Art Workers’ Coalition. Courtesy of Primary Information.

The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) was a loose group of artists, writers, and members of the creative community formed in January 1969 after the artist Takis protested the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by removing his sculpture from their exhibition, The Museum as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. In the case with Takis, the artist was concerned with his ability to control the exhibition of his work after it had been sold (the museum had exhibited his work against his wishes because they owned it and felt that their right of ownership superseded his rights as an artist to control its exhibition). This initial protest was a spark that ignited the coalition—which gathered members and concerns exponentially throughout the early months of 1969. At the time, the Art Workers’ Coalition was concerned with the responsibility of museums to artists and aimed their efforts at building a dialogue between themselves and MoMA.

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Gauging the Grey Area workshop, Valuing Laboring in the Arts practicum, April 19, 2014, UC Berkeley Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Arts Research Center, UC Berkeley. Photo: Joseph del Pesco.

“Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor” is both the name of the workshop organized collaboratively by artists Helena Keeffe and Lauren van Haaften-Schick and its product. In their stated goals for the workshop, they posit that the prevailing measures for valuing artistic labor fluctuate between its contribution to a collective good (vis-à-vis a gift economy) and its potential for professionalization (with the ensuing promises of exposure), and that both measures leave artists and institutions with insufficient means to establish fair compensation. “Gauging the Gray Area”—the workshop—sought to formulate a set of standards by which artists can evaluate proposed opportunities (both compensated and non-compensated) as they arise, based on criteria related to the impacts and risks the terms on offer create for the artist. The resulting eponymous broadsheet is conceivably a viable tool to help artists measure subjective, difficult-to-quantify conditions, but its most effective application may be as a precursor to evaluating what negotiations are necessary and what precedents are established in the working relationships between artists and organizations.

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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).

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Helena Keeffe. Standard Deviation, 2013; broadside. Courtesy of the Artist.

In statistical and financial analyses, standard deviation measures the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Investors use this method as a gauge for expected volatility: high standard deviation equals more volatility. In the art world, the volatile and precarious economic conditions that working artists face provide evidence of a high standard deviation in the value of artistic labor. This is particularly evident in the discrepancies in how value is assigned to artistic labor by institutions of varying scales and financial means.

What kinds of strategies might artists employ to create a sense of agency when it comes to artistic production? What are the key questions artists should ask themselves in seeking to define standards for valuing their labor? Standard Deviation—a multiphase project that includes a series of conversations, a printed broadside for distribution, and an online forum—addresses these questions so that artists might identify the kinds of opportunities that serve their artistic goals and help them sustain viable practices over time. The printed broadside functions as a tool to generate public awareness and as an aid to personal conviction. It uses the imagery of a hand as a mnemonic device for five key questions artists can ask themselves when presented with exhibition opportunities. It also includes a Request for Funders form, a flow chart to help answer the question, “Should I work for free?” and symbolic currency whose exchange is intended to acknowledge volunteer labor.

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