Art, to recycle Bruce Nauman’s oft-quoted quip once more, was definitely whatever the artist was doing in the studio—the emphasis firmly resting on the activity implied in the very verb “doing.” Of course, art has always also been whatever an artist’s assistants were doing in the studio—the emphasis here resting on the activity implied in the very verb “assisting.”
Indeed, art’s ostensibly physical demands and the laborious toils of the artist life as I knew it are probably what drove me to opt for the flipside of practice (criticism, discourse, theory) in the first place; my becoming a critic was not a matter, then, of mere Oedipal revenge. I would like to point out here that the current essay’s autobiographical tone was inspired, in part, by reading Anton Vidokle’s “Art Without Work?,” published in e-flux journal #29 (November 2011), in which the author recalled “the precise moment when it first occurred to me that I would like to become an artist”—a moment marked by the insight that artists do not work. The precise moment when it first occurred to me that I would like to become a writer was similarly motivated by an ambient fear of work in the sense of manual labor, although I do remember that already early on I was attracted to what I imagined to be the prototypical writer’s monastic work ethic: whether my vita was going to be an activa one or rather contemplativainstead, I did want work to be a part of it, for to this day, I dreadboredom more than anything else in life.
See Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, eds. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011) for a comprehensive survey of the debate’s current status. An early exhibition to have brilliantly taken up the topic was Helen Molesworth’s “Work Ethic,” organized at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2004. A more recent exhibition titled “BUSY. Exhausted Self/Unlimited Ability” was organized at 21er Haus in Vienna (September 2012–January 2013).
What “else”? “Art is a history of doing nothing and a long tale of useful action,” is how Liam Gillick put it in the opening sentence of his essay “The Good of Work,” reprinted in the aforementioned Are You Working Too Much?
The transformation of human interaction into art work (and, in the case of the broad orbit of the Relational Aesthetics & social practice phenomena, into artworks) was made possible in part by the sheer quantitative explosion of the art world in the crucial period 1987–1993 and, subsequently, the dramatically increased self-consciousness of the art world as a complex social ecosystem with its own codes, geographies, histories (cf. the related deluge, in the last decade or so, of art-about-art), laws, lore, rites, and rules. One of the key rituals to be considered in this context, in fact, is the performance of business—art world activity as theatre. One of the theatrical requirements upon which membership in the art world rests is this ceaseless, often quite exhausting performance of a persistent business, which does not necessarily mean “making” work, or even working (as in “producing”—needless to say, acting out the role of the busy art-world type can be, perversely enough, a lot of “work”). It is interesting to bring up Josef Strau’s enlightening, entertaining discourse on the non-productive attitude in this regard: speaking of his life as an artist in Cologne in the late 1980s, Strau noted how “the substitution of the artist-as-producer with the sheer behavior of the artist-bohemian was a reaction to the work values of the eighties and necessitated a very dense social field in which to act out its partly theatrical impulse.” Looking back upon these wonder years from the sober hard-nosed realities of noughties Berlin, Strau remarked: “I would characterize the prevailing attitude (in Cologne) as a lack of interest in the procedures of production, with more emphasis on positioning oneself as an artist within the social fabric.” Needless to add, this labor of positioning oneself as an artist within the social fabric conforms to a productivist regime of its own: one may not produce art objects, but one produces (performs) artisthood instead, and it is easy to see how keeping up with Strau’s non-productive attitude—the very activity of avoiding work—can be a lot of work, if not outright exhausting, indeed.
Are these actually different entities? Hardly: lives and careers blend in the all-encompassing fog of the Project. As Boris Groys caustically noted in his “The Loneliness of the Project” from 2002: “the formulation of diverse projects has now become the major preoccupation of contemporary man”—and in this field too, art has ably lead the way, for instance by substituting the primacy of theproject for that of the object or product. See →.
Needless to add—but allow me to do so regardless—that production here is obviously not understood in the conventional sense of fabrication, the manufacture of products; production denotesproductivity as opposed to activity. Needless to add, additionally, that the perceived lightness of so much current art does not merely concern art production of course; the blight of lightness affects art activity as a whole—collecting, curating, writing …
This is a reference to a contribution by Sol LeWitt to an issue of the avant-garde art journal Aspen from 1967: “The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer, but to give him information … The serial artist does not attempt to produce a mysterious or beautiful object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” Quoted in Helen Molesworth’s lead essay in the catalogue accompanying Work Ethic (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004). Molesworth locates LeWitt’s identification with the figure of the clerk—soon to become the cornerstone of Conceptual Art’s celebrated “aesthetics of administration”—in the context of “America’s shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society” marked by “the rise of a highly professionalized managerial class and the simultaneous development of a service economy. Some art historians have viewed the strategies of anti-authorship, such as LeWitt’s imagining of himself as a clerk, as part of the ‘de-skilling’ of the artist. Yet it is more accurate to treat this transformation as a re-skilling … What were the new sets of skills needed to be an artist?” That art was the site of the earliest experiments in this momentous process of socioeconomic transformation, and artists this nascent regime’s first guinea pigs, gives a new twist to Hannah Arendt’s well-known contention that “the artist is the only ‘worker’ left in a laboring society”—first among the clerks when everyone else was still busy making things. In Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 127.
The ideology of taste, the stirrings of which can be heard again with alarming regularity in the realm of art, constitutes a huge subject that can only be touched upon in passing here, with little more than a nod to Pierre Bourdieu’s landmark study on the matter, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. The doctrine of a natural disposition towards the tasteful (i.e., as something that can by its very definition hardly be acquired through the vulgar ways of work) is obviously a cornerstone of what Bourdieu terms the “aristocracy of culture.” The genius’ flaunting of effortlessness—“see, how easy”—is one obvious way in which the social logic of distinction is held in place, and the artist, as the traditional embodiment of genius, clearly plays an important role in the perpetuation of this logic.
We are all only too aware of the dynamics of status that are at play in this hierarchical distinction: being busy is an obvious emblem of status in our reticular, insomniac world, while working does not necessarily carry the same upwardly mobilizing charge—certainly in an artistic regime in which the avoidance of work and the reliance on the mystery of talent instead of the brute facts of effort are held up as the defining virtues of so much art.
This is a paraphrase of Hannah Arendt's celebrated dictum fromThe Human Condition: “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”