The Edge of Precarity: art-work, productivity, & public funding

With manufacturing in the West being mechanized and outsourced, economic surplus-value has been taken over by work in the service industry. The recent economic shift, in which the worker’s entire existence is consumed by pressures of self- optimization and exploitation, has as much an effect on artists as it does on other service positions. This cruel reality combined with the unpaid and often short-term work available to artists is becoming increasingly precarious. With a goal of the abolition of work, which can only successfully take form as a communal effort, artists must first recognize their exploitation and restructure their practice accordingly.

What does precarity Why don’t artists ______mean? ______get paid?

Most artists cannot live exclusively off of Artists do not get paid a wage for their studio gallery sales. In fact, according to a 2018 study work or intellectual labor, and rarely expect to. done by The Creative Independent, only 21% of They are expected to work within an economically- artists even found gallery sales helpful to viable market, either producing goods or sustaining their practice. Rather, 61% engage in reproducing labor in order to finance their freelance or contracted work to support their additional work of a studio practice. Their studio studio practice in the form of internships, work is ineligible for waged labor for many reasons adjunct professorships, and short-term work which including the perception of productivity in is low-paying and unstable. In an economy in which contemporary economies, the assumed autonomy of wage-labor is the precarious norm, this leaves the art production, and the immateriality of art- artist without security in the workforce. labor. If we accept wage-labor as a norm (which I do not), Since the industrial era, work has been gauged by who pays for artwork? its economic productivity, which distinguished There is an initial discrepancy concerning who art “work” from unproductive art. Despite economic benefits: the public or the individual. This productivity becoming increasingly speculative, discrepancy within capitalism has distinct art is still perceived as being located outside of consequences on how art is valorized. If art is the world of work. Art’s assumed autonomy, for the individual who creates it, then they are simplified by neo-liberalism as the ability to deemed responsible for the risk of substituting survive the open market, has been met with financial compensation with autonomous working processes of industrialized deregulation and conditions. Alternatively, if art is for the cutbacks in social spending that have spread public, it should be publicly funded. The across the globe since the Reagan/Thatcher era. publicness of art is undoubtable, yet there However, art-work ranges beyond the production of remains a justification for this and other a product that can survive the market. Project feminized labor to remain unvalorized. work that makes up most of art-work includes The imperialist ideology of productivity, that criticism, aesthetic judgement, deconstruction, which rejects the artists’ work as productive, interpretation, and installation to shape the justifies and fetishizes the artists’ precarity production and post-production of an artwork. The through the myth that creativity is spawned immateriality of knowledge production and project through suffering and pain. This ideology combined work that defines art-work has contributed to the with the post-recession service economy in the dichotomy of art and work and has kept art-work United States has led artists to new levels of located outside of the capitalist value process. exploitation.

What happens when artists Why should artists ______don’t get paid? ______get paid?

If artists’ labor isn’t even recognized as work, The immaterial labor that produces cultural what do they do? Self-optimization and archetypal content has been stolen from artists in the form forms of subjectivity have convinced artists that of unpaid and underpaid “opportunities” and anyone can “make it” if they work hard enough. through the cultural commodification of the arts. Capitalism has encompassed the workers’ In response, there have been several attempts to personality and subjectivity within the production decommodify art since the 1950s, with each of value, making these areas exposed to the movement being reappropriated by the markets. constant pressure of economic optimization. Conceptual art successfully established that Artists often self-exploit in their quest for instead of solely being measured by material optimization through attending universities, production, art’s social value should be working for free in cultural institutions, and recognized using scales of social productivity. offering freelance curation. This investment in Performance and video art undermined the standard human capital, coinciding with debt, travels of object production, while process-based and through time and drives the artist to further feminist art recognized labor exploitation. levels of exploitation. Contemporary art, that which engages in active The largest cultural institutions are ecstatically decommodification and self-criticality, is a form staffed by unpaid interns. This cycle of of communication generating publicness. This work exploitation disguises itself as an “investment” superimposes “material” with “social” and in their career that will one day provide them “cultural” production that benefits the public by with financial security. However, the insecurity confronting the structures that control society. amongst cultural workers simply limits the The public depends on cultural institutions to perspectives and voices of criticality that are produce and output content and information. This necessary for contemporary art to have any meaning information comes from artists. These institutions in society. It leaves the heavy task of social disperse artists’ labor and allow art-work to critique in the hands of the few who can afford to recycle knowledge production (as resource and work in an industry that remains unvalorized. product) within viewers. The concept that art does Having an élite cultural industry led by the few not have nor generate use-value denies the onsets a deadening of information, corruption, and critical proximity and interdependence of commodification of cultural and knowledge contemporary art to the production of meaning and production. This trajectory, in which creative and criticality within society. immaterial work goes unpaid, will undoubtedly push The public must support artists so that they can the realm of work to incorporate more and more of continue the work of critique, because the work of what was once deemed private. critique never ends.

Restructuring the system: Role of this exhibition: ______abolition of work ______The Edge of Precarity

Just as dematerialization in conceptual art The artists included in this exhibition: Stephanie projected the serviceization of the U.S. economy, Cayer, Sarah Grisham, Gabrielle Constantine, and post-object art forms (such as performance) Sarah Hayward use their positions as artists to forecast a shift to self-performance as the investigate how privilege, self-exploitation, and evaluative performance of all labor. overwork manifest itself in the artist. This Abolishing work and the structures that define exhibition reflects on the sufferings of creative productivity is essential to restructuring the workers and antagonizes artists’ fluidity and artist’s role within society. The artist’s precarity within the current U.S. economy. exploitation and insecurity can easily be This show is necessary to explain that artistic attributed to the “lack of jobs”, however wage- work is socialized and is as much subjected to labor remains the foundational error. economic, political, and social conditions as work To abandon wage-labor and the structures of in general. By valorizing art-work, we can exploitation that accompany work, social and understand and see the value in other unpaid work. feminized labor must first be recognized as modes of production. Once elevated to the neo-liberal “supreme moral duty” of work, art-work can surpass commodification as a tool of socialization and initiate dematerialization and the end of “work”. The public can be driven to work by desires instead of external demands by establishing a universal basic income, transforming the selfish individuals formed by capitalism into a communal and creative public. Yet public funding for artists has plummeted and the current administrations’ attempts to completely de-fund the NEA puts “Political visions are fragile. They appear and are lost artists at risk. This makes opting out of the again. Ideas formulated in one generation are frequently forgotten, or repressed, by the next; goals which seemed precarious U.S economy even more threatening for necessary and realistic to progressive thinkers one era are individual artists and leaves only the option of shelved as visionary and utopian by their successors. a communal restructuring. Aspirations which find voice in certain periods of radical What role do artists have in initiating a post- endeavor are stifled, or even wholly silenced, in others. work revolution? And what kind of artwork will The history of all progressive movements is littered with such half-remembered hopes, with dreams that have failed.” lead the way? BARBARA TAYLOR – EVE AND THE NEW JERUSALEM