Art & Labor

Jessica Stockholder
© 2004 JESSICA S T OC KHOL DE R
Art & Labor:
Some Introductory Ideas

W e have organized this

daylong conference to
explore the status of the art
object in relation to how
things are now produced. We are positing that labor is of central
importance to art making. Labor can be explored as a popular and very
juicy subject of art, and as the work of the artist and the many other
laborers (artists assistants, curators, installers, writers, designers) that
contribute to the manufacture of the object of art, or, in some cases,
the moment of art. The act of making mediates between our inside
and the outside, for each of us and for society as a whole. That we
make things is driven by biology and necessity; like breathing and
socializing it is part of being human. Each one of us grows into the his-
tory and culture of making that we are born into; our making is always
transforming that culture even as it is determined by it.
Second, we might also consider the laborers who work within the
infrastructure of art: curators, art handlers, writers, dealers and
museum directors. Thinking about the artist and the art object in rela-
tion to these people and the power structures they inhabit raises
issues of class that are inextricably part of fine art’s value and the labor
relations that support it.
 Third, the artist occupies a peculiar place in class structure. Working
with our hands we are laborers. And yet, by expending a great amount of
time and materials creating ostensibly useless objects, we are wastrels,
dilettantes, connoisseurs. The artist functions at once as a déclassé
laborer and as a decadent god. Either way the discomfort associated
with mucking about in the dirt is pushed as far away as possible.
We often find ourselves in the position of a boss supervising labor-
ers who are working for us. Unlike curators who rarely get their hands
dirty rooting around in the physical world, artists often do. As we gain
recognition, we artists often end up, by choice or necessity, keeping
our hands clean as well. Historically, art making has been tied to work-
ing with materials. Working with materials involves intelligence and
thoughts that are rich in ways quite different from the thoughts that
are generated while seated at a desk. Desk thinking floats free from the
resistance and logic of time and space in the material world; and yet
desk thinking is no less fraught with the time and space of the mate-
rial world. Freud has described thinking as the practicing of action. In
fact, desk thinking is even more fraught than material thinking in that
we are capable of expending much more time and materials by giving
commands from our desk than we ever could if we had to execute
those commands ourselves.

The two kinds of thinking need not be divorced from one. Our question
is: why has the thinking that grows from physical labor been relegated
to the lower status? What effect has this had on art, not only on the
ways in which it gets made but also on the values that get ascribed to
these various kinds of making?
We wonder, does art reflect our means of production? Artists used
to be understood as craftspeople. Art was an object made by hand.
Perhaps art was the repository of more eccentric impulses than those
generated by the making of life’s necessities—soap, toys, furniture,
houses—all made by people locally and with available materials. Now
we are aware of very little, if any, of the making of the things we need.
It happens elsewhere, often overseas. We are able to have many things
because they don’t cost what they would if we ourselves were the
makers. Where Marx worried about alienated labor—the effect of

2
workers making things that they themselves could not afford to buy—
today we experience the opposite (but no less alienating) phenomenon
of being able to buy things that we could not afford to make. It is of
course a great pleasure to have all these things and to be able to
engage with such an enormous pool of significance and stimulation.
But it is also painful and numbing to be so divorced from the making of
things and from the people who make them for us.

Our art today reflects this distance. And so, a lot of art, on the face of
it, seems to be not about making but about currating. To collect things
and re-arrange them is a widely respected form of activity. Art mirrors
our lack of production or, more precisely, it mirrors how acceptable
modes of production—what we are willing or unwilling to do—have
changed. Just as many of us are not willing to mend our clothes or
clean our homes and are willing to pay other people to do those things
for us, art conflates the luxury of choosing what we want to do with the
menial tasks that make that luxury possible: painting, keyboarding,
stitching, sanding, editing.

Art making has traditionally been the placeholder for the continuation
of learning through making that we all engage in as children and which
some of us continue to engage in as artists and tradesmen. Do we need
this part of ourselves to be reflected in the culture we live in? Or are we
happy to be rid of such reminders of the physical world together with
its awkwardness, its frustrations, and its mortality?

Jessica Stockholder
Joe Scanlan
June 2004