Yoga for Adjuncts: The Somatics of Human Capital workshop, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Megan Hoetger.

Greetings, practitioners!
Let’s begin by balancing on one leg. Good. (Or if you can, try balancing on zero legs!)
Feeling shaky? Remember: Falling over is all right. Precariousness is the greatest teacher.
Let me start off with a simple fact: Art schools—which employ at intermittent, patchwork intervals a large number of urban cultural workers, teaching artists—have led the way toward loosening the rigid idea of the educator as a wage-earner.
Another fact: The private art schools are quantitatively assessed and overseen by tech-entrepreneur trustee boards and investment bankers with teams of consultants to translate their risk-management strategies into administrative policies.
Let’s accept this situation—let it sink in. Let it quiver under the fasciae.
We can’t go home again. We can’t go back. We have only what is now.
Or, to put it another way: Let’s find a new home in the floating world of today’s institutions, of managed, interlocking slots of short-term labor.
Let’s take some deep breaths.

Read the full article here.

Participation ≠ Compensation workshop, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Joseph del Pesco.

In my role as respondent to the day-long events comprising “Valuing Labor in the Arts,” I had the good fortune to be asked to attend Stephanie Syjuco’s morning workshop titled “Participation ≠ Compensation.” In her introductory remarks, Stephanie briefly described to us some of her recent art projects, including a 2009 commission for PS1 in which she re-created a late-’60s draped felt piece by Robert Morris—only Stephanie chose to work not with felt but a large, custom-made industrial moving blanket. Prior to the piece’s exhibition, the museum’s shipping staff was instructed to actually use her faux-Morris blanket to wrap artworks for safe transport. Stephanie wondered aloud whether in the end she should have credited PS1’s professional movers as coauthors, as being every bit an artist in relation to the work as Syjuco herself. Later, I told Stephanie I thought that would’ve been cruel to the movers. Why? “I imagine they’re unionized,” I said, “with pensions and benefits. What a major step down to give all that up to become artists.”

What, if any, difference exists between the creative effort devoted to making art and other kinds of work—like, say, shipping art? One argument is that, unlike art making, wage labor is undertaken not for its own sake but for a paycheck; it’s a means to an end rather than an end in itself. That might sound abstract and academic, but the idea has long exerted real-world effects. “A fine artist has no use for use, no meaning for meaning, no need for any need,” declared staunch socialist Ad Reinhardt in 1964.¹ During the various “Valuing Labor” workshops I attended, I noticed museum visitors staring at us, obviously wondering what we were doing and why we were doing it in an exhibition space. Maybe they thought we were the art. If only they knew what we were actually discussing: labor disputes, inadequate working conditions, nonpayment for services, contract battles, crass economic exploitation. But then it struck me: Even knowing exactly what we were saying, maybe they’d still see it all as art, and thus as being somehow divorced from material concerns. And if so, would they be wrong?

Read the full article here.

Introduction, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Joseph del Pesco.

Worse than ill-targeted policies, of course, is all the talent lost when painters or actors are paying the rent by doing carpentry or waiting on tables. We need good carpenters and waiters, and it’s wasteful at both ends for those things to be done by people whose talents lie elsewhere.

Why is this system broken? (It isn’t working for people who aren’t artists, either.) How can we turn the creative, optimistic, earnest innovations we heard about at the practicum into realistic initiatives with coherent core principles? And how can we treat society’s relationship to the arts with the same softhearted, hardheaded realism we demand in fields such as criminal justice, education, and environmental policy?

Read the full article here.

W.A.G.E., Artist Payment Graphic, excerpt from W.A.G.E. graphic poster of artist survey results, 2011.

W.A.G.E. (WORKING ARTISTS AND THE GREATER ECONOMY) WORKS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THE ARTS, AND TO RESOLVE THEM. 

Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. 100 Posterworks, 2009-2013; printed poster; 11 x 17 in. Courtesy of the Artists.

1. Occupational Realism, by Julia Bryan-Wilson

“Performance as occupation” participates in the rising tide of discourse regarding the interconnection of contingent labor, artistic value, and precarity. Precarity is one name given to the effect of neoliberal economic conditions emergent in the wake of global financial upheaval, recession, and the reorganization of employment to accommodate the spread of service, information, and knowledge work. It designates a pervasively unpredictable terrain of employment within these conditions—work that is without health-care benefits or other safety nets, underpaid, part-time, unprotected, short-term, unsustainable, risky.

2. Five Things I Learned, by Alexis Clements

Reimagining the world seems like everyone’s favorite marketing slogan and pastime these days. And starting from scratch is great in some instances. But the reality is that most of the time it’s not only impossible to start from scratch, it’s undesirable, as you can end up walking down well-trod paths. Beyond finding that a lot of writing about arts and labor focused on the visual arts marketplace, I also found that few writers mention the past at all in their writing on the topic, save to throw in mini-lessons or interpretations of historical theories, particularly those of Karl Marx (I often prefer Arendt on labor, if we’re going for historical theory).

Read the full article here.