and collector) might be if confusing the role of “curator” with “deco- rator” (and collector) might be another way another way to articulate to articulate female dandyism since your role, as curator in the context of Marres, is to female dandyism cultivate an interior that is always already a public space? Of course, there are many historical LS: To confuse the role of curator with precedents for this, as female artists and decorator is a deliberate provocation and curators have done important work in it seems this is a provocation that relates to drawing attention to the political value of your position as an artist as well. It alludes to the interior, especially during the Feminist the discrepancy between the professional and Art Movement of the 1970s. I’m thinking here the amateur (and in terms of traditional role of Martha Rosler’s, “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” patterns this could be read as male and Cal Art’s Woman House Project, or Mierle female), but also brings about the old Laderman’s “maintenance” performances, chestnut of the tension between art and among others. These examples ask insightful design, which I wanted to address. I think questions, especially in relation to contempo- that to locate the political is not so much in rary readings of the interior. I think one making the private public, but more in trans- question contemporary female artists might gressing borders – between (the object as) art Meredyth Sparks, Extraction (Painted Blue Wall/ Radiator), 2011 continue to consider is how to negotiate and decoration, private and public, the profes- between the decorative act and decoration sional and the amateur. The interior, and as a form of signification, in relation to everything associated with the house, is concepts like “decoration, “the interior” a perfect context for that. and “women’s work” more generally. MS: I’m also thinking about the function LS: I didn’t want to dwell overtly on of the salon in the early 20th century and artworks with the subject of the interior; for how many of the most famous examples were instance the kitchen – as an integrated part hosted by women like Gertrude Stein. This of the house – or anything that might be seems to be an instance of the merging associated with domestic work is not of public and private. However, it could be mentioned in Madame Realism at all. Martha argued that the salon host plays more of Rosler’s revealing works around domestic a supporting role to the activities carried out labour as service colonization or the domestic by the guests. One might wonder if salonists in relation to war, was not there. The Frank- were collecting people? furter kitchen, designed as a more LS: Ha ha! Well, like curators are collecting ‘economical’ kitchen (a kitchen as a little artists? I don’t know a lot about these salons, factory for women to save time for other but what I have read is that women were very things) by the modernist designer Margarete important as hostesses in the first half of Schütte-Lihotzky, wasn’t there either. Only the 20th century, and that these salons were perhaps in the work of Josephine Pryde was fertile ground for great, experimental and there a direct female notion of the domestic critical, literary and other artistic works. – although the baskets in her sculptures rather But they really could also function as provoke the idea of craft as associated with a shelter, which made them, politically, certain expectations of female art, not neces- equally important  sarily as a critique of domestic work. Madame Realism was not about any improvement of the interior (for women that is) but proposed Josephine Pryde, The Mystery of Artistic Work VIII, 2010 a radical change of it. For the sake of that in Madame Realism -exhibition, Marres, Maastricht 2011 Photo: Johannes Schwartz argument, I think, in Madame Realism it was all focused on the living room, a more abstract idea of ‘home’ – yes, the room least defined by house work, but the room in the house for intellectual activities, relaxation or other frivolities, such as, well, collecting and decorating. The ‘man’s room’, I guess. MS: Focusing solely on activities that might be carried out in the living room – the room in the home most often associated with leisure – is a provocative aspect of Madame Realism “One might wonder if salonists were collecting people?” Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein photographed by Man Ray

Issue #1 10 2.

FADE IN: INT. AUTO ITALIA SOUTH EAST #1 - DAY

People sat on hay bales chat amiably as they sip the complementary beer and lemonade. It’s a balmy afternoon in South London and the monitor hums in harmony with the nervous, anticipatory audience as the talk begins. Kerton’s fingers tap the computer keyboard in preparation for his PowerPoint tasks. A bird song is playing in the I DON’T SING, NO REALLY I DON’T SING, background. NOT PROFESSIONALLY ANYWAY (IN B FLAT) JOHN JONES #1 Ad lib introduction to the commissioning of by the project Ever-Changing Moods from the Auto Jessica Wiesner & Rachal Bradley Italia perspective.

WIESNER #2 Hi everyone, thanks for coming. I guess I thought I’d start by talking about some of the ideas that informed this project. One of the main ideas was generated from an examination of a mutual feeling of uncertainty. This uncertainty related to feelings about our place in the world and indeed the tenuous nature of our disintegrating connection to the world in crisis. This declaration is a declaration of Anxiety: interaction and cooperation on the one hand and substantiality and inertia on the other. The dizziness of freedom and the relentless saturation of perceived choice, rubbing against the realization that the very availability of these choices actively neutralizes the ability to choose. Unsurprisingly, because what is at stake is the potential that there may in fact be nothing meaningful at all in the ‘real’, either because a wrong choice or no choice would not help you down life’s path or just the plain fact that death brings with it the ultimate leveler of human achievement and experience.

WIESNER glances at BRADLEY

BRADLEY #3 Yes, indeed, this appeared to me as a threshold, a moment of uncertainty; like the top of a wall, the space between the hand that holds a pen over a blank piece of paper, the gaze out the studio window. (Glance to KERTON. Show slide BUBBLEGUM)

3. 4.

BRADLEY #3 (CONT’D) WIESNER #2 And with this moment of uncertainty, in fact What are you suggesting, Rachal? crucial to its manifestation, is a self- conscious objectivity. BRADLEY #3 I think I’m suggesting that states of high Wiesner reaches for glass of water, takes a sip, replaces anxiety are not to be placated; rather they glass. are innate bodily functions giving us intense capability when needed. BRADLEY #3 (CONT’D) (Glance to Kerton. Cue ADRENAL GLAND CLIP) In ‘Concept of Anxiety’, A Philosopher argues that a positive resolution to anxiety is a BRADLEY #3 (CONT’D) self-conscious exercise in responsibility and The crisis is needed, and not to be ignored. choice. Commit yourself to a choice, commit But the means of production and control of the yourself to an anxiety-free existence, commit crisis are salient. yourself. Bradley can hardly stay seated. Wiesner leans back on her WIESNER #2 hay bale. (Beat) (Glance to KERTON show slide PILLOWS/ATLAS’ BALLS) But there’s a necessary disingenuousness that operates in this self-conscious anxiety, one WIESNER #2 which when used expertly can score out the I’ve been thinking recently about housewife uncanny and disconcerting relationship between pillows, the kind sold in packs of two from fear of exposure and the desire to be exposed. John Lewis. As an object it serves to index the It was this particular treatment of anxiety human head, reassurance that the mainstay of that tickled my fancy. thought is comfortable and supported. Like the (Glance to Kerton. Cue MEL BROOKS IN HIGH ANXIETY CLIP) bed, the pillow is a space par excellence for the individual, the singular person, singular WIESNER #2 (CONT’D) thought, singular body. A body that is indexed It is a state of high anxiety that provides the crucially on the horizontal plane. drivers for final realization or, put another way, production. BRADLEY #3 (Glance to Kerton. Show slide HOPE/ COPE) (Glance to Kerton. Show slide of FARNESE ATLAS) That’s funny because I’ve been thinking BRADLEY #3 recently about balls. The body’s long-term stress response process also known as homeostasis is a primal and Wiesner reaches for the glass of water and takes a sip. physical management system, which brings about Atlas is the classical reminder of vertical man’s burden. an internal stability in the face of external This particular sculpture of Atlas shows the effect instability, for example a life- threatening of gravity upon the doomed man particularly on his danger or too much caffeine. When thought testicles. Exceptional in this 2nd century example, Atlas about in terms of the body politic, the body’s has a sagging scrotum that plummets towards the earth on stress management processes (fight/flight and which he kneels. homeostasis), are also recognised on a state level. Invocation of crisis can contribute to BRADLEY #3 (CONT’D) manipulating large groups of workers or in the Formally three spheres are emphasized and long term a menacing suppression of the new. crucially reciprocated within each other. The Radical conservatism borne out of the need to globe of the celestial spheres (here we can maintain ‘internal’ stability in the face of read this as the universe), the sphere of ‘external’ instability. Atlas’s head (the brain/ capability of thought 11 and language) and the sphere of his testicles (nature/instinct). In this sculpture there is Issue #1 metaphysical unification of all aspects of ‘man’. (Glance to Kerton. Show slide of BALLS CLOSE-UP) Rachal Bradley and Jessica Wiesner, performance and production stills: Working Tax Credits, Full Time, FULL ON from the exhibition ‘Ever Changing Moods’, Auto Italia, London, 2011 Images courtesy of Tim Steer, Melissa Gordon, Rachal Bradley and Matthew Richardson

12

Issue #1 Labour 5. 6.

WIESNER #2 WIESNER #2 (In Russian; English subtitles) (Glance to Kerton. Show slide MUNDANE LIFE/TRANSCENDENTAL But what appears to be the most painful part of LIFE) Atlas’s burdensome fate is the knee resting on Beuys’s dictum “everyone is an artist” presents the triangular ‘non- form’. a very specific relationship of an individual to the ‘real’ via an idealized and material BRADLEY #3 account of the power of art. This interests me. There is a paradoxical attempt by the sculptor to hide not the labor BRADLEY #3 of Atlas in his task of holding up the sky but Yeah I try not to think about Beuys too often, the holding up of the sculpture itself. This I wanted to see 37 individuals aggressively and attempt to hide the physical support structure chorally index a standardized measure of labour of the sculpture’s material acts as a reminder i.e. a working week, on a chorus of essentially of the codependent relationship between the temporary workers - art freelancers. I needed mundane and the transcendental. A point to see what this looked like. painfully revealed through the angular knee. WIESNER #2 WIESNER #2 (Glance to Kerton. Show slide FREELANCERS/ FIGHT FLIGHT + (Glance to Kerton. Show slide SCULPTRESS PROTEIN SHAKE) REST DIGEST IMAGE) If sculpture at its peninsular can be described This indexing of the invisible and yet as an effect on a material, period, then extremely direct and contentious socioeconomic lets say I’m interested in the double bluff refrains is actually just an examination of of the effect of gravity on the vertical our own reality, Working Tax Credits is a and horizontal plane; primary forces as standardisation, part of a larger system, anthropomorphic affect. A sculpture’s vertical we are freelancers with low yield and high achievement held up by footwear sold for productivity. Rachal I’m going to mention now perpetual body-mobility. Its, like, bluffing the over-arching theme of rest and action. back the effects of gravity and the upstanding forward facing ‘man’. BRADLEY #3 OK Jess. Bradley and Wiesner simultaneously reach for their Yeah, like in Lucy Stein’s ‘The Last Bohemian glasses of water and each take a sip, replacing the on the Costa Blanca’ there’s another double glasses. bluff, the bohemian works hard to look like (Glance at Kerton. Cue RAF PILLOW PERFORMANCE CLIP) they’re not working hard.

BRADLEY #3 WIESNER #2 Sir Anthony Caro is a counterpoint. In Caro’s Hmmmm, maybe... account of sculpture... in a book...he puts forward the argument that sculpture has such an Wiesner sips again from her glass of water and shuffles impact and transformative potential primarily papers. because of its permanence in space and time. Performance is discredited because it occupies WIESNER #2 (CONT’D) finite temporal and spatial dimensions. I’m Can we talk about sculpture again please? interested on the back of this to experiment with the potentially mundane aspect of Joanne Robertson coughs loudly into her hands. sculpture. This grows out of a prima face dichotomy BRADLEY #3 between sculpture and performance. Trying to Well I want to bring up something about make these two mediums stand in for intangible, evidence from that picture you emailed to me. existentialist dichotomies such as materialism (Glance to Kerton. Show slide POLICE MEN CARRYING and idealism. EVIDENCE BUNDLES.)

7. 8.

WIESNER #2 BRADLEY #3 It reminds me of that picture you tore out of I’m sure there’s loads of stuff we’ve missed Vogue. out. (Glance to Kerton. Show slide VOGUE RUNWAY ROUND UP (Glance to Kerton. Show slide of MIME ARTIST) OVERSIZED HANDBAGS) BRADLEY #3 (CONT’D) BRADLEY #3 Let’s finish on the Dennis Potter clip. Hmm, I feel like in art discourse there’s (Show DENNIS POTTER, ARENA INTERVIEW ‘SUPERFLUITY OF an assimilation of the value of an object CLUES’ CLIP) via socioeconomic models, such as Marxism or capitalism or via psychoanalytical models. Wiesner and Bradley look expectantly at Kerton. There are other ways of thinking about our relationships to the material world in terms FADE OUT of value. I mean there are other ways of describing the relationship between object, value and the self.

WIESNER #2 THE END Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

BRADLEY #3 Evidence? Real Evidence?

WIESNER #2 Uh-huh.

WIESNER #2 (Nod to Kerton. Show slide REAL EVIDENCE EXPLANATION) Uh-huh. ‘Real evidence is a type of evidence which usually takes the form of some material object produced for inspection in order that the court may draw an inference from its own observation as to the existence, condition or value of the object in question. Although real evidence may be extremely valuable as a means of proof, little if any weight attaches to such evidence in the absence of accompanying testimony identifying the object in question and explaining its connection with, or significance in relation to, the facts at issue or relevant to the issue.’ This description of the value of an object is contingent on a testimony which activates it and for me it points to a potential basis for the deconstruction of some fundamental precepts so eloquently argued by Sir Caro for example, Issue #1 and further problematising our relationship to Labour sculpture and performance, an interrogation of 13 our connection with the real. mode of production and the conditions for Align Spend most other work, as they’re both subsumed Working by financialised regimes of accumulation. Emma Hedditch 2011 It is more a generalization of non-value, Artists of fictitious capital, than some idealized ‘creativity’ – the only way we can speak about in the creativity here is that assigned to the friction- less multiplication of money, the normativity Greater of capital’s own growth pattern of self- valorising value extended to all human life. Economy W.A.G.E.† make the point that artists are structurally and subjectively reproduced as speculators in the market since their work Marina Vishmidt Workshop at UDK Berlin. A student is not remunerated with a wage. This gives climbs through the window after them a direct interest in the fortunes of exploring a protest against advertising ‘...one of the most important experiences capital which wage workers don’t have. on the school building by Coca Cola. of our times is the fact that we are unable In a situation where everyone is supposed At this time the Bologna process was to have any experience of it. The result is to be a speculator, ‘investing’ in themselves being introduced at the school and a permanent criticism that is blind to the no matter what they do, what are the conse- students were organizing against it. crisis, and a permanent crisis that is deaf quences not just for the critical status of art I was paid to be a visiting workshop to criticism. In short, a perfect harmony!’ in relation to the capitalist whole, but to the organiser. Boris Buden, ‘Criticism without Crisis: status of the labour that happens in art? Does Crisis without Criticism’* it get closer to industrialized forms of labour, i.e. more like all other kinds of work? Does For the past however many years, I’ve been the turn to services as a mimetic genre since looking into the ‘speculative mode of produc- the 60s and most visibly in the recent ‘rela- tion’, that is, ways of valuing labour which tional aesthetics’ and ‘socially engaged’ disavow its character as labour. Art is the practices also herald a final loss of distinction primary site of investigation, inasmuch as between artistic labour and non-artistic art is supposed to be the opposite of labour, labour, or does it mark the subsumption of The kitchen of an apartment in Herne typically behaving more like a luxury labour under art as a regime of speculation Hill, London. I share the tenancy with commodity in the market or an investment and abstraction just as it has been subsumed one other person. The apartment is of love in the studio or community. But are under finance? Is this the sign of a ‘primitive approximately 970 pounds per month. these cordons still so sanitary, given the accumulation’ of other social practices proximity of art and labour via the promulga- undertaken by art, or does art just mediate tion of creativity and voluntary effort as ‘primitive accumulation’ happening the watchword for all kinds of work, while elsewhere? the distinctiveness of wage labour itself starts Further, what happens when the sources to blur in a climate of debt-fuelled proximity of surplus-value for the self-valorising value work and finance? It could be said that the of art and of finance start to dry up, that is, speculative mode of production is not based when unemployment is the order of the day? on the generalization of creativity but on If the boom years of the past decade poised Windows I covered in an apartment the confusion about how and where to extract art as the form of social services expedient in Berlin that I rented for one month, surplus-value. Thus we observe a generaliza- to creative neoliberalism, with funding in the summer of 2006, from an artist tion of ‘de-valorisation’ rather than of disbursed at the same time as cuts to the who recently bought it at an auction. ‘self-valorisation’ as a notionally post- welfare budget, austerity sees them both as capitalist economic or political trend. This expendable. Does it not clarify that culture is is what links the precarity of the artistic part of welfare on the one hand, and that this

Composition made Cladding on in studio at IASPIS a building in in Stockholm, where, Williamsburg, on a residency in Brooklyn, photo- Composting unit built by students at 2008, I was given graphed as part of the Art Academy in Tromsø, 2007 where an apartment, a series of images I was paid to be a workshop organiser studio and money for an exhibition. for one week. to live for 6 months.

Issue #1 Labour 14 can be politically dramatized or used in assigned to art in capitalism’s social division an emancipatory or at least a critical way of labour, since commodities which do not on the other? In the same way as defending find a price are socially useless – see Marx the public sector, or cultural budgets within when he says ‘If a thing is useless, so is the the public sector these days can be a radical labour contained in it; the labour does not programme insofar as it entails asking for count as labour, and therefore creates no more, not agreeing to less out of shame value.’ Here it’s not only the matter of the at a dubious and relatively poorly-funded ‘absolute commodity’ which is the artwork A bicycle lent to me by my roommate privilege created by exactly that mode of that bears no use-value whatever and is in Manhattan, 2008. production and exploitation about which thus free in some important way in a world many artworld actors entertain a perfunctory pinioned by the law of value (Adorno); here scepticism? Perhaps. Yet the rational core we’re thinking about the commodity labour- of the opportunism that is by and large power which does not find a price in the the practical horizon of existence for most sphere of art production thus is useless. cultural projects these days is that the And thus it is free: it is important to note moment for demanding things from the state what desires and privileges are capitalized has passed, and another way of conceiving or even just mobilized in the institution of any notion of ‘the public good’ has yet to unpaid artistic labour; people work for free A desk at a press conference for an take its place, much less the political means because they find it less alienating than exhibition in Barcelona in 2008. I was to institute it. another kind of work which might be paid, paid an artist fee of almost 2000 GBP. Given this collapse in the social reproduc- though usually that other kind of work cannot The desk became part of my work for tion or recognition of culture, we should focus be wholly avoided for survival reasons. the exhibition. a bit more tightly on the practical criticism of The prevalence of free labour in art-related value performed by labour in the sphere of art. spheres has to do with art’s constitutive The art sphere has a problematic relationship ideological opposition to labour as such (as to the commodity not only at the level of well as more humdrum mechanisms of supply and demand). The economy of art, that part of it which positions itself somewhere not in T he ar t sphere has ‘the market’, is understood to operate with a problematic relationship other kinds of exchange than monetary, and to be producing other kinds of value. Hence A beehive cared for by two friends to the commodity not only people who would never work for free in a in Holyoke, Massachusetts. regular job consent to unpaid opportunities at t he level of t he ar t work, in the art-related sphere because it’s not work, but at the level of labour. in fact, what better proof could there be that it wasn’t work than the fact that’s not paid? Most art institutions run Here we must distinguish between work and alienated labour, since the above instinctively on voluntary labour, conflates them, separating them out again in as do most art practices ‘artwork’– payment is considered a corollary to alienated labour, compensation for it in Studio space at Whitney Independent the artwork, but at the level of labour. Most some way, as much as a ‘valuing’ of this Study Programme, shared with 2 others. art institutions run on voluntary labour, as do labour, while art is done for its own sake, and most art practices. This is labour which is not its labour is somehow unquantifiable.A rt is reimbursed and is thus objectively judged (i.e., art and labour is labour, but only art has by funding structures) as non-commodifiable, the privileges of testing out forms of activity * in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray often also by those who perform it. This which could obtain in a world where they are (eds), MayFlyBooks: London and mayflybooks.org, accords with the specifically ‘useless’ status not separate: ‘the status of art as a space for 2009, p. 41. † W.A.G.E. works to draw attention to inequalities that exist in the arts, and how to resolve them. wageforwork.com Desk space in a The seminar room — room that I rented at the Whitney Marina Vishmidt is a writer, editor, and a Ph.D. in Manhattan for 9 Independent Study candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, who works mainly on art, labour and the value- months in 2008/09 Programme with form. She contributes to Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Parkett, and for $800 per month. adjustments to related periodicals, collections and catalogues. furniture. The WISP has been running for 40 years and is funded by private donors. Partici- pants spend one year at the institution and pay between $500 and $900 for twice-weekly semi- nars and a studio space in Chinatown, in NY. I attended the programme in 2008/09.

Issue #1 Labour 15 find a price, if only because of the fact that Would it then be more art is not considered labour and is not paid for unless it finds a price in the art market? radical to insist that all This would tend to impose a certain kind of artistic practice is labour, ‘capitalism’ on the feudal structures of the artworld. If not always recognizing labour and that this labour-power through the wage, they would have to adopt Post lunch, whilst at Whitney mechanism of rent, getting them to price Independent Study Programme. find a price, if only because ‘knowledge production’ like the academy or of the fact that art is not industrial R&D departments do. This would also countervail the unlimited exploitation considered labour and is characteristic of the art sphere as prototype for all waged labour under conditions of not paid for u n les s it fi nds economic crisis (affect over money). Finally, a pr ice in t he ar t market? it would acknowledge the fact that not everyone is unpaid in the economics of art, the de-functionalization of subjectivities: tackling the unlovely issue of distribution. Action made at the corner of Elizabeth singularities emerge there emancipated from So learning to ask for artistic labour to be and Prince Street in New York, 2009. any utility. As a purely aesthetic space, the reimbursed through either wages or rent world of art harbours a potential critique seems equitable, since barring a society-wide of the general organization of society, and revolutionary challenge to commodification, of the organization of work in particular.’ it is reactionary to hold up artistic labour as (Claire Fontaine). Here the point has to be not-labour. Under capitalist conditions all that even while art is a function of inopera- work should be priced the same way. tivity, as CF argues, it is also the case that This is the pragmatic-political level labour registers in art as a disruption of its W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater own social and aesthetic consistency. If for Economy) are operating at. On this level at Roof repairs made to a building in no other reason, this is why the question of least, the philosophical or critical distinctions Braddock, Pennsylvannia. The roof labour continues to have a valence for self- between art and labour, the ‘aesthetic rela- needed replacing and the first stage reflexive or socially critical art practices. tions of production’ or art’s status as both a of replacing the rafters took about The practical estrangement from commodity and not a commodity are otiose. 10 days with a group of 4 friends commodity relations tends to materialize as That is, the question of how labour in the field from NYC, 2009. unpaid labour in the art world. And this of art is to be valued has everything to do anomalous performance grounds its precon- with those things, but the resistance to the ditions – because unpaid labour is so commodity cannot be enacted in working abundant and accepted, institutional budgets for free when things cost money. Real condi- frequently don’t cost for it. This is especially tions of exploitation demand capitalist social the case in discursive or public-art practices relations like the wage be transvalued, and or projects; when there is no discernible sometimes reinforced, when it is the excep- relation to the art market, the work is not tions to them which help to cement their grip. valued – that is, the art market is the only In proposing that artists and artworkers get Laundry drying rack at the apartment existing metric whereby art can be valued, paid as a matter of course, W.A.G.E. some- in Herne Hill, London, 2010. even by public funding. So art produced under times identify as workers, seeking to cut such auspices exists perforce outside the the tie with the artist as speculator in her market economy, regardless of its makers’ own work, transfixed by the movements views on the commodity-form. Would it then of the market like the financiers whose gifts be more radical to insist that all artistic make the museums go round. W.A.G.E. define practice is labour, and that this labour-power artistic work as the provision of ‘cultural

Danish daily newspaper The household Bloomberg-sponsored education covers the story of a chores schedule area at Tate Modern, London, 2010. workers’ struggle in the for a household of Philippines. I printed this students in Aarhus, image for an exhibition Denmark. I was paid in Copenhagen in 2010. as a visiting work- shop organiser and went on excursions to the places where students live in Aarhus during the week I was there. 16

Issue #1 Labour demand. I would tendentially compare this to W.A.G.E. define artistic the historical instance of the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign; where the question of work as the provision of a wage for what is constitutively supposed to ‘cultural value’ to society be out of sight and out of mind for capital – domestic labour and reproduction done out of which should be recognized love – shows the dependence of capitalism on the violation of the law of value in its depen- by ‘capital value’; paid in dence on unpaid labour. The driving idea of Materials from the Women’s Archive money rather than non- WfH was that in order to destroy the relations Bolzano. After researching at the of production as they are, founded on the Archive I found some collections of exchangeable forms of exchange relation with capital in the form newspaper articles that highlighted of the wage, everything should be re-defined changing attitudes to women and their currency such as ‘exposure’ as labour since all labour is waged and then occupation of public space in the city. or ‘prestige’ supposedly capitalism would crack under the I was in Bolzano as part of Critical strain. This is perhaps the chief example that Complicities, a project curated by Lisa Mazza and Julia Moritz, 2010. value’ to society which should be recognized by ‘capital value’; paid in money rather than It is a paradox which non-exchangeable forms of currency such as ‘exposure’ (or) ‘prestige’ or any of the usual can genuinely prompt ways of phrasing the question mark that art political thinking as labours under. This has been known to raise eyebrows, especially in Europe where the well as being a narrow critical pre-set demurs at such conflations as too market-friendly. But to my mind, reformist demand Paper document storage at Cinenova the eyebrow misses the point. It seems more offices in London. Cinenova is a like an ironic strategy of over-identification comes to mind of a materialist feminist women’s film and video distributor that intended to highlight the absurdity of a class politics that set out to directly challenge the I volunteer for with eight other people. of workers in capitalism who are paid in relations of production from the standpoint recognition rather than money; freedom of value. It’s also one of the clearest examples from work paradoxically resulting in absolute in this branch of feminism of trying to apply dependency on the charity of patrons, institu- capitalist logic against capital, and thus tions, and yes, successful speculators. Asking seems directly relevant for thinking about for a wage for artists’ work (in the form of W.A.G.E.. I have written more extensively fees in budgets, etc) is already highlighting elsewhere on the problematic aspects of the the incredibly problematic nature of consid- campaign at the time and now, none of which ering artistic production in line with any didn’t have a dialectical underside, summed Monitor depicting a video by the other kind of work in capitalism. It is a up perhaps in the title of an essay from Disabled Women’s Theatre collective paradox which can genuinely prompt political the time by one of its main activists, Silvia from the 1980s. The video is viewed by thinking as well as being a narrow reformist Federici: ‘Wages Against Housework’. a visitor to the exhibition Reproductive Labour at The Showroom in London. Interview with W.A.G.E. Reproductive Labour was an exhibition Mar ina Vish m idt : Paolo Vir no has recent ly s aid ‘Nowa- project by Cinenova in early 2011. days artistic labour is turning into wage labour while the problem is, of course, how to liberate human ac-

Poster on the outside of a space in Soho, Manhattan, 2011. The space is called ‘We Work’ and is a combination of A fire in the forest clearing at the Blue Mountain A studio at the Blue Mountain Center office space and café, where members Center in the Adirondacks. The Blue Mountain in the Adirondacks. can come to work, hold meetings Center has a residency programme for artists, and have their mail delivered. writers and activists. I was there for 2 weeks during 2010. All accommodation and food was paid for. The residency is supported by a private foundation.

Issue #1 Labour 17 « Continued from page seventeen tivity in general from the artists and artworkers form of wage labour.’ While coming in a climate of back- Cultural work- this is a reference not to lash against workers (or any artistic labour per se, and social priority besides the ers are function- the ways it is economically well-being of financial insti- ing within false or theoretically valued, but tutions), and whether and to the increasingly ‘creative’ what kinds of alliances would dichotomies ideological component of all be necessary to make this kinds of exploitation, this possible? regarding the Equipment cupboard at the Contempo- does bring in the question W.A.G.E.: We define concept of work, rary Art Museum, Roskilde, Denmark, of the wider political horizon W.A.G.E.’s mission simply: 2011. The Museum currently has an within which the pragmatic cultural workers (visual speculative en- exhibition entitled Trauma 1–11 which demand for the institutional artists, performers, indepen- was organised with the now closed recognition of artistic labour dent curators, writers) must trepreneurial Copenhagen Free University, of which through artist fees should be be a part of the art institu- schemes based I took part (or was a part of/member of). situated. While the demand tion’s economic equation. itself is hard to disagree with, W.A.G.E.’s role in conscious- on a busines s in the present context capital ness-raising is to reconnect is trying to get out of paying with the systems that are model of profit anyone, which is part of the currently in-place, in which and/ or laws reason artistic labour is used cultural workers are posi- as a model for limitless (self-) tioned in relation to a labour of supply and exploitation. The history of model that’s disconnected demand Wages for Housework can and dispersed, a self-exploit- Studio at IASPIS in Stockholm. also be a reference here, ative “non-worker” model. I am trying to make photos for though it was formulated As Andre Gorz stated, “We the tendency of some of our a magazine where I hold a large at a time of a strong welfare must learn to cast a different peers and colleagues to be piece of cloth at the window. state compared to today. gaze upon work; to no longer dismissive of this reality But that can stay as a back- think of it as something one perpetuates the notion of drop for now. has or doesn’t have, but as artists-as-hobbyists asking what we do.” for special treatment. Our work doesn’t negate Cultural workers are Capital is trying to other formulas, dialogues, functioning within false paradigms, dreams and goals dichotomies regarding the get out of paying of alternate, and currently concept of work, speculative anyone, wh ich is practiced, economies. But the entrepreneurial schemes Bed at the apartment I rented cultural worker is removed based on a business model in Manhattan 2008/09. part of the reason from the particular economic of profit and/ or laws of supply relationship W.A.G.E. is and demand, when their artistic labour is highlighting, one that falsely production and presentation used as a model assumes that institutional models at the arts institution exposure equals a capitalist have no inherent relationship for lim it les s ( s elf- ) return on the free market; to those economic formula- this speculative burden tions. Both “cultural” and exploitation assumed by the art worker “capital” values currently in a collapsed economy has function within the cultural The question for W.A.G.E. less relevance than it did worker’s economic land- would be whether the current when there was a “robust” scape; but while cultural post-crash economic and economy. capital does not necessitate/ political climate has influ- Very often when visual guarantee the capital gain enced the idea of W.A.G.E. as artists, writers, performers of currency, capital-based a ‘capitalist project’ – in the and independent curators currency is still required times of a ‘jobless recovery’, present their work at art in exchange for survival. mass unemployment, attacks institutions (major and minor One of the variables that on the public sector and venues), both the labour leads to non-payment is that soaring profits, getting paid involved and the presentation most of the labour involved for your labour seems far itself go uncompensated by in exhibiting/ performing/ from essential to capitalism. the presenting institution. lecturing etc. precedes the Can you see a cultural or And yet our continued partic- event itself and is done on legislative change in the ipation in the marketplace is a voluntary basis, and it is support infrastructure of essential to it’s functioning; this contribution which is

18 Issue #1 Labour very difficult to monetize. historical experience was very contemporary artists But there is clearly wage-labour much one of the problematics … for the artist (individual, collaborators involved in the presentation of organizing artists as workers and collectives alike) and of art – art handlers are a case – as opposed, perhaps, to or ar t worker to independent curators produce in point, they get paid an hourly artworkers who could seek get paid not in a combination of ideas, situa- wage to install and de-install representation from other and tions and objects. Both the exhibitions. An artist fee is more established unions. It was ‘futures’ (capital, commercial and non-profit both symbolic and real about problems of collectivity, systems are presenting objects, compensation. but also about valuing labour symbolic or other- performances/ events and In any other free-market- (when are you ‘on the clock’?), w is e ) but in wages, installations, linking them place, the contribution that and trying to separate that inextricably in the marketplace artists make would be valued labour-value from how the so turning the art- of art sales, as well as in the as labour and would therefore artist’s work might or might marketplace of networking/ necessitate compensation. not function as a commodity in ist from a specula- exposure. A traditional studio We’re fighting to be compen- a market, and finally what kinds tor into a worker practice in which the artist/s sated as educators and of weapons were available for produce objects on their own producers in the non-profit, artists to protect the value of time, regardless of whether and public-private partnership their labour – withdrawal of I’m interested in the role or not they get exhibited, is arts economy. Institutions labour not being an option, ‘capital’ plays in the narrative, precisely the area of labour taking part in this economy although of course there were since there’s a difference that is challenging to remu- provide the public with a ‘Art Strikes’ but that was a between wages and capital, nerate. Why should the artist/s cultural experience which gesture with all kinds of other and part of the reason artists get paid for time spent volun- cannot exist without us – performative and political getting paid is politically and tarily making something which the cultural producers. Our implications. practically important is exactly was not commissioned, and cause recognizes that the W.A.G.E.: We frame our goal for the artist or artworker to who should be expected to rules played must be the ruled as ‘consciousness-raising’ get paid not in ‘futures’ (capital, pay them? But the time spent applied to everyone involved in because we must begin to see symbolic or otherwise) but in working with/ in an institution- this particular economic sector, ourselves as a community, to wages, so turning the artist what is presented at and for how to be paid within a system that, attach value to a holistic view from a speculator into a worker. long, and what the institutions by law, must compensate of that community. We’re W.A.G.E.: The artist is budgets are- can be measured the other labourers within it. highlighting the notion of the currently both a speculator and monetized. We know The traditional formula of self-regulating art institution and a worker – again, a duality, that artists and institutions “the worker” is fractured. as a strategy: consciousness not a dichotomy. We know there are mutually dependent. We’re acutely aware that regarding our vast and varied is a price for labour – identified cultural production and cultural economic realities as cultural as a “wage”; capital is the sum MV: From your research into capital are laden with “value”. workers must be recognized by of commodity values. So hard the Canadian artists union The question is, what kind of the board members, adminis- currency is currently traded situation, as well as other value? Cultural, economic, trators and staff of the art for “flesh and blood commodity” existing models in Scandinavia, psychological, societal, enter- institution. The art institutions in wages, as well as for the do you think a national legal tainment, historical? A scheme and the artist share a mutual objects of production. When framework – which you’ve in “futures” (as we know, a dependency, and that the commodity’s use-value advocated – ensuring a provi- dead artist is worth more than relationship has never been is of general utility, its share sion for artists’ fees in a live one!) is not viable. Art contemporarily clarified in of workforce remuneration institutional budgets – will be institutions worldwide present economic terms in contempo- is still necessitated at this flexible enough to apply across tens-of-thousands of indepen- rary terms. W.A.G.E. is building juncture even through a late- different scales of institution, dent curators, writers and an advocacy organization based capitalist transition. We need or is it intended for institutions artists annually via exhibitions, on something like CARFAC to start applying and under- above a certain size/ budget? performances, readings, panels, (Canadian Artists’ Representa- standing the multiplicity of As far as I know, many of these lectures, film/ video screenings tion), but of course recognizing terms available for our situation, compensation structures relate and other events. W.A.G.E. is in the socio-economic landscape like a corporacratic Post-Fordist to the hire and exhibition of active dialogue about payment of communities in the U.S. Walmartified cognitive capi- artists’ work – how would these practices and financial distribu- talist commons of general kinds of fee schedules apply tion by the arts institutions MV: One of the catchphrases intellect… to more ‘discursive’, transient within our communities. of W.A.G.E. is the idea of One could also argue that or socially multiple types of being paid in ‘capital value social practice and related practice? Doesn’t the question MV: How do you see W.A.G.E. for cultural value’. And from post-studio strategies make it of payment for artists’ and in the historical trajectory of what you say in your response, possible to quantify the actual artworkers’ work (rather than groups like the Art Workers the nature of this value is to time spent making the work, the sales of the products of Coalition (as a campaign) or be established locally and in which in a traditional studio this work) always end up back the UK Artists Union (as an each particular institution or practice is almost impossible at defining the nature of this organization)? I suppose that situation. I guess, like before, to measure. Today, most work? Continued on page twenty »

19

Issue #1 Labour « Continued from page nineteen W.A.G.E.: Any type of and looked through the The rules of Implicit fee schedule must relate AWC papers before starting to contemporary practices, W.A.G.E., and their list of the game being Horizon so an applicable and flexible demands was inspirational played must schedule should be in the writing of the wo/mani- Or, constructed by artists festo. We looked to AWC be the rules and institutions together. to see what results they got What We W.A.G.E. and Artists Space through what types of applied to in NYC are launching a actions. So at the onset we all t he players Talk About year-long collaborative looked to AWC for what to project that will do precisely do, as well as how we might of t hat game When We this. Our work with AS approach things differently. will provide framework for We’re very influenced by tual property, peer Talk About our WA.G.E. –certification the development of CARFAC production, copyleft, platform and other compo- and are interested in utilizing commons et al. relate to Painting Avigail Moss nents of support mechanisms some aspects of their repre- the kinds of questions you’re that W.A.G.E. can offer sentational, flexible and trying to raise, all these to cultural workers. continually evolving system being discourses that try to What do we talk about when we talk of support for visual artists. consider production outside about painting? Or rather, in what ways MV: Apart from the historical the wage-labour relation, and do artists think about painting, and examples of artists orga- MV: What’s your assessment the kinds of social relations how does this match the way their work nizing in their own interests of the prospects for legisla- it presupposes. So mainly it’s is received by their publics, by their after the model of worker’s tive change in the current a question about how you patrons, and by history? In a 2005 organizations which I raised economic and political see the different economies interview, art historian Katy Siegel and in the previous question, is environment, which seems within which artistic labour artist Mel Bochner presented a version the campaign inspired by to be characterized by functions, and what other of this question as well as one answer: other historical or current an austerity-era open kinds of economies can it examples which agitated season on workers’ rights? put into practice – something Siegel: Did you consider yourself on issues relating to equal W.A.G.E.: Right now, like e-flux’s Time/ Bank is a painter in the mid-1960s? How pay but which were also civil we’re developing a W.A.G.E.- perhaps a visible iteration did you perceive painting’s general rights struggles (like the certification platform in order of this in the art sphere. position at the time? ERA, but, more micropoliti- to implement self-regulatory W.A.G.E.: “Politics” (i.e. Bochner: I was trained as a painter, cally perhaps, the welfare institutional practices. We’re citizens tactics, militant and most of the artists of my genera- rights movement)? If so, focused on creating economic connectionism) and tion had a similar background. are these more political or formulations regarding the “economics” (i.e. systems Painting, as a way of thinking tactical inspirations? Do you arts community’s interdepen- of currency distribution) about the world, has always been see a relation to not just AWC dencies. We will explore continually create false the implicit horizon of my work.1 and the like, but e.g. Wages these possibilities this year, dichotomies and notions of for Housework? in order to implement ideological purity to fracture In one respect, Bochner evokes the W.A.G.E.: Yes, we see other a crucial and necessary and splinter how communi- horizon – one of painting’s metaphoric labour and civil rights models economic parity within ties and systems work dividing lines; the index of space and – both historical and current the arts institution. together with some sense depth upon which illusion and perspec- – as relevant, applicable and of congruity. Again, the rules tive rely. But in another, Bochner – an inspirational, which is why MV: You’ve said the W.A.G.E. of the game being played artist often associated with Conceptual we started W.A.G.E. We don’t campaign is not meant to must be the rules applied to Art of the 1960s and 1970s – also refers calculate whether they are ‘negate all other formulas, all the players of that game. to his own experiments of that period, “political” or “tactical” dialogues, dreams and goals So the formulas must be when he turned from painting to inspirations, or which one of alternate, and currently determined by both the measurements of spaces and serial movement is more important practiced, economies – players and those played  structures. That is, he construed his to any of us- there’s multi- some that would inherently practice through painting even when plicity and continual flux discount that very economic he did not explicitly paint. in how the work of activists relationships we’re high- This exchange offers a productive and cultural transformations lighting.’ Following from that, frame for describing a symposium on have influenced and are and again, not thinking of painting I co-organized with art histo- influencing our group. the wage and these other rian Kerstin Stakemeier in November AWC was highly moti- forms as mutually exclusive 2010 at the Jan van Eyck Academie in vating to our formation. We or antagonistic, how do you Maastricht, Netherlands. Entitling our went to the MoMA archives think the debates on intellec- — 1. Katy Siegel and Dawoud Bey, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975, New York: Independent Curators International, 2006, p. 58.

Issue #1 Labour 20 symposium, Painting – The Implicit Horizon, we relevance alongside, or counter to, popular and how is it established – internally or exter- invited ten discussants from Europe and North culture’s hold on viewer’s attention. For nally – by an artist, by public opinion, or in this America – four artists, four art historians, example, articles in a thematic issue of the case, by the state? And how do such influences and two critics – to address how painting, German art journal, Texte zur Kunst, “Painting affect the work itself? as a complex mode of production formed by is not the issue” (March 2010) charted painting In her talk “Painting’s Flat Support, Canvas cultural commitments, economies, and materi- as a kind of adjunct to Conceptual Art. Mean- and Screen,” scholar Esther Leslie examined alities, has always remained in the present as while David Joselit has proposed that recent painting’s material history. Citing Walter a primary limit for other artistic propositions.2 works present themselves as transitive devices Benjamin’s influential essay, “The Work of Art Why offer another academic discussion on for “…[suturing] spectators to extra-perceptual in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” painting? Innumerable writers and artists social networks rather than merely situating (1939) Leslie reflected on technological addressing painting’s position in art have them in a phenomenological relationship of advances in high-definition digital screens cited how Western painting has existed in a individual perception.” 3 That is, painting turns and liquid crystal displays, and asked where perpetual state of malaise since the eighteenth out to have had its finger on the progressive painting’s place was now, at a time when century, when art transformed from a religious social media pulse all along. Hollywood filmmakers like Michael Mann to a secular métier. In the early twentieth We wanted to provide a place for separate can call their films “digital painting.” Because century, Marcel Duchamp declared painting’s conversations such as these to encounter one painting still relies on the localized, phenom- impossibility in a note to himself, while others another, to see whether we could collectively enological experiences of individual viewers, like Aleksandr Rodchenko and Ad Reinhardt unpack some different ways of interpreting the it is excluded from cultural production’s respectively laid claims to having painted work of painting and the work of painters alike. material shifts, and appears, as G.W.F. Hegel the last painting – in both cases, definitive once described in his lectures on aesthetics negations: monochromes. Materialisms of the early nineteenth century, incapable Due to its portability, painting still functions of reflecting social truths. Digital media seem as a staple for museums and private collec- to make progress (that is, if planned obsoles- “ What role does tions. This versatility has always made painting cence can be considered progress) even as vulnerable to critics who call it the complicit they still rely on mimetic allegories to beguile quality play in commodity par excellence in capitalism. Yet, viewers. This discussion carried a host of as there is no scarcity of artists who paint, how important implications for artists: what an artist’s practice are artists and historians to account for this funding and institutional structures support continuing labour of painting? With issues the artist’s work, how do artists reflect on and how is it like this in mind we structured our first panel, these relationships, and what ideological established? entitled “Materialisms”, to look at how certain conflicts might be at stake. material and ideological structures have Artist Dierk Schmidt analysed such questions Since the 1960s, critics and art historians determined painting. in a presentation of his practice, asking like Yves-Alain Bois and Arthur Danto have Our first discussant, art historian Stephen whether contemporary forms of history also produced various requiems for painting, Eisenman, explored radical art historical painting can act as vehicles for critique. describing it as a material practice no longer scholarship in California in the 1970s and His investigations into the inconsistencies able to express collective truths. In these 1980s, surveying authors like T.J. Clark and narratives, painting becomes, for better or Otto Karl Werckmeister who interpret art as worse, an anachronistic activity forced to contingent upon histories of class relations. “ Because painting accept its own obsolescence in the face of These models have historically countered other ever more numerous artistic attitudes and interpretive methods that focus on internal still relies on forms. But others criticized such declamations metaphoric analogies between a work’s form as rhetorical, and invested in the idea of art and its content. Eisenman’s presentation the localized, as progress. For instance, curator Katy Seigel served as reminder that all interpretive models turned a revisionist eye to post-war painting’s come from somewhere, and that, like art, the phenomenological history in her exhibition at the National discipline of art history is bound by time and Academy Museum in New York, High Times, space. Also employing a materialist line, art experiences of Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975 (2006). historian Warren Carter surveyed the Federal individual viewers, Labouring to expand insular canonical limits, Arts Projects (1935–43): branches of the Works Siegel proposed works by African Americans, Progress Administration that employed artists it is excluded from women, and others whose practices were in the United States during the Great Depres- neglected by the ascendant art-cultural sion. His presentation of a period when the cultural production’s debates of the era around Minimalism and American government granted artists relative Conceptual Art in New York. Meanwhile, still financial security introduced a question: what material shifts, others have argued for painting’s continued role does quality play in an artist’s practice — — and appears 2. Symposium discussants were: Carol Armstrong (Yale University, 3. David Joselit, “Painting Besides Itself”, OCTOBER 130, USA), Jo Baer (Amsterdam, NL), Warren Carter (Richmond Fall 2009, pp. 125–134. University, UK), Helmut Draxler (Merz Academy, DE), Stephen incapable of Eisenman (Northwestern University, USA), Elisabeth Lebovici (Paris, FR), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College, UK), Ulrike Müller (New York, USA), Dierk Schmidt (Berlin, DE), Amy Sillman (New reflecting social York, USA). truths.

Issue #1 Labour 21 between political situations and image ...“Talking about ‘office wives’?” production question whether paintings can offer legible translations – of text or context to image – and what this means for his agency as an artist. For instance, in a minutely researched, two-part work intended for – but censored from – a group show in Kunstverein Münster entitled Questionnaire to H. von Pierer (1998), Schmidt interrogated how the museum’s corporate support from Siemans AG, a powerful multinational conglomerate, undermined partici- pating artists by usurping their works to pad a nominally philanthropic  Kaisa Lassinaro talks to director Lizzie Borden corporate image. about the film ‘Born in Flames’ (1983) Painting as the medium Our first panel set the tone for our What set you off to make Born in Flames the music and dialogue to create a cacophony second panel, entitled “Counterpoints – in 1977? of voices – because there never was one Painting as the medium.” Here we I realised that there was big divide between unified voice.A s Flo Kennedy (as Zella Wylie) questioned how the perennially uttered feminists; white feminists and black women says in the film, “Who would you rather death of painting related to an artist’s who would not describe themselves as femi- see come through the door, one lion or five identity – and how an artist’s identity nists. There was no dialogue among blacks, hundred mice?” I wanted the women to might correspond with painting’s Hispanics, and white women, politically and be those mice because there’s strength in relation with, or ambivalence to, socially. So I decided that I wanted to create numbers. The multiplicity of voices meant other media. a situation, a film, which would bring all of that all the voices were significant.A ll the Evoking works by Helen Frankenthaler these women together, to see if there was women were after the same things – even and Sigmar Polke, art historian Carol common cause. I wanted to set it in a science if their music was different and they spoke Armstrong argued in favor of recursive fiction context because it wasn’t happening about issues differently. art historical models. She proposed at the moment. I wanted to create a world a history where binary oppositions in which it was possible – because I wanted How did you end up getting the Red Crayola and between painting and photography to see it myself. The Bloods tracks in the film? Were you involved no longer obtained, where painting, “… in the music scene in New York? the art of pushing materials around The music’s very prominent in the film; In New York at the time everybody was on something that is notionally a two can you tell us about its role? working together. Mayo Thompson, from dimensional surface in order to suggest I wanted the music to be part of the different The Red Crayola, was part of a conceptual something in the mind of the painter voices that all of the women use, because group, Art and Language, which Katherine and then its viewers,” was its own each of them has a different way of speaking Bigelow worked with. That’s how I met Mayo, history, and photography was its and style of music. I wanted the music to who wrote the song, “Born in Flames.” Becky alchemical and philosophical child. clash, to overlap, to create energy and dyna- Johnston who, along with Kathryn and Pat Explicit in her presentation was that mism in the film. InR adio Regazza, Adele’s Murphy, plays one of the three Socialist Youth a viewer’s circumstances affect their rhyming and rhetoric was part of the music; group editors, was living in the same building interpretations of art, and therefore when Honey broadcast on Phoenix Radio, as Adele Bertei. That’s how I met Adele – who (as Armstrong has described elsewhere) her messages were rapped and couched in is part of the film as an actor and as part of a viewer need not encounter a work the lyrics of the music she played. I wanted The Bloods. Adele introduced me to Pat Place, as being only “…of [its] time.” 4 Following Armstrong’s lecture, artist Amy Sillman presented her intellectual thought may be riddled with paradoxes and Artist Jo Baer further unpacked such questions influences: Japanese writing, comics, prohibitions but this is also precisely what makes in a video representing thirty-five years of her improvisational jazz, Abstract Expres- engaging with its history all the more profound. work. Baer’s multifaceted painting practice sionist painting and experimental films Critic Elisabeth Lebovici confronted painting’s spans – one might even say expands – generic by artists like Jack Smith. For Sillman, embodiment by reminding us that painting boundaries of terms like Minimalism, feminism, such historical signs are fit for retrieval discourses are still determined by local contexts, and what Baer has called “radical figuration.” and inhabitation; and like Armstrong, whether they are European, Anglo-Saxon or South Speaking to us via a faulty Skype connection, she sees painting not as an ahistorical American. Presenting the example of eighty-seven Baer offered proof of the way an artist must soup of disembodied images but as year old Hungarian-born French painter Vera account for duration and distance in her practice. a crucial human resource – evidence Molnar, Lebovici discussed duration in painting of localized, embodied thought. This and the age – as in date of birth – of an artist, Illusions of the Real — as well as the valences of achievement – a term On our third and final panel, we addressed 4. Carol Armstrong, “All-Time Favorites: Carol Armstrong on Paul Cézanne”, Artforum, used to describe the passage of time as much the terms Realism and Illusionism: two ideas Summer 2011, pp. 87–90. as the realization of an artist’s work. that pace the divide between description and

22

Issue #1 Labour who also became involved in the film. Down- she borrowed my big old car for the scene. for other proofs. He offered Leon town New York at the time was a small world, The film, art, and music worlds were inter- Battista Alberti’s theory of painting like the Wild West. There was still sand on twined then, which made collaboration as an episteme ripe for re-investigation, the beaches. That’s where I shot some of the possible. pointing out that the metaphor of Algerian scenes. We all loved and hated the painting as a window stemmed from World Trade Center. It was such a big phallic It took five years to make the film; can you tell us an art historical misconception. Rather symbol, a natural target. The last shot of my about its making and how you got people involved than a window opening onto the Real, film is the blowing up of the transmission in it? painting framed a stage of drama, tower of the World Trade Center, not the Yes, it took five years because of the way of tableau. Thus, Draxler posited that entire building. I am truly horrified about I made it. It started with a question – why are rather than asking how painting could what happened and filled with grief it’s no women so segregated from each other? I did represent the Real through its illusions, longer there. not know black women, Hispanics, many a more important question would be, Many of the people in Born in Flames were Asian people. There were hardly any in the “what can painting represent as art?” involved in the art, music and the film worlds. art world. So I recruited women from lesbian Similar to Draxler, artist Ulrike Müller Scott and Beth B, Nan Goldin, Jim Jarmusch, bars, sought women out everywhere, asked also presented painting as a relational Bette Gordon, so many others. If you went to if they wanted to be in the movie. I asked form. She prefaced her lecture entitled, the Mudd Club, you’d run into them, and women playing basketball at the local YMCA, “Very Abstract and Really Figurative,” by they’d become involved in one way or another. where I found the woman who played suggesting that abstraction and figura- Some of the actors were in other directors’ Adelaide Norris. Many women started in tion, once in opposition to one another, movies – Adele, Pat Place, Ron Vawter (from the film, but quit. The ones who stayed could both be expanded beyond their The Wooster Group.) There was such great ended up being the main characters. binary positions to describe the way synergy and so much activity. We all helped I think there are two ways of making a humans relate to objects and to one each other. When Kathryn Bigelow made her movie – inductive and deductive. A deductive another. Müller figures this link in her first movie, of two guys beating each other up, movie is where you have a script and follow it. studio works – baked enamel paintings on steel – as well as in her recent collaborative work as co-organizer with Celeste Dupuy-Spencer of a life drawing collective, “Friends of the Fine Arts” (FFARTs). Describing FFARTs’s activities, Müller explained how participants take turns drawing one another, effectively decentering the inequity of the artist/ model working relationship and challenging canonical injunctions of mastery.

Postscript The symposium skated around the tensions and ambiguities inherent in painting – painting as object, as context, as discourse. But ultimately the implicit element in the Implicit Horizon was the figure of the painter itself: an individual still adhering to aspects of the artisanal even while the division of labor has long Images from the book ‘Born in Flames’, Occasional Papers, 2011 permeated art practices. So what kind of questions should we pose to the painter in a time when some painters narration, chronicle and chronicler, and carry function as creative directors running formal as well as political implications. We asked: studios, while other painters incorpo- How have questions of the Real in painting rate painting as only one part of their moved away from discussion of representation practice? How should we distinguish and towards discussions of enactment? the day-to-day work of the painter from In his talk, “Return of the Proof,” art historian the work of all artists; the painter who, Helmut Draxler explored how painting provides like all artists, ultimately faces the a frame for negotiating relationality. He showed tension between choice and exigency? how histories of Modernism and the avant-garde posited by authors from Clement Greenberg to Rosalind Krauss offered a unilinear account of Avigail Moss is an artist and writer. In 2009–10 painting’s end. Draxler argued that in order to she was a researcher in residence at the Jan van resist such teleological endgames, one must Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands, and is currently an MA candidate in the History of Art Hendrik Gerrits and Cristina Gómez Barrio posing during a interrogate other discursive realities, make space at University College London. life drawing session organized by Friends of the Fine Arts and dedicated to “bible studies”, Brooklyn, November 2009. 23

Issue #1 Labour daring, had the most to gain and the most to lose – the most energy because they needed to be heard. (There were actually two major issues dividing the feminist world at that time – the relationship to gay women and the relationship to pornography. I didn’t address pornography in Born in Flames, but later, in Working Girls.)

How do you see Born in Flames today? Do you find it still relevant? It’s interesting and depressing to me that the same issues that existed back then have not gone away. Some of these issues still make me as angry as they made me back then. Anger and frustration fueled my making of Born In Flames. I wanted to stir up people, create an agit-prop. That’s why I pushed the women’s actions to the point « Continued from page twentythree of armed resistance. I wanted to present Proceeding inductively is the opposite. What was the relationship between feminist the whole range of choices – peaceful It’s not like a documentary, where you go groups and gay and lesbian groups at the time? revolution, change through the printed entirely in the direction your subjects lead At that time in New York, there was major word, the spoken or sung word, and when you. In inductive filmmaking, you don’t conflict within the mainstream feminist all of that failed, presenting the possibility have a script, you start with an idea and let movement about the presence of gay and that one might have to use force. the film evolve from there. That’s howB orn lesbian groups – they were afraid that When I see the film again – which I did in Flames was made – and why it took so lesbians would alienate women across after reading the graphic novel – it’s hard long. I had no money and could never spend the country, prevent them from supporting for me to look at technically. I’m very critical of it, but, in all, I’m amazed at the creativity of the women in it, and the creativity of their music. That wasn’t me, that was my being an anthropologist, going out into the world and bringing these women together. It was their collective more than $100 for a shot at one time. We the Equal Rights Amendment, which the energy that created the film, it was bigger would go out and improvise a scene, which mainstream feminists were fighting for. than the sum of its parts. But what aston- would serve as the foundation for the next So they distanced themselves from lesbian ishes me the most is that the film appears scene. I’d look at it on the editing machine, groups, which created a lot of controversy. to be relevant to a younger generation then write a script based on what we’d shot. I never became involved with mainstream of women. I couldn’t be more pleased, We’d then go out and shoot it again. It’s feminism, represented by Ms. Magazine, although it means that the same problems kind of funky, since so many people in the which was a great magazine but didn’t and issues are still here to be resolved  film are non-actors playing themselves for address everyone’s issues. Mainstream the most part. Some of the things they say feminists are represented in my film by and do are what they’d do. We shot where the three women who run the socialist they really lived; we placed them in “real” newspaper. Lizzie Borden is a filmmaker and writer living in Los Angeles. demonstrations. The fictional parts, obvi- I felt that the lesbians were most margin- ously, are when they arm themselves, alized, which is why I made them the most Kaisa Lassinaro is a designer living in London. Her illustrated transcript of ‘Born in Flames’ steal trucks, blow up buildings, etc. radical in the film. They were the most is out now on occasionalpapers.org

24

Issue #1