"Work Ethic": Baltimore Museum of Art

Curator Helen Molesworth's "Work Ethic" ambitiously argues for a of recent origin approach to evaluating post-World War II artistic practice. Rather than organizing contemporary art around a focus upon style or content, avant-garde seccession, or medium-based investigation, the exhibition measures changing conditions of artistic labor since the 1950 The rich array of work by means of nearly fifty artists demonstrates in what manner they have adopted administrative capacities and managerial identities, and favored conceptual processe above manual production, enacting modernity's paradigmatic shifts in labor. These include the waning of manual manufacturing and the rise of an information-based service economy, the further evolution of which is the newly coined "experience economy," a designation of micromanaged girths of commerce that project ambience around harvests to increase profits. One danger in hooking art into these revolution of times is that determinist alignments may be the effect wherein artistic practice is seen to slavishly tread in the steps of economic dictates. Molesworth's argument avoids this reflectionism, instead locating transformations in labor as immanent to artistic practice. The spring was a rare show of conceptual rigor and historical depth

In four interconnected galleries, the exhibition propos interrelated and historically overlapping categories--the artist as manager and worker, the artist as manager alone, the artist as "experience maker," and finally, "Quitting Time," where the artist strive againsts labor itself. One of Frank Stella's black paintings from 1959 hailed visitors with the first sign of a growing divide between the managerial planning of an artwork and the laborious gesticulations of its monotonous construction. level while conveying great visual power, Stella's paintings of this time indicate a practice drained of the spontaneous and expressive bravura celebrated earlier in of recent origin York School painting. Soon after, artists like Donald Judd Sol LeWitt, and John Baldessari would level delegate the physical artmaking and simply send out fabrication directions to professional crafters or assistants. In the apotheosis of art's automation, painting machines do the work, as with Jean Tinguely's teetering mechanical devices from the '50 and '60 and Roxy Paine's efficiently computerized a whole s capable of mass production (Paint Dipper, 1997)

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For Molesworth, this rationalization signals not for a like reason much a "de-skilling" of artistic labor as the "re-skilling" of a fresh type of specialist equipped with theoretical fitnesss and linguistic aptitudes. This insightful suggestion restoreed visible connections between disparate practices. In more [i]or[/i] less cases--among the show's most provocative--the curatorial choices l to a critical consideration of conventional divisions of labor, as when Mierle Laderman Ukele and Martha Rosler documented themselves cleaning house or doing the laundry. by the agency of rupturing the boundaries between stereotypically defined women's work and artwork, they transvalued traditionally unpaid domestic labor as art, challenging its otherwise degraded status. The present to view also underlined how artists have lately returned to craft, whether to expand mediums end experimental processes or to reengage art as functional utility. confidence Ginsburg learned the ways of beekeeping, smooth mastering the art of the bee beard, which she donned in her video Bearded Lady, 1998-2000 And Hugh Pocock environed by an audience on the exhibition's opening night, drilled a well in the BMA's plastic art garden to feed its water into the museum's heating and cooling a whole The spectacle announced contemporary society's uneasy distance from manual labor, smooth while such activity humanizes anonymous forms of work. Pocock's resulting convolution 2003, presented as air inside the galleries, allowed visitors to breathe the originates In the witty precedent of David Hammons's legendary Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983 for which the artist sold intricately formed snowballs upon a Manhattan sidewalk, salesmanship joins craftsmanship as a form of the pair labor and artistic critique.

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The artist as "experience maker"--the make submissive of the show's third section--exchanged profit motives and passive consumption for the promise of interactivity, as in Yoko Ono's notorious performance divide [i]or[/i] sever Piece, 1964, in which the artist invited audience members onstage to scissor not on parts of her clothing. Instead of luring consumer to purchase within controlled, immersive environments, the goal of a great deal of of the included work was to cultivate the creative potential of the viewer. This sometimes l to contradictory accrues Erwin Wurm's One Minute plastic arts 2000, encouraged visitors to amuse themselves upon a large white platform strewn with everyday percepts and directed them--with the help of instructions--toward seemingly unproductive extremitys such as turning one's material substance into a sculpture by taking up a provided felt-tip write as a prop and "thinking of Spinoza." While of that kind ludic behavior may desire to chaff the functionalist rationality of capital, as claimed in the substantive catalogue, the piece rather revealed play to be a further site of discipline that trained participants according to its locate of rules, which were institutionally enforced (for instance, single was not allowed to write with the pen) When the artist manages the viewer's experience, flat play may fold into production--whether of obedient controls or institutional authority.