Last weekend I presented a workshop with Helena Keeffe for the practicum Valuing Labor in the Arts, presented by the Arts Resource Center at UC Berkeley. It was a big experiment for both of us, and proved very productive for both the facilitators and workshop participants, as the workshop structure opened up new ways for us to talk about difficult personal, ethical and economic questions as group.

Below is a description of our workshop. Descriptions for the full day of events available at Art Practical, to be followed by reflections on the day, and a pdf of the document our workshop collectively produced.

Image credit: Michele Bock

Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor
Helena Keeffe and Lauren van Haaften-Schick

When is it okay to work for free? Why is remuneration a concern for artists and arts workers? What perpetuates the devaluation of artistic labor? How have artists confronted these challenges? Can we devise a scheme for artists to follow during negotiations for compensation? Is it possible to create a shared standard of artist needs?

Artistic labor is often assumed to be unquantifiable, difficult to define, existing solely within a gift economy. At the same time, we live in the era of the presumed professional artist, in which art practitioners are expected to be hyper-performers, on the clock, and giving it all for the promise of exposure. Both assumptions about art work have positive aspects: a gift economy encourages collectivity and mutual exchange while the professionalization of the arts presumably elevates the artist to a more respected role in society. Yet the collision of these contradicting assumptions has instead cast artists as precarious workers, in which they are expected to give and to perform endlessly without any established standards for remuneration.

The workshop “Gauging the Gray Area: Standards for Artistic Labor” consists of a conversation and exercise through which participants will consider the ways that we value our artistic labor and attempt to formulate a set of standards for answering the above questions in our professional and daily lives. We will discuss examples of artists who have refused work for the lack of payment and who have turned these conflicts into opportunities for teaching or encouraging change. We will consider tools that artists have devised to evaluate situations: when to work for free, when to demand more, and how to better define the myriad gray areas of artistic work. Such tools include Helena Keeffe’s project Standard Deviation, Jessica Hische’s Should I Work for Free?, Lauren van Haaften-Schick’s Non-Participation, data collected by WAGE and CARFAC, and legal tools such as Seth Siegelaub’s Artists Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement. Workshop participants will discuss their experiences with such negotiations and will be asked to formulate their own standards for when and why to say yes or no to unpaid—and sometimes paid—art work.

At the conclusion of the workshop, we will devise a tiered system of standards for determining whether or not to accept paid and unpaid work within the arts, taking into consideration the personal, social, and practical circumstances behind each decision. Rather than seek a collective standard, we will recognize that personal needs and ethics regarding payment for artistic labor will vary among participants. Our considerations and conclusions will be printed as a broadside for conference attendees to take with them and reproduce or edit for themselves. We hope that this broadside will not only be the spark of many future conversations, but will begin to be used as a concrete tool among artists for measuring the value of their work.

I’m pleased to announce my participation in the conference Living Labor: Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies at NYU on April 12, 2014.

I’ll be presenting on the origin and use of Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Reserved Rights and Transfer of Sale Agreement, and the notion of critical circulation.

Panel information:

ART & THE MARKETPLACE (3:00PM – 4:45PM)

“If you give me your time, I’ll give you experience”: The Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI) and the Value Theory of Labor
Samara Davis (New York University)

Field Notes from an Ethnography of Manhattan Marxism
Steve Lyons (Concordia University)

Live Matter, Hidden Labor: Rethinking the Silent Presence of the Other in Contemporary Art
Jimena Ortuzar (University of Toronto)

Siegelaub’s Agreement as Critical Circulation
Lauren van Haaften-Schick (Independent Curator)

Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies
April 11 – 13, 2014
Performance Studies, NYU
Keynote Address by Professor Fred Moten and Sianne Ngai

Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference being organized at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, and will take place April 11th-14th 2014.

Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures will be presented within the exhibit Cookbook Dreams and Inflatable Futures, curated by Arts & Sciences projects at the Reinstitute/Guest Spot art space in Baltimore. For this exhibit, “Canceled” has been presented as an artist project & archive of itself. This is a nice thing about making shows that can exist on a book shelf or in a big white space.

More info on the show at Guest Spot, and on Arts & Sciences projects.

Cookbook Dreams and Inflatable Futures

Antoine Lefebvre, Robin Cameron, Cybele Lyle, Luca Antonucci, John Bohl, NOWORK, and Lauren van Haaften-Schick

On view: March 8, 2014 through April 19, 2014

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 8, 2014, 7-10pm

Guest Spot at THE REINSTITUTE (Baltimore) is pleased to present Cookbook Dreams and Inflatable Futures, a group exhibition organized by Arts & Sciences Projects. Opening Saturday March 8, 2014, the works will be on view through April 19, 2014. The show will feature artists’ books and works in other media by Antoine Lefebvre, Robin Cameron, Cybele Lyle, Luca Antonucci, John Bohl, NOWORK, and Lauren van Haaften-Schick.

Inspired by Ant Farm’s 1971 Inflatocookbook, which envisioned a utopia of DIY inflatables within its humble photocopied pages, Cookbook Dreams and Inflatable Futures brings together artists who concoct varied approaches to circulating and advancing concepts and ideas central to their practice through innovative means of book making and distribution. For these artists, books are conceived as alternative spaces in which to exhibit works to a broader audience; they embrace a process-oriented approach to book making, where dialogues are revealed between books and works in other media, including photography, prints, video, and painting. The assembled artists in Cookbook Dreams and Inflatable Futures not only utilize the book as a vehicle for their ideas, they also position the book as an art object, thus challenging notions of assigned value in contemporary art. In making a diverse range of books, these artists assert agency by choice of content, form, materials, and production values. What unites the artists in the show is the realization of the boundless possibilities of books as they enter circulation, free to establish a life of their own.

Antoine Lefebvre initiated La Bibliothèque Fantastique (LBF) in 2009 as an artist’s book virtual publisher. Free and downloadable from the internet, LBF books are made of excerpts of other works, with pages, sentences and words realized in new editions, thus developing a discourse on the ontology of the book.Robin Cameron’s The Book That Makes Itself exposes its own production through its content and form. By personifying the book itself, Cameron articulates her artistic practice as the subject (The Artist), agent and author. The collaborative practice of Cybele Lyle and Luca Antonucci reveals itself in their Space, Time + Architecture project, which includes the titular Sigfried Giedion tome in a highly redacted state, collaged photographs that imagine new conceptions of space, and a revised, letterpressed Space, Time + Architecturethat unites their ideas into a new form. John Bohl uses painting and sculpture to examine utopia, kitsch, and romanticism. Typically produced in collabration with other artists, his books may be seen as sculptural objects dialectically engaged with his paintings and works in other media. NOWORK is a platform for collaboratively produced, anonymous projects that relate to New York City, with a focus on photographic material in public spaces. Not citing individual authorship for their work has allowed them to treat their source material, whether taken or found, as part of an act of re-circulation. The problem of artistic agency features prominently in Lauren van Haaften-Shick’s curatorial practice, which considers a selection of art exhibitions manifested in alternative forms, such as publications. van Haaften-Schick’s work highlights the book form (and printed matter) as a crucial means of disseminating artworks and ideas, potentially in ways that are more historically accessible and lasting than a traditional exhibition would have been.

Guest Spot is located at 1715 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Hours:
Saturday 1pm-4pm
Wednesdays 5pm-7pm
or by appointment unless otherwise noted.

Contact
rodmalin(at)guestspot(dot)org

I’m very pleased to be heading to Denmark to participate in the upcoming series Making Social Realities with Books at rum46, organized by the space in partnership with Bret Bloom and the Jutland Academy of Art.

The talk takes place on Wednesday, January 22nd at 19:00 at rum 46 in Aarhus. The workshop is the following day at rum 46 starting at 10:00.

Talk: Critical Circulation: Artists’ Books, Labor, and the Law

A dual economic and legal history of contemporary art can be traced through the histories of artists’ publishing practices, and in the attachment of legal terms to works of art. As an alternative exhibition format, publications have been employed as a crucial means of disseminating documentation and information on a wide and accessible scale, potentially in ways that are more historically stable and accessible than a traditional exhibition. Employing legal instruments such as the contract and certificate of authenticity, artists have attempted to gain control over the circulation and exhibition of their work, while critiquing a market-driven cultural economy. Each of these strategies instrumentalize circulation as a site for critique, allowing for the politics surrounding the creation, presentation, exchange, and future provenance of art to become at least as relevant as the work itself.

Conceptual art and institutional critique of the 1960s-70s stand as important historic examples in which the discourses of communications, labor, and the law are utilized to further artists’ rights and develop critical forms of production, dissemination, and reception. Beginning with Seth Siegelaub’s abandonment of a traditional gallery model to realize exhibitions as publications, and his later development of the “Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” and concluding with current examples explored in the recent exhibition Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures, we will re-examine how these strategies have been used to create new modes of artistic agency.

Workshop: Non-Participation

Non-Participation is an ongoing collection of letters of refusal written by artists and other cultural producers to decline their participation in cultural events or exhibitions for political or ethical reasons. The issues raised by these artists’ letters include the non-payment of artists’ fees, the denial of copyright ownership, censorship, rejections of corporate funding, and many others. To quote one such letter by artist Michael Rakowitz, “sometimes what we say ‘no’ to is more important than what we agree to.”

Workshop participants will explore issues of how artistic labor is evaluated, consider ways for artists to better assert their needs or negotiate compromise, and compare the situations of artists in different national and cultural contexts. These considerations are particularly pertinent given the increasingly unstable state of arts funding internationally, and as privatization and debt become deeply politicized. We will discuss past and present examples of cultural producers advocating for improved labor conditions, such as the Art Workers Coalition, W.A.G.E., The CarrotWorkers Collective, and others. We will also explore various legal and other practical tools developed by cultural producers for asserting one’s rights and expectations as arts workers, including Helena Keeffe’s Standard Deviation, Mary Beth Edelson’s Artist Contract, and Seth Siegelaub’s The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement. Participants will formulate scenarios for their own “non-participation,” considering when they can and should say “no.”

I’ll be in Denmark next week to give a series of presentations on my upcoming project Non-Participation, and on the notion of Critical Circulation.

My first stop is Bureau Publik in Copenhagen on January 21, followed by rum46 in Aarhus on the 22nd and 23rd.

Non-Participation

Non-Participation is an ongoing collection of letters of refusal written by artists and other cultural producers to decline their participation in cultural events or exhibitions for political or ethical reasons. The issues raised by these artists’ letters include the non-payment of artists’ fees, the denial of copyright control, censorship, corporate funding, and many others. To quote one such letter by artist Michael Rakowitz, “sometimes what we say ‘no’ to is more important than what we agree to.”

We will discuss past and present examples of cultural producers advocating for improved labor conditions, such as the Art Workers Coalition, W.A.G.E., The CarrotWorkers Collective, and others. We will also explore various legal and practical tools developed for asserting one’s rights as arts workers, including Helena Keeffe’s Standard Deviation, Mary Beth Edelson’s Artist Contract, and Seth Siegelaub’s The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement. In a climate of increasing precarity, class stratification, and pervasive pressure upon artists to offer their labor for free, the agency in the act refusal has gained new urgency.