Professional practice - labor and capital

It’s the economy stupid!  That famous behind the scenes campaign phrase coined by Presidential advisor James Carville, and which fueled Bill Clinton’s road to the White House, should be tacked on every artist’s wall or stuck to the fridge.  As if artists needed a reminder of the odds of making it big – might as well buy into the lotto – or even, sadly, making a living.

W.A.G.E. (working artists and the greater economy) strives to draw attention to economic inequalities that exist in the arts, and to resolve them. 

Based on the premise that artists provide a work force and advocates for supporting institutions to pay for work costs associated with preparation, installation, presentation, consultation, exhibition and reproduction, they lobby against the exploitation of artists and demand equality.  They are working toward developing a more inclusive environment of mutual respect between artists and institutions.    

Working within a system which encourages and promotes exposure as currency, inherently devalues the very work it’s purporting to champion, and is tantamount to holding up the trope of the starving artist – the romantic and mysterious starving artist as a viable option for success – that figurative and literal idea that we’re all willing to die for our art, compensation be damned!  Compensation – what a base and common notion to be bothered with when creating brilliant art.

Collectively, artists are our own worst enemies, because, truth be told, we are willing to work for free.  But this mold is set by academia.  As young artists struggle to get their art noticed, to get shown, each next step that seems to move them up the ladder to more recognition, greater gallery prestige, larger markets, they sacrifice fair payment, forego certain associated costs, and tell themselves that one day – when they’re famous – they’ll be compensated for their art.  If an artist can determine their priorities – where one comes from, what do you really want – art and life, work and life.  These are things are connected if you consider it the art itself and set it up to empower yourself. 

The idea of the Fordist model – that the artist is producing a thing – is counter to what Apple’s approach is.  There you have the freedom to work from home, to surf the web, to not wear suits or heels, to access all the meaning in the world online – it’s the freedom to work all the time.  The idea that you're available to work all the time and should work all the time.  The idea of constraint vs. freedom, awareness vs. tools, labor vs. capital is inherent in the Apple model.  You get trapped in the ‘work is a real downer/don’t worry, be happy binary. 

The question every artist should ask is:  Why subjugate oneself to a system that is based on devaluing the person and the work?  And then, what are you willing to do about it?

             

Refusal

ICI, a consortium of international curators, is a curatorial organization that doesn’t have an affiliation with a particular museum. It is an open-source curatorial model that any institution can take part in. ICI has been touring the Creative Time exhibition Living as Form to various international venues, including the Technion, a university in Israel. The installation of the exhibition at the Technion was met with a public letter of protest and boycotts from artists, because the university researches and develops drones that attack the West Bank and Gaza. Boycotts sometimes help reveal underlying politics to artists and the art world, but they also raise the question of whether it is more effective to show controversial art in spaces with contested politics, or to withdraw. Another recent boycott was of Manifesta 10, being held in St. Petersburg, because of Russia’s discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ citizens. While these are very different issues, each prompted boycotts and refusals for political and ideological reasons. In protests, it can be argued that one side claims ethical superiority. In the case of the show in Israel, it could be said that the West knows best and is ethically and morally “superior” to the East. This can be problematic because it can translate to a superior attitude towards cultures that aren’t your own.

In recent years there have been many examples of refusal in which artists withdrew from exhibitions because they disagreed with the practices of the hosting institution. These include the Sydney Biennale, which was funded by a private prison company, as well as the Louvre and Guggenheim Museums in the UAE. A group of artists and activists led by Walid Raad were active in an organized boycott of the Guggenheim. Other artist protests include Gulf Labor and the 2011 Sharjah Biennial. Lee Lozano’s refusal to stay in the art world culminated in her last work, the Dropout Piece.

In all of these instances, artists were faced with the decision to participate or withdraw, and had to determine whether it would be better to participate and show their work as an act of protest, or to withdraw from the exhibition and protest in the form of a boycott. Artists whose work is political are often faced with issues of participation and refusal. One has to determine on a case-by-case basis whether to show work in specific institutions. If showing the work engages people and moves the conversation about such issues forward it can be a useful strategy. One must be aware that this decision can also be misconstrued as being in support of unethical institutions and practices if care is not taken to dispel this notion. In my own practice I will, no doubt, be required to make such decisions in the future; I can think of instances in which either response would be appropriate.

Image Object Thing

In Joshua Simon and Noam Yuran’s lecture, Neomaterialism, they discuss the regime of no meaning, that all materials have a spirit, and that in this society there is commodity of all things. They discuss the dematerialization over the past 4 decades of currency, things, and art. Symbols behave like materials. Money rules, money communicates. There is an anonymity to all stuff. Fewer things carry a sense of place or otherness, due to globalism (when all of the stuff, even the souvenirs, are made in the same place). How do we find something that has human meaning, or thingness? Old things and vintage things carry the last senses of thingness and traces of place.

If we define the object of our time, it would be the iPad, because it occupies the space between thingness and nothingness. We can touch it, but it contains virtual information, so it rests somewhere in between. The existence of things is an effect of money, in the drive to accumulate. But, things are only ephemeral effects. Money and the movement of money is the ultimate reality of everything in society.

More things become private property and private property is actually a social relation because it exists for the other people to see rather than for the owner. So, something that is social appears under the guise of being material. Simon and Yuran argue that private property is really just in relation to others. Brand names guarantee the thingness and value the “real,” therefore they are made of money. But even money has changed from being material to non-material because it isn’t linked to gold anymore.

How does this relate to the art object? Dematerial art is conceptual art. The conceptual art object is scarce because it is expensive. Dematerialization of the art object is about the idea, not the object: the idea is the primary thing regardless of the physical fact. 

“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’” – Lucy Lippard (Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972)

Right of Refusal

As the line between art and politics becomes increasingly blurred and the ongoing debate intensifies about the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, more artists are exercising their right to refuse participation in certain exhibits or spaces.  To young, struggling artists, this represents a dilemma of walking a fine line that is fraught with personal and professional peril.  The assigned readings on this issue and from class discussion, indicate that the politically motivated collectives do have an impact when the collective stays strong and works together. 

The costs to successful artists to take action, to set themselves apart and refuse – to stand behind their convictions – may be easier to bear than for lesser known artists, and their lack of participation could also cost the gallery more.  It would seem the greater the name recognition of the artist, the greater the strength of the collective, the greater impact their refusal might have.  Does it take less courage for a successful artist to refuse participation?

One of my classmates, exasperated with end of the semester work load expressed big plans for the future, “I can’t wait to get out of here, produce amazing art work and become a famous artist!”    And I wonder, on this journey to fame and possible fortune, what the possible ‘right of refusal’ might cost that promising and desired career. 

In my own practice, I have refused to participate in an Austin, Texas gallery panel discussion and accompanying exhibit because my documentary work from Afghanistan and Iraq would have been shown alongside the work of President George W. Bush’s personal White House photographer, Eric Draper.  We were to lead the panel and also speak separately on our photography.

                                             

It’s no secret of my liberal-leaning politics – in fact, I refused an assignment to be embedded with the U.S. troop on the invasion of Iraq because I didn’t believe in the war and didn’t want to glorify war or the military with my photography.  The photographer who went in my place, whose scruples apparently weren’t a problem, won the Pulitzer Prize.  There is sometimes a very dear price to be paid to exercise your artist’s right of refusal and have the courage to stand by your convictions.

Post-Internet Art

Ah…the currency of clicks!  The marketing tool for post-internet art.  Love it, hate it, networked technologies have influenced the way art is viewed, produced, researched, and purchased.  Huge corporations have altered the way they do business and present information based on those all-important clicks.  And how do those flashes of pseudo acceptance and approval affect artists?  If work is presented online, say Instagram and/or Facebook, and it gets substantial "Likes" does the artist gravitate to producing only that kind of art?  Based on the online validation of a particular style of work or presentation, couldn't that also serve as a kind of censorship of art that isn't "Liked" as much?

In Art in America Magazine, Brian Droitcour discussed the controversy of the term and the art.  “Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what ‘Post-Internet’ means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision.  “I know it when I see it” – like porn, right?  It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex – renders it lurid. “ 

Post-internet art has even become a punch line on a TV show about art, “Touching the Art.”  Artist and comedian Casey Jane Ellison hosts the show, coincidentally running not on any broadcast television network, but rather…wait for it, the online Ovation YouTube channel.  The Los Angeles Times article about the show described the round-table format of it in which, Ellison – feigning cluelessness in a seductive shade of inky purple lipstick – grills a panel of guests about subjects such as the relevance of art school, the objectification of women and the possible meaning of the phrase “post-Internet.”  Ever the comedian, Ellison pronounced, “post-net is so annoying to say out loud.”

While the internet functions not only as an equalizing factor in distribution and opportunity to view, it nevertheless, defaults to a somewhat distorted presentation of art online given the possible nuanced changes in colors, the flattening of images, and the lack of interactive human experience.  But it’s interesting to consider artists’ relationships with the internet and objects – are they making art online or making art after going online. 

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-touching-the-art-series-casey-jane-ellison-20141201-column.html

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/

Post-Internet art

In a post-Internet age, the Internet is no longer novel. Specifically, post-Internet art doesn’t need to exist online, which was the case with Net art, a term that was coined when the internet was new and could be used as a defining characteristic of artwork that engaged this new technology. In the past, New Media was defined by specific technology. Post-Internet art differs in that we are all transformed by the Internet. It is not separate and relegated to a certain technology, like Net art was.

Now that the Internet has pervaded our lives to the point of saturation, most artists are operating in a post-Internet context, where the use of the Internet for art research, production, and distribution is taken for granted. Post-Internet art is produced with an awareness of the social and information networks in which it is created and viewed. Some of the issues that have arisen as a result of our post-Internet culture include issues of originality, appropriation, and attention as currency (just getting views online has value because people take time to watch videos or look at it and it becomes part of the larger culture and has value based on popularity).

In my own work, the Internet serves as an archive of material to be researched, discovered, and repurposed in order to create new narratives. This is the post-Internet descendant of Duchamp’s readymade: a vast network of information that can be carefully mined and edited to create new juxtapositions and meanings.

“Beginnings + Ends,” Frieze issue 159 (Nov/Dec 2013)

Artists, writers, and curators discuss post-Internet art:

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/beginnings-ends/

Article from the NY Times about post-Internet art’s relationship to the art market:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/arts/international/post-internet-art-waits-its-turn.html

Curatorial Practice

In Jeffrey Kipnis’ essay, “Who’s Afraid of Gift-Wrapped Kazoos?” he warns of the dangers of curating an exhibition in order to educate the audience. Once the exhibition verges into the didactic, it tells viewers what to think, rather than provoking questions and opening up a space for viewers to respond (think/see/feel) from their own particular perspective. Kipnis describes curating as a cultural practice that should “affect us, change us, stimulate us to think and see and hear and feel differently,” not one that should educate. “Once something teaches you something,” he says, “it thinks for you.” Instead, the exhibition should prod the viewer think for him/herself.

Although Kipnis is describing the process of selecting existing works (in particular architecture) and displaying them in a gallery or museum, I am interested in how this cultural practice of curating is adopted and deployed by the artist to create a new work in the form of an exhibition. The same rule applies: the exhibition should elicit a personal response from the viewer, rather than delivering an educational message. Many artists have borrowed the tools of the curator to create installations out of found and/or made objects. Mark Dion comes to mind as an example of an artist who takes the museum as his medium, and combs through the collection to extract artifacts of natural and human history, which he then recontextualizes by placing them in an exhibition together. His installations do not educate, but open up the possibility of new insights by making the viewer question the connections between the disparate objects that have now been placed in juxtaposition.

The exhibitions created by Group Material in the 1980s and early 90s are particularly interesting to me as examples of how artists can collect, create, and curate work dealing with social or political issues. Their exhibitions borrow the formal language of a documentary exhibition, complete with didactics and catalogs, but are not limited to the role of educating; on the contrary, they challenge and provoke the viewer. Borrowing the role of the curator allows an artist to participate in the practice of creating new cultural meaning by bringing disparate elements together in a space, and prompting the audience to make connections between them.

Article on Group Material’s curatorial and aesthetic practice:

“Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Alison Green, Afterall 26 (Spring 2011)

http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.26/citizen-artists-group-material