Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor and Economics, at SPACES through January 15, isn’t an exhibition, exactly. It’s something way bigger and more important. That it really exists beyond SPACES’ white-cube gallery, and will outlast its brief appearance there, is part of the reason why.
Produced by the Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer), Art Work is a Marxist-leaning website and a 40-page, tabloid-sized newspaper (printed at the Plain Dealer press) whose theme is the very real problem of making art and making a living as an artist in the United States during a great recession.
Articles by artists, critics, activists and academics offer strategies for sustainable artistic production within the current capitalist system (translation: enabling artists to earn enough to pay the rent); and new models of production that subvert or circumvent altogether an art market and “nonprofit” arts sector controlled, as the trio sees it, by the elites who run museums, corporations and foundations. (If you think all this Marxist mumbo-jumbo sounds a bit dated, then recall how Masters of the Universe-sized greed largely brought on our current recession.)
Most important, though, Art Work’s contributors, explicitly or not, challenge America’s somewhat backward notions about artists and what they do all day – misperceptions that directly effect how artistic labor is valued and compensated. (Consider that very few artists become moneymaking art stars, and fame is not the best barometer of talent or innovative creativity.) As Temporary Services puts it: “Why don’t we [Americans] think being an artist is a ‘real job’?”
But why pose that question in a newspaper, a dying medium? Perhaps one reason is that the newspaper is the direct descendent of colonial gazettes and pamphlets, America’s first widely distributed form of democratic free speech. Perhaps we’re supposed to ponder what its disappearance means to a democratic society. Another reason may be that Art Work can be mass-distributed throughout the 50 states and Puerto Rico, without huge expense, for use in homegrown exhibitions and discussions.
What’s on view at SPACES – it could be called an “installation,” for lack of a better term – offers a model for the Art Work exhibitions that Temporary Services wants creative types to host across the country. Each page of the newspaper is duct-taped to the wall at eye-level; bundles of papers are scattered across the gallery, waiting for visitors to grab a few. Ready-to-mail packages of the newspaper, addressed to art spaces across the United States, sit on a table. The glowing screen of a lone computer beckons: it’s Art Work, the website, which offers postings of related happenings. (The collective is urging others to take on the task of an international edition.) The installation here, and wherever else it might be replicated, is merely a stage for discussions about how capitalist economies, particularly ailing ones, influence art-making and the valuation of artistic labor – and how to subvert these influences.
For the past 11 years, Temporary Services has developed an art practice focused on social justice, “mutually beneficial” creative collaborations that spread around opportunities but subvert the art market, and the production of mostly free brochures, events, lectures and exhibitions. For example, Prisoners’ Inventions, a brilliant show that traveled across America and Europe from 2003 to 2007, was the result of a collaboration with Angelo, a California inmate who also happens to be a draftsman. It featured Angelo’s detailed ink drawings (with explanatory notes), an exact replica of his cell, re-creations of the inventions (which ranged from a booze still to mini-lathe), and videos that showed how several were made. Prisoners’ Inventions rocked our ideas about prisoners and what constitutes creative labor.
If recent polls are accurate, the demand for creative labor – or at least paid creative labor—is on the downturn. Artists should be abuzz about Art Work. A 2008 report from the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that artists are unemployed at twice the rate of other professional workers. (The majority of working artists are college-educated and thus considered “professionals,” at least by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) In fact, there was a 63 percent increase in artist unemployment from 2007 to 2008. A new survey of 5,300 American artists conducted by Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a national artist-support nonprofit, found that more than half reported a decrease in art-related income from 2008 to 2009; almost one in five saw their earnings plunge by 50 percent or more. Two-thirds reported that they hold two or more jobs but earned less than $40,000 in 2008, and almost half lack adequate health insurance.
However, Pulitzer-winning art critic Holland Cotter, among others, carries a bright torch in this gray landscape of newsprint and grim statistics. Art Work includes his must-read article (reprinted from the New York Times), in which he claims that day jobs aren’t necessarily a bad thing because the work gets artists’ head out of the insular art world and into different experiences. And, if nobody’s buying art, then artists, no longer pressured to produce for an art-market assembly line, are free to experiment.
Some contributors offer strategies for resisting the art market and nonprofit funding systems. Models for resistance include artist Nicolas Lampert’s brief history of the 1930s-era Artist’s Union, which staged demonstrations against the Whitney and the Federal Art Project, and artist-writer Gregory Sholette’s recounting of the Art Worker’s Coalition (1969-1971) which, in its brief life, demanded that artists deserved royalties from the resale of their works and that museums offer free admission to everyone. Promising strategies include OurGoods, a network of artists and designers that barters skills, objects and spaces (you’re invited to join) and the Chicago-based InCUBATE’s micro-grants and artist-run credit league.
More than anything else, Art Work is designed to be a national discussion – or rather, a bunch of DIY exhibitions -discussions that spring up from Albuquerque to Brooklyn, Cleveland to Calexico. But remember: The exhibition closes only if and when you stop talking about it.
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