Work Ethic by Helen Molesworth, The Pensylvania State University Press, 2003.

Notes and take aways:

(p25) - Post WW11, avant garde art had a disregard for traditional artistic skills.

Robert Rauschenberg - Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).

Frank Stella’s Club Onyx (1959) - black house paint and store brought brush which dictated the width of the stripes.

Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of it’s Own Making (1961) - plain wooden box with a tape recording of hammering and sawing.

Steinberg. Here was a work of art content to be described in he language of work as opposed to that of art. Sawing and hammering replaced drawing and composition.

“An object insistent upon the labour of its maker.”

The essay argues = one unifying principle of the extraordinary heterogenous field of post WW11 avant-garde art was a concern with the problematic of artistic labour. American industrial economy, based in manufacturing, shifted to postindustrial economy = managerial and service labour.

“the concern with artistic labour manifested itself in simplicity and explicit ways as much of the advanced art of the period managed, stages, mimicked, ridiculed and challenged the cultural and societal anxieties around the shifting terrain and definitions of work. “

(p26)

Modernism promised that art would offer resistance to regimented life under industrialisation. Arts and Crafts movement to Bauhaus, = dream of integration of art and life, work and leisure. Belief that the alienation produced by the fragmented nature of modern labour would be ameliorated (to make something bad, better).

(p27)

1960s artists worked during corporatisation of America. Professionalisation of the category of artist. Burgeoning NY contemporary art market. Put pressure on artists to redefine themselves and their work. The profound transformation of labour. Rise of the managerial class. Division between activities of managers and workers. Managerial work no longer defined by manufacture of objects.

“Rather the work of management was to oversee the labour of others, and it often involved making representations of work, such as diagrams, graphs and flowcharts.”

Managers = conception and planning. Workers = execution. Industrial economy became the service economy. Goods produced elsewhere. Disappearance of commodity coincided with the disappearance of the traditional art object. Further exploration of the problem of artistic labour. The increasing influence and importance of the art of MARCEL DUCHAMP.

(p28)

MARCEL DUCHAMP - ‘readymades’. - defied two historical traditions; that art should be unique and that it should be produced by a highly trained artist. Most serious attach on the category of Art since the Renaissance. Duchamp didn’t destroy art, but opened up an enormous field of aesthetic possibility. Helped to liberate artists from conventional modes of working. didn’t need to produce visually aesthetic objects. ART BECAME A REALM OF IDEAS. The most important reception of Duchamp came in 1950s with John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg - all rejected the supposed purity and emotionalism of Ab Expressionism.

Art of 1960s producted movements inc. Minimalism, conceptual art, Fluxus, Performance, Process, Feminist art and Happenings.

(p29)

Art was Dematerialised, it pursued the aesthetic of silence, in was anti-illusionistic, it was conceptual, it was anti-commodity, it was democratised.

“It’s difficulty lay in large measure in its double rejection: as artists stopped employing traditional artistic skills, they also stopped making works of art that imagined the museum or the collector’s home as their final destination. Instead artists attempted to make works of art that would actively resist easy assimilation into the realm of the art market, where art was seen to be one luxury commodity…”

LEO STEINBERG, Other Criteria, 1968 - STATED THAT NEW ART PRESENTS ITSELF AS WORK NOT ART, and therefore needs to be analysed in sociocultural terms in addition to those taken from the discourse of art.

Role of artist was being REARTICULATED.

TWO IMPORTANT TEXTS - “The Creative Act” Duchamp, 1957 - “the creative act is not performed by the artist along”. The VIEWERS role - brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications = thus contributing to the creative act. (p30)

Roland Barthes - “The Death of the Author”, 1967 - describes the increasingly prevalent form of ANTI-AUTHORIAL ARTIST PRACTICE. Artists in 1960s found metaphorical death of the author liberating. Artists sought ways to downplay or undermine their own authorship. Paid assistants, mathematical systems, using the camera, YOKO ONO turned the completion of her artwork over to the audience completely. However, revoking ownership also questioned the status or value of their labour.

(p31)

Where artists still required in any subjective or authorial specificity? If not, what was their role? What was to constitute their labour?

Sol LeWitt - the aim of the artist would be not to instruct but to give the viewer information. Like a Clerk. (1960s rise of the managerial role in work and service economy in US).

Not a de-skilling but a re-skilling.

(p32)

The rise of MFA degrees awarded over the years (ie: exponential).

Rauchenberg's Erased a De Kooning Drawing - acknowledgement that one form of artistic skill was being supplanted by another. Rauschenberg said he worked hard to erase all of de Kooning’s drawing.

(p33)

The need to teach technical skill was replaced by being around artists and hearing them TALK. The talk became the CRIT, the guest artist lecture, and the studio visit. Result was a generation of college educated artists whose skills were theoretical and verbal. The Rise of the MFA student. (Ha!!)

(p34)

The professionalisation of the artist (as opposed to the lone genius or one possessing laboriously learned skills). Ab Expressionists helped promulgate myth of isolated artist in the studio. Presented themselves as working class - think Jackson Pollock in his work shirts and blue jeans. Warhol and Frank Stella - image of working professional. Both produced work that was devoid of the interior life of the artist. Both adopted mechanised production apparatus. Stella brushes were store bought as was the paint. the stripe in his paintings. Warhol borrowed images - assembly line. Stella’s idea of an executive artist - did work for him. “The Factory” = Warhol created. Stella = art-worker.

(p37/38/39)

NY capital of art world post WW2. Loft spaces in SoHo. Issue with landlord saw artists group together as a body like a union partitioning the Mayor of NY. Artists became both producers and consumers of art.

What does an artist do in his studio - Bruce Nauman - in response dictated a set of tasks to do in his studio. Filmed them. Studio becomes a performative arena.

(p41/42)

Questions - when is the work finished? Is it “enough” work? Chris Burden Honest Labour, 1979, artist dug a ditch over a period of three days while acting as a visiting artist at an art school. Ditch was useless without a purpose. the process was valued and the performance? Honest labour - the product was useless. An honest days work refuses to produce a luxury commodity object. Artists in 1960s argued (emphatically) that it was more important how a piece of art was made than rather than final product = Process Art. Separation of mental and manual labour. NB: assistants making art under instruction.

PROCESS BECOMES ARTIST LABOUR.

(p43)

“As shifting definitions of labour came to structure both art and everyday life, the traditionally unpaid labour of housework and child rearing became material for artists interested in problems of work. The many artists who were women tried to combine their housework and their artwork indicates that the traditional division of labour between manager and worker does not apply to domestic tasks. “

Martha Rosler, Backyard Economy, 1974. Artist mows the lawn and hangs out the laundry. Daily, necessary, unpaid chores.