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 margin 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…”