Labour

Given current changes in the working world, some artists are exploring the idea of a world without work. They sometimes participate by becoming employers themselves in order to reveal the aberrations of a paid activity that is not only not as productive as it should be, but is also likely to confine workers to absurd, meaningless tasks. Given this realization, they seek to reclaim unproductive time, anticipating a world in which freed time would allow for the creation of individual and collective projects that would be more useful to society.
[Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei]

In his recent writings, Dave Beech examines the question of art’s exceptionalism with regard to classical, neoclassical, and Marxist economics. Because of its particular mode of production, art is not a typical commodity, and so it is not defined by the labour theory of value and does not conform to the laws of supply and demand. However, in a post-Fordist economy, artists are affected by the same precarious living conditions as are other workers. In this context, contemporary artists and activists address their collective conditions of labour under neoliberal capitalism.

Informed by Clive Robertson’s framing of administrative logics as the “mechanisms of bureaucratic power within alternative and mainstream art and culture organizations,” the author considers recent work by Jo-Anne Balcaen that explores labour and status in the arts, as well as Anne-Marie Proulx’s Resolutions, which focuses on the collective administration of artist-run spaces. Both artists critically reflect on the power dynamics present in arts administration, which follow broader administrative logics that similarly conceal brutal working conditions and profound systemic inequality, maintaining this social stratification through shameless bureaucratic obfuscation.

The statistical profile of practising visual artists reveals and confirms the difficult conditions that they continue to face, despite numerous initiatives, including the Journée sans culture, which have explored and exposed the professional and personal challenges of a career in the arts. In the spirit of these findings, the art of Joshua Schwebel offers a possible solution. Through specific interventions that address precise needs, Schwebel shines a spotlight on inequities in the field, thereby showing the important responsibility that cultural workers share in changing and eliminating these prejudices.
[Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft]

Is art in willing servitude or does it have the capacity to infiltrate a system without losing its own language? How do artists invest the field of labour? Jean-Charles Massera, Liv Schulman, and Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht put forth art that, while flirting with the utilitarianism of neoliberal society, has become an integral part of a role-playing game in which it risks its meaning and function in a schizophrenic world. Ironically, the drive toward efficiency and productivity and the consequent alienation dogging both labour and art end up in paralysis and derealization. Taking this context as material, the artists work the language from within, through the forms that they create at the crossroads of documentary and fiction.
[Translated from the French by Ron Ross]

In his ongoing Occupations series (2012–), Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama reconfigures old jute sacks, used to transport cocoa and coal in Ghana, into vast stitched-together coverings or tent-like structures, with which he envelops architectural sites worldwide. This text unpacks Mahama’s installations by focusing on his use of jute fabric and traces the various processes of labour present in the material’s production and circulation and, in turn, the artwork as a whole. This story of jute, which is also one of entangled labour and global capital, proves that Mahama’s artworks are the product of working bodies. It also addresses critical questions related to how global industrialized labour is made invisible under capitalist markets.

[In French] L’exposition Room(s) to Move : je, tu, elle, présentée par Sophie Jodoin au centre EXPRESSION de Saint-Hyacinthe, au MacLaren Art Centre de Barrie et au Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides de Saint-Jérôme, dresse le portrait triple d’une femme à travers les régimes intimes, sociaux et médicaux qui tendent à la circonscrire. Projet-bilan marquant la pratique des sept dernières années de l’artiste et réfléchi en collaboration étroite avec la commissaire Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, l’exposition marque un tournant important dans la carrière de Jodoin – tournant marqué par la forte présence du langage comme mode opératoire. Le corps, toujours aussi important dans son travail, se fait toutefois plus implicite, télescopé dans la posture même du regardeur, devenu lecteur, et de son rapport à l’espace et à l’architecture.