Labour & Art
Who did it? Who gets paid?
To be in labor, to give birth, labor movements, workers rights: labor has traditionally been associated with an arduous effort that results in extraordinary achievement: an art-work, ‘my’ baby. In contemporary economics, culture and art, the connection between work and results is less simple. Celebrity artist studios with employees toiling at minimum wage, derivative, currency and high frequency traders profiting from agile agression, gaming/movie/animation studios releasing products produced by teams, stock trading practiced as conceptual art. Work disconnects from ‘the work’. The made is manufactured or conceptualised. Value arises from manipulated numbers or conjunctions of ideas.
The following survey explores the problematic of labour by examining a set of artworks that examine the contemporary disconnect between producers and profit.
I want you to relax for a minute. To not do any work; to not do any mental work; to not think about these words; nor to do anything physical. Let your entire being stop working. And if it does, identity and the body will die. Our notion of work is enmeshed with our notion of life. Life labours.
It was a labor of love. I labored over this essay. Or did I? Perhaps the essay is pure quotations. The artist labored over their masterpiece. Or did they? Perhaps they hired someone to do it; perhaps they merely publicized an event as art. “For centuries, the use of assistants and apprentices was standard in the art world. Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Rubens relied heavily on the assistants in their studios. With the rise of the Impressionists, however, the idea of a studio practice, which maximizes incomes by using assistants, fell into disfavor. Artists were supposed to be pouring out their personal visions onto the canvas — not instructing employees on how to do it.”
The distinction and use of outsourced labor is now again returning tofull bloom. The artist has became idea source; craft is exiled into a skilled labor ghetto. Jeff Koons is today’s typical feudal or regal aristocracy, he runs a business “…staffed by close to 130 mostly young people. Koons’s artwork is intensely labored, in order to look like no human hand was ever actually involved”; in fact not only does he hire labor to erase all trace of labor, he also erases himself from the labor class, Koons never touches a paint brush.
“If I had to be doing this myself, I wouldn’t even be able to finish one painting a year.” — Jeff Koons
Recycling Wealth
In contrast to the antiseptic eradication of labor, the artist Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage project ambition was “to change the lives of a group of people with the materials they deal with everyday” (as Muniz stated in the documentary Wasteland ). Working with garbage pickers at the world’s largest landfill (Jardim Gramacho, near Rio de Janeiro) the series produced portraits of the garbage pickers that sold at Sothebys auction in 2008. The portrait of a garbage picker below sold for 53,660.29 USD. The money returned to the community from which it emerged. Labor was at the surface, core and key to an aesthetic operative in service of conceptual ethics. The project is unfortunately an outlier, as in finance, in the art world it is rare to return or recycle wealth back to the community of origin.
Vik Muniz (2008). From the series: Pictures of Garbage.
The Disembodied WorkOut
The language of predator capitalism exemplifies a logic that twists and breaks definitions of work: leveraged buyouts refer to physical leverage but it is actually money that does the work. Patent trolls hunt ideas, abstraction hunting abstraction using legal clauses. Algorithms even replace mental labor as deep learning neural networks analyze big data and high frequency trading relies on millisecond fluctuations in stock market traffic to extract profit from basic glitches in information.
Who actually makes anything now? The third world makes. The first world invests, consumes and extracts profits. Information economy eats industrial exonomy. As Stelarc declared the ‘obsolete body’ is an extensible modularized evolutionary structure now enmeshed within entropic technological networks. Conceptual art and the dematerialized art object (Lippard 1973) further modulated art’s relation to labor; ironically Lippard conceived her intervention as a way to evade the commodification of art; unfortunate it has been used to rationalize divisions of labor by reinforcing the division between ideas and muscle.
Big name contemporary artists rarely do physical work, — they manage projects; they workout at the gym to stay fit. The contemporary myth of the labor of the mind means that labor for the upper classes is exiled, disembodied; their working self is no longer locatable in any single body; physical work is outsourced into virtual remote networked entities; the creation of ideas/art/innovation/products relies on organizing many tightly intertwined products/discourses/organisms/markets; every organism/market is a sack full other micro-organisms/cultures; and the whole weighty sweaty wild world of weird data harvests leisure. What/where is the real work?
The Real Work is in defining the Work
Consider the evolution of the question through the economic ages: who did the work? the hunter? the gatherer? the industrial worker? the store owner? the designer? the programmer?
Who made your cellphone? Charles Babbage? Alan Turing? Steve Jobs? Or is it the unknown miner, smelter, plastics component engineer, integrated circuit analyst, assembly line assembler?
Who/where is the work responsible for the birth of a baby? The mother? The father? The doctor? Nurses/midwives? Hormones? DNA?
Work in most manufactured items/organic entities usually resides along a long twisted chain that approximates the complexity of a protein. The labor involved in finding out who did what is so immense that normally stronger louder and aggressive primates claim ownership over processes, and thereby claim profit.
Post-work
Cultural definitions of work fluctuate. Artists have often defined work differently than other professions. Current definitions now fail to fit, iconic succinctness dissipates, ambiguity rules.
Modernism: The real work of dance was: the aligning of every cell in your body with a primordial egoless energy. The real work of literature was: the letting go of all obstacles to the inner voice. The real work of visual art was: surrendering to the rhythm and texture of light. The real work of composing was: allowing silence as sound to flow.
POST-Modernism: The real work of dance is: to physicalize disparate autonomies. The real work of literature is: to palpitate civilization’s multiple voices. The real work of visual art is: to deflect all stable interpretations. The real work of composing is: to agitate against the hypnosis of the hedonic.
Authorship has been displaced by conceptual provenance. Yet apart from the proclamations about the end of work, the system itself continues to heave and groan and labor: exploitation continues. And that leads to the pragmatic paradigmatic question of who gets paid.
Crowd-Sourced Art
Aaron Koblin + Takashi Kawashima’s Ten Thousand Cents (2008) project employed workers through Amazon Turk to draw parts of single bill. The artists built a software, and facilitated the project. The art included the context of its creation: their managerial skill leveraging an operative crowd-source platform.
Look closely at the stats concerning the labor involved in Ten Tousand Cents
In the top 3 countries, Indian workers worked 5xs longer than the U.S. but Chinese workers provided even more time-intensive labor: almost 10xs more than U.S. workers. “Workers were paid one cent each” Total labor cost: $100. Proceeds from sale of reproductions goto charity.
China as one of the world’s labor forces also acts as a primary source to create the stock for a conceptual store. In 2008, Liu Ding’s Store (www.liudingstore.com) launched selling works online; it “‘employs a utilitarian economic model — a shop — to establish a platform for thinking and discussion centred around the creation of value.” Four product lines have been developed: Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart (paintings commissioned by the artist and painted by painters in the Dafen village at Shenzhen), The Utopian Future of Art, Our Reality (used books, antiques, and other objects priced equally and resold), Conversations (audio-visual documentations of conversations the artist has had; in this case, the claim is that collectors buy intellectual exchange, an experience), and Friendship (“the newest product in ‘Liu Ding’s Store’. What is for sale is an abstract psychological space, an environment and context made up of works and furniture designed by the artist. This context encourages people to gather and spend time together.”)
Saturation and scarcity create deformations (densities and absences) in cultural space-time. Eva and Franco Mattes in the press release for their June 7th 2014 exhibit By everyone, For No One, Every Day state:
Who labored? Who got paid? Is the infamy and social capital the artists earned convertible into coin? Can the contributors ever claim credit?
Artist & or as Corporations
Let’s assume (perhaps incorrectly) Andy Warhol was lazy in respect to physical work. But even after having established his business as art, he was still manually drawing (or instructing his assistants to draw) crumpled dollar bills for the exhibit ‘The Art of Money’ at the Chelsea Gallery in 1969. For the same group exhibit, the sculptor Abraham Luebelski was lazier, he borrowed $250,00 and declared it a sculpture, saying he “had spent all of 15 minutes assembling the work, had to borrow what he calls his ‘sculptural daydream.’ The bank didn’t have enough cash on hand, so it had to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve. The bank also had to post guards around the sculpture and put it in the vault at night. On exhibit for five days, the sculpture ran up a bill of $300, because of the $60 daily interest on the money.”
In 15th century Florence, “The Church deemed it sinful to charge interest on loans, viewing it as profit without labour.” In the 1969 conceptual artists, played with this idea (as cats with mice, toying with it before killing it); in what critic Sophie Cras calls ‘artistic shareholding experiments’ “Lee Lozano’s Investment Piece, started in January 1969, describes her act of investing $938.25 in highly speculative warrants…” For Profit Systems, Les Levine exhibited the ads announcing his $2,375 investment (it eventually made a 220% return). For Money, Robert Morris offered investment services to the Whitney on a $100,000 loan he suggested they take out using their collection as collateral (the piece was actually done in truncated format using 50K secured from a patron and invested into a guaranteed return account).
r > g
For the economist Thomas Piketty, radical inequality in wealth occurs when return on investments is greater then economic growth. In other words, the profit of non-labour (making investments) exceeds that of labor (making things).
Leisure is Labor, Labor is still not Leisure
The first sentence of Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class states “The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture…” A leisure class lives off the labor of others (prominent examples, in Veblen’s opinion: army officers and priests).
In the contemporary information economy, the leisure class is all of us. The Internet incentivizes and monetizes the gestures and histories of both leisure and labor class users. Increasingly, as many now recognize, leisure is now implicitly labor, commercially traded data. We are all always on shift.
Yet if existence can now be harvested, data slavery can be self-regulated and sold; the self packaged; its inadvertent gestural work incorporated. The artist Jennifer Lyn Morone exemplifies that self-regulation; she incorporates herself as an act of resistance against tacit harvesting:
“JLM Inc is a new business established to determine the value of an individual. The corporation derives value from three sources and legally protects and bestows rights upon the total output of Jennifer Lyn Morone:
1. Past experiences and present capabilities. These are offered as biological, physical and mental services such as genes, labour, creativity, blood, sweat and tears.
2. Selling future potential in the form of shares.
3. Accumulation, categorisation and evaluation of data that is generated as a result of Jennifer Lyn Morone’s life.” [source: we-make-money-not-art]
Even thought the suit does not fit, Morone adopts the persona; she becomes business, marketed not as a strategy but as a legitimate process; her fiction is an actual reality which conforms to the rules and regulations of corporate process. It is not mere speculation, she has incorporated herself: “reappropriating capitalist and corporate strategy to make being a person a business.
There are numerous precedents. For over a decade, Santiago Sierra has toyed with the persona of artist as corporate employer, exploiter, probing loopholes and cavities in the body politic. In a set of radical interventions staged over decades at a network of international art institutions, Sierra challenged notions of work, class, race, status and value by placing the viewer into a complicit role as witness of what seems to be invasive, manipulative economic injustices.
Refugees from Chechenia paid to remain inside cardboard boxes for 4 hours a day for 6 weeks. 133 people paid to have their hair dyed blonde. Four heroin-addict prostitutes paid the price of a shot of heroin to have a 160 cm line tattooed on their back. A Bangladesh man hired to spend 15 days living inside a wall at MOMA. At P.S.1. Sierra wanted to photograph the back of all employees lined up in a row according to their position; it was denied; “Of course they knew if I did that, there would be a perfect gradation from white to black…” The crucial revelation of Sierra’s work is that the world he brings into the museums and galleries is not a fiction; he imports economic realities.
Sierra’s shock tactics outline radical yet often invisible systemic structures that perpetuate inequality. Ai Weiwei did the same for Documenta 12 in 2007 by importing 1001 Chinese Tourists.
Parallel to exhibiting the tourists, Weiwei exhibited 1001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs; the direct implication of the parallel is that people are products of their labor, their existence in the social order regulated by their function.
Stealing Success: the rise of appropriation
While laborers are subsumed by the function of labor, consumers are co-opted by consumption. In the 1980s Richard Prince simply rephotographed Marlboro ads and sold them at an astronomical markup; in 2007 one of these pure appropriation works sold for 3.4 million making it the most expensive photograph in the world. What was he selling? Perhaps the audacity to steal without any inhibition and publicly truimph by hiding nothing? Can this not be seen as implicitly the position of the rapacious alpha males of derivative trading, leveraged buyouts and junk bonds: “If I can take it, it belongs to me”? And by extension, all the developed world, whose advances are inherently based on resource extraction and manipulation of illicit flows from Africa?
Sherrie Levine shifted this controversial dialogue home to the art-world when in 1981 she re-photographed Walker Evans’ portraits of sharecroppers. This combined with her recasting of Duchamp’s urinal in bronze in 1991; it sold at auction for over 900,000USD in 2012. A solid confirmation of value. But what ethical value is conferred: structurally this post-modern gesture purely lifts and echoes in raw citation the intellectual or artistic labour of another artist. It becomes evident that principles of ownership are nebulous apparitions. The structure of our system might be devoted to a reification of the capacity to plunder with impunity, legal piracy in the guise of intellectual play.
Are such homages different at a philosophical level from processes of raw resource extraction or stock-market leverage? Is there not a continuity of process between the high-net-worth-individuals (HNWI) capable of purchasing these works, their business practices and the artistic process? Are the HNWI not (as in ancient times with tithing paid to the Catholic church) buying absolution from the vice of avarice? Is the price not confirmation of an ethical audacity which defies notions of reciprocity and compassionate empathy? Is there not a complicity of practice? Has Richard Prince or Gagosian devoted a majority of profits back to people-in-need. Is there any credit given to the artists from whom he steals?
At issue is the largest dilemma of reasonable compensation: what is labor worth? What can labor buy? Can labor afford to buy what it makes? Or is that privilege reserved for those who define what is made?
Li Liao got a job at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen building iPads. 45 days later he had earned enough money to buy one. He quit and exhibited the ipad, his work coat, contract, ID badge in a piece called Consumption.
Labor and the traces of the labor become the art: the situation of abstract exploitation emerges as mundane physical objects. Disparity is implicit in the configuration of the project. By negating corporate opacity, making transparent power relations, Liao opens a window into a world of indentured labor.
Conclusion
Arriving at some neat and tidy proclamation about such a tangled mass of intricate processes that all intersect is clearly not possible. Work as energy permeates all processes. Identities are nebulous. But setting aside the meta-nuances, it is possible to discern that the art world feels split between concerted efforts to reveal injustice and other efforts to maximize profit/personal gain. This dichotomy between engaged altruism and mercantile capaitilism is often blurred by the integrity of the entities involved in each position, and the conflict of interest involved by association with various institutions. Unraveling these exotic dense ethical entrails only occurs temporarily. Each situation demands a fresh assessment.
However, it is clear that some commercial artists, the estates of various creatives, and the owners of canonical works, often protectively manipulate market structures to enhance the investment potential of manufactured inherited or purchased works. This manipulation conforms to the same general rules as market manipulations of stocks or bonds or derivatives: abstract value is generated from privilege. The old adage is true: the rich get richer. The minimum wage either falls or does not exist at all (from the franchises of America, to the free trade zones in Mexico or China); laborers often labor without the benefit of law degrees and so inherently lose the capacity to claim fair compensation. The art world as much as any other sector of humanity replicates that inequity.
Bonus!
In the film industry, auteurs and directors get top credit: They make the films! Their vision is labor that is irreplaceable! The key grip, makeup, caterer are all replaceable….
I don’t know what happened I just lost my head.
Since the 1970s CEO stock options and severance clauses have created exponentional increases in their compensation; this rise in their networth parallels the ascendancy of neurology into a science that explains all. Secular positivist societies worship the brain. CEOs impersonate and personify the head that holds the brain, specifically the forebrain, the analytic neurological tangle that earns all with its bright stock option guidance and nourishing and protecting star ideas and viral innovations. The CEO is the analog of pure research, except the CEO (or Starchitect or Celebrity Artist or Mega-Dealer or Billionaire Collector) is the epitome of pure money: a recursive situation where the feedback of interest from owning cash generates more cash. God of the middle ages has been replaced with celebrity neurons in swivel chairs.
In fact the CEO is like an energy-intensive dopamine greedy sub-module of the pleasure centre, a rat that will hit the lever to deliver endorphins until the body moves into a sugar coma. CEOs are cocaine incarnate: it is never enough, never too much. Civilization in this particular scenario of oligarchic excess has surrendered the dampening logic of puritan caution for the hedonic groove of selfish alphas. And the augmentation of one sector of humanities net-worth is paid by a loss from the majority in the lower 1/3 of wealth.
OCD : not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but Obsessive Cash Disease
References
Cras, Sophie. “Art as an Investment and Artistic Stockholding.” In The Art Market. MIT Press, 2014.
Lipman Jean “Money for Money’s Sake.” Art in America, January-February, 1970.
Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Reprint edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Sesser, Stan. “The Art Assembly Line.” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2011, sec. Life and Style. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303745304576357681741418282.
Veblen, Thorstein. “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” 1899. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/833/833-h/833-h.htm.
