Workers Leaving the Museum, 2011 | dylan gauthier / floatingcity.us

Background
Questions around work and labor have had a resurgence in art discourse and cultural studies in the past few years due no doubt to the current economic crisis. Naturally, it was already on all of our minds since the ascendancy of neo-liberal capitalism in the 1990’s had set a path for outsourcing and a rapid de-industrialization of America’s remaining manufacturing industries. The implosion of that system three years ago with the “mortgage crisis” and ensuing global recession has again brought the topic into the fore. Specifically, what is the nature of work in a de-industrializing society, its relationship to alternative or standard economic models, and how do we explain its ubiquity – and often, invisibility – in the developed West. Clearly, work is both a verb and a noun: the act of production and the product. As Karl Marx writes in his early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, “The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object and turned into a physical thing; this project is an objectification of labor.”

Work can be alternately a necessity, an affliction, an object of desire, a means to associate with others, a requirement for self-sufficiency, a joy and a burden. William Morris, founder of the arts and craft movement and proponent of English socialism, interrogates this disparity between good work and bad in 1884. Morris begins his Useful Work vs. Useless Toil by describing “Two kinds of work – one good, the other bad; one not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to life.” Whereas in Morris’s time, these two kinds of work were generally divided along class lines, our own era has seen a shrinking of the middle class and a lessening distinction between good work and bad.

For Morris, much of the work done by a certain class was superfluous both to the upkeep of society (a term neo-liberalism would rather not admit) and to the betterment of the laborer him/herself. Morris provided a stark opposition to the Platonic idea of a diversified labor force based on natural faculties which would have been a common understanding at the time. As Socrates tells Adeimantus in Republic, “We are not all alike; there are diversities of natures among us which are adapted to different occupations…and if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him… and leaves other things” (Republic, quoted in McNulty, 1975). In the 20th century, Morris’ work finds a place in Hannah Arendt, whose split notion of animal laborens-homo faber adds a further valuation of the divide between unthinking, menial labor and what we might call creative work. Recently, philosophers such as Richard Sennett (a pupil of Arendt) have tried to recast Arendt’s labor assessment, stressing the need for labor to involve thinking, and that thinking need understand what it means to labor, and Sennett’s book, The Craftsman, offers a convincing argument to this end.

Recently, Morris’s short speech has been reprinted in a number of different paperback editions, reflecting a shared realization that as the workforce of the West has become to a larger and larger extent less industrialized, the separation between work and leisure has broken down. In the Fordist production model, work was clearly demarcated: it was something that was done with the hands, with the help of large machines, in a place called a factory. As manufacturing work has been outsourced and service-sector and knowledge and cultural producing work has increased, the places, times and modes of work have shifted to the extent that they are nearly unrecognizable; the scope of work now encompasses the scope of leisure, and in some cases the inverse is also true.

We are living in a time of transition. A case can be made that the manufacturing sites offshore are still central to understanding what our society is and does, but the predominant form of work within our culture has transitioned to what the Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato calls immaterial labor. Lazzarato’s view is that even where material production continues in the factories of South East Asia, etc., it is to be accompanied by an immaterial form of labor. As important as the manufacture of objects is the manufacture of knowledge, culture and information about and around those objects. Work is no longer simply about making things, but about making information around those things. According to artist and writer Keti Chukhrov, Lazzarato’s immaterial labor, “coincides increasingly with the creative maneuvers of a virtuosic performer.” It is, in Chukhrov’s words, “an engagement with knowledge,” the aim of which is not just fabrication “but the multiplication of new conditions and variations for production itself.”

Art and Labor
In the highly specialized cross-section of labor, culture and economy that is the art market, these questions about the nature of work have arisen as an ongoing conversation between artists, academic researchers and arts institutions. Because of its interplay with academia and public institutions, even if relatively few individuals are directly involved in or affected firsthand by the workings of the art market, its messages reverberate through many popular forms. In addition, the sites of production of the art world mirror the centers of economic production in the West – New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Paris, Chicago, Sao Paolo, etc. are not by any accident the capitals of Western world finance and also of the Western art world. Perhaps the increase in the number of MFA degrees awarded each year and the high level of competition for relatively few jobs has something to do with its prevalence as a topic of recent art-making as well.

Sociologist Pascal Gielen, whose book The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism posits that the global art economy is “wholly congruent with the worst aspirations of late capitalism.” In Gielen’s book (itself based on Virno’s theory of the multitude), the artist is presented as the ultimate “flexible” entrepreneur: the archetypal, self-interested worker whose lack of benefits parallels a lack of a clear career path, and is only remedied by a willingness and ability to “adapt” to a seemingly infinite number of work configurations. Similarly, Diedrich Diederichsen euphemizes the artist “self-employed cultural worker,” whose cultural capital is derived from a) time spent in art school and b) time spent in bars (Diederichsen, 35). Like the entrepreneur, for the artist there is no clocking in or out – the work of the artist is performed around the clock. Gone is even the problematic promise of climbing a corporate ladder: the entrepreneur labors without contract, without guarantee of any kind, and accepts underpayment in exchange for a sense of being independent. At the same time, risk can not be placed on a corporate or institutional structure, yet must be fully assumed by the individual. While this trend toward entrepreneurism in broader society, and the intendant push to “be flexible” is disturbing when it enters into previously sanctified and safeguarded areas of employment, for the artist, this is nothing new. Both Diederichsen and Gielen ignore that this standard of artistic production recurs throughout the art historical canon whenever competition or a lack of resources are paired with highly educated and skilled artists. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, in their co-authored book on the lives of artists, Born Under Saturn, tell us that ever since artists broke free from the guild system, establishing themselves as something other than artisans – and really, anytime stiff competition required a diversification of income –artists have had to balance their creative practice with other activities:

“Many artists sought salvation in a second job, not only in picture dealing, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, but in occupations entirely at variance with their calling. Jan van Goyen dealt in real estate and tulips; Aert van der Neer owned an inn in Amsterdam, Jan Steen a brewery in Delft and an inn in Leyden; Jan van de Cappelle carried on his father’s dyeing business; Jacob Ruisdael was a baber-surgeon and Joost van Craebeeck a baker; Philips Koninck owned a canal-shipping company and Hobbema held an appointment as a gauger of imported wine.” (21)

Gielen tries to balance the potential exploitation of the artist-entrepreneur’s form of work with its ability to create situations in which real liberties might be attained, for example, in art’s ability to influence mass culture. So the choice to diversify is also one that artists make in order to escape from a the seemingly too-narrow audience actually pays attention to contemporary art. As 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey stated after winning the coveted prize, “I want to make work that has some kind of effect…on contemporary culture. I don’t want to do a gallery show, I want to do a T.V. show.”

Artists from Steve McQueen to Shirin Neshat amongst others have volleyed their success as producers of art to resultant success as filmmakers – a parallel form of production with a slightly higher number of viewers. But for any artist who hasn’t won a large prize, or who isn’t either independently wealthy or supported by the proceeds of their work, it is probably necessary to lead a secondary life, working in trades, as art handlers, preparators, curators, or outside of the field in their day job of choice.

The Social

As Claire Bishop postulates, sometimes art work that embraces the political gesture seems to defy a categorization as artwork even when it passes for art by name and association. The question of what is aesthetic about artwork made with a “social turn” in mind (i.e. art that is socially engaged or turned towards social/political concerns) is an ongoing point of debate in the art world, and though it falls beyond the scope of this paper to delve too far into the debate, I do want to raise a few points related to labor.

Claire Bishop quotes the artist Dan Graham in a recent essay: “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more critical, and more real than art.” The political nature of some forms of contemporary art practice, as the outcropping and reflection of a specific polis is the description of a possibility that the aesthetic is itself political. Jacques Rancière, in the Politics of Aesthetics gives this belief a name: the aesthetic is a particular distribution of the sensible. In other words, aesthetics denotes a particular sharing and refusal-to-share. This aesthetic regime that has dominated contemporary society for the last century is built on a transition of subject matter that Rancière traces to 19th century French literature. For once, the subject of artistic production was not the aristocracy, or even the bureaucracy, but the anonymous masses (Virno’s ‘multitude’). This change in the focus of art could be found first in literature, and then in the visual and performative arts. The shift engendered the creation of new technologies, argues Rancière, and not the other way around. That is to say, the photograph exists because the novels of Hugo and Balzac exist. With the refocusing of art’s subject matter on the everyday, the multitude, or the anonymous figure, an opening up of artistic practice was also possible. Everything that followed, from Dadaism to Situationism to Minimalist Art, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, to Relational Aesthetics and art’s fascination with the social can be traced to this 19th century repositioning of the subject of art.

Today, to paraphrase the question which follows the course of Gerald Raunig’s book “A Thousand Machines,” we are faced with a question. Not, “what is an artwork” but “is that an artwork?” Who is the artist and where do we find them? How can we differentiate between a video made for a gallery or a museum and a video made for youtube, all the more as certain artists may not differentiate in their own work? A poster on Yelp.com writes of his visit to MASS MoCA for the first time, “What is contemporary art? Surely, I haven’t got a clue…as we move from room to room and floor to floor, we asked yourself [sic] the question: This is art?…even though the displays here are uncomplicated closer observation makes [us] realize how time consuming these practices are.”

There is a tendency to reduce the measure of a work of art to the amount of time it took to produce, or at least the measure of time that it appears to contain within it.

The contemporary working mode of the artist as one that is engaged with a multitude of forms of ‘work’ above and beyond the work of producing new artistic objects, situations or concepts – and here we can say that the associated immaterial labor takes the form of the numerous administrative and physical requirements of art production. For a ‘successful’ artist, the tendency is to hire assistants to take on these quotidian tasks, to free the artist up for the serious and important work of theorizing, conceptualizing and planning the fabrication of the ‘art.’ Less successful artists, or those ‘emerging’ (from what we may ask? from their less successful or less known ‘phase’?) must fulfill many roles at once: as office manager, negotiator of contracts, sub-contractor, art director, fabricator, and so on. Beyond that, they must find a way to support themselves if they are not independently wealthy and especially if the form of art that they produce does not lend itself to commodification or sale and so often the artist must work for other artists or perform other tasks entirely. This complex relationship is alluded to in the segment of the Workers video where Richard Criddle, himself a sculptor, speaks of the “support structure” that allows him to make his own work, while requiring that he work for the museum and for other individual artists. His full-time employment as head preparator of a major museum cannot support his art practice alone, but he must also subcontract out as a fabricator to other specialists, artists, producers. The artist must be flexible above all else, taking what work is available and trading off between time spent working for others and time spent on “making work.”

The premise of my thesis project is to draw on and expand upon theories of work and time in our society and particularly their relation to the immaterial or cultural worker. The questions of “what is the nature of work in a post-fordist society?” and “what is the role of the artist (and the art-work) in that society?” provide a rough frame for my project. I began my inquiry into this topic with a short video for Michael Gitlin’s advanced studio class last year. The video combined texts from the [idC] (institute for distributed creativity) mailing listserv, with my own encounters with forms of work and workers (both art and ‘other’) in and around New York City. Entering into abandoned office buildings in Lower Manhattan, attending lectures on the nature of work at the Goethe Institute and the New School, and talking with friends and artists about their work, congeal to form the subject matter as well as the visual image and sound-track for the video. The piece (Swim the Ruins) was recently finished, and serves as a sketch which I can refer to, and a visual guide to the videomaking style I intend to use to complete a part of this project.

One note: like the individual artist-entrepreneur, today museums, too, must become ‘flexible’ as public support for the arts erodes. As Art McConnell, a MASS MoCA employee for 22 years and the head of the museum’s facilities and maintenance explained to me, the museum site is also an equation of real estate. On the one hand, art space is let out to private corporations seeking ambiant spaces to host clients. More surprisingly, the museum general plan includes several hundred thousand square feet of retail and office space. In a conversation that did not make the final cut of the video, Art explained to me how the U.S. Social Security Administration office would soon become a tenant in a space that the museum was converting to be used as office space. It is also noteworthy that Building 8 – the site that Bureau for Open Culture transformed into a co-working space and the site of the “I’m Searching for Field Character” exhibition – became a pet project for Art McConnell, not for its use as a space for contemporary art, but because, nestled alongside the Hoosic River and adjoining a small grassy area, Building 8 would seem particularly well-suited to wedding rentals.

Footnotes:
1 An exhibition on current trends in labor, “The Workers,” curated by Susan Cross, opened in the museum concurrently, and these two exhibitions served as the backdrop to the research project and resulting video.
2 In Fromm, p.95
3 Chukhrov, Keti. “Towards the Space of the General: On Labor beyond Materiality and Immateriality“ E-Flux web journal. URL: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/180 Retrieved 2010-11-15.
4 Leckey, Mark. Interview with Jonathan Jones. Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th7ycfdJBg8. Retrieved 2011-10-30.
5 Christopher S., 9/11/2009. http://www.yelp.com/biz/mass-museum-of-contemporary-art-north-adams#hrid:OAPJF1jgH1xYrIJyZRep2Q (The proposed thesis project will take place, in part, at MassMoca, in North Adams, Mass.)
6 “American FactFinder”. United States Census Bureau. URL: http://factfinder.census.gov/ Retrieved 2008-01-31.
7 Young, Carey. Personal website. Url: http://www.careyyoung.com/past/winwin.html Retrieved: 11-1-11.8 Godfrey, Mark. Works Both Ways: Carey Young’s Projects for the Kunstverein München. Url: http://www.careyyoung.com/essays/godfrey.html Retrieved: 11-1-

The Museum and North Adams

Myself and my partner, Kendra Sullivan, visited North Adams on six separate occasions spanning four seasons, beginning in February of 2011 and making our final visit for the conclusion of our project in September. MASS MoCA is located in the former Sprague Electronics Company, in North Adams, Massachusetts — a sprawling complex of brick factory buildings that date to 1905. Originally constructed to house a textiles printing factory, the 26 buildings that make up the MASS MoCA campus today provide space for large-scale exhibitions of internationally recognized contemporary visual artists, dance and theater companies. The establishment of the museum in 2003 was promoted as a means to revitalize the crippled economy of North Adams which had been laying in waste since Sprague (as it is and was called by its workers) closed in the mid-1980′s. The economy of the town has prospered to some degree, though unemployment is still high and aside from the museum and its dependencies, there is little new economic generation. North Adams had always been a factory town. Situated at the confluence of the Hoosic river branches which gave power to its mills since the town’s inception in the 1700′s, it quickly rose to wealth and prominence in the region as a site of textile manufacturing. The town’s population peaked sometime in the 1960′s at around 21,000 (current population: 13,000). The economic diversification of the town lessened throughout the 1900‘s as small holders and surrounding farms were no longer a viable way of life.

We can imagine that the situation in North Adams at the time was similar to that described by Tamara Hareven in her book “Family Time and Industrial Time,” a fascinating study of famiy life at Amoskeag Mills in neighboring Manchester, New Hampshire. The factory-as-town functioned on a family system which had been imported from England in the 1700′s, meaning, family members recruited other family members, until entire households were employed in the Mills. In Manchester, just about everyone worked at Amoskeag. (13) It provided not just the economic life of the town but was also the primary social motivator. Today, the manufactory workers have been replaced with artist-workers as well as a cultural worker of a different sort — one which we can redefine following Marx as a lumpen cultural worker — the cultural tourist. Some number of the residents of North Adams are employed by the museum and others by the restaurants, hotels and cultural sites that have been refurbished to support a tourist economy. The question of what the impact of the art community has been on the town of North Adams will form a large part of my inquiry for this project. Of particular interest to me is the fact that the most coveted “jobs” in North Adams today might not even be at the museum — if the role of artist/exhibitor is not even on the town’s radar.

What is the role of the art-factory as town in the present-day North Adams community? Hugging the edge of downtown, but with walls, gates and fortifications typical of the Fordist workplace (fortifications conceived in response to labor unrest in this country) it is only somewhat strange that for its central historical and physical placement in the town, the former factory site occupied by the museum exists on the periphery of town life. The museum’s audience seems to consist of two distinct publics: the art world crowd and the locals. On many levels, the museum has struggled to engage with its local audience, and to connect North Adams residents to its exhibitions. Its most popular events are not contemporary art shows but music, dance and theater performances. For one thing, residents of the town have little privilege to the museum aside from its many programs for school-age children and its one free day a month. One telling factor is that openings are open to members only, no doubt as a way to fundraise, however museum visitors might be tempted to visit more frequently if they were included in the program scope. For another thing, North Adams is a poor community: 22% of the population lives below the poverty line, and per capita income is about $19,000 a year.

A $15 adult ticket ($10 students), with no discount for locals, is a price that probably discourages frequent visits.

As I have mentioned, Bureau for Open Culture’s programming was installed in Building 8 as a micro-site at the edge of the museum, yet still funded by and embraced by the broader museum program. One of its most popular (in multiple senses of the word) attractions was a project called Beer Garden (2011), which was just that – a beer garden that was set up every Thursday and Friday night for the duration of the Summer. Beer Garden had no price of admission, and optionally sold Berkshire-brewed beer and fresh baked pretzels to visitors. By my accounts, Beer Garden attracted a segment of the North Adams population that the museum has had trouble in the past drawing in to public events, and was in fact more successful with locals than it was even with museum visitors, most of whom came for the day and left before the garden opened, shortly after the museum’s closing. Museum workers also took to the garden, staying late into the night, taking turns playing music, sometimes dancing. The night of our presentation at Bartleby’s Pen – the literary component of the beer garden organized by Red76 for the exhibition – was the closing night of the season for the beer garden and the last event in BFOC’s schedule. We had been invited to present a talk about the collaborative boatbuilding project which had taken place earlier in the day. We also presented a new book which connected artists who engage in “adventuring” to the more broadly known use of chance practices in art production. As our talk began, I had the feeling of being in some kind of utopian social club. For one thing, there was no price of admission, yet the lighting, atmosphere, and presence of a large group of diverse participants established the beer garden as a safe and open space. Pre-teens from the town could be seen teaching each other to spin hula hoops, local art students bid goodbye to the beer garden by drinking its last kegs dry, museum workers gathered with us to discuss our project, and all the while a soundtrack of experimental music blasted from the open door of Building 8. One museum curator declared that the turn out for Beer Garden had been better than almost any recurrent public program, saving only the annual music festival organized by Wilco. There was talk of reviving the project next year, with or without the support of Bureau for Open Culture who seemed ready to be done with it. The conversation turned to whether or not the museum could reopen it as Beer Garden, whether the Bureau would grant its permission to use the name, whether the whole thing was in fact a discreet piece of artistic production, as a work of relational aesthetics, or whether the bar – paid for, staffed and stocked by the museum – was akin to any other public event the museum might host.

A Note on the Collaborative Nature of the Project

My original thesis project proposal for Toward a Common Measure of Time, which morphed into Workers Leaving the Museum, focused on notions of collaboration as praxis in contemporary art and specifically as something that has been central to my personal artistic practice This project shares many stands with my original proposal, in that it can be envisioned as a multi-point collaborative work that will establish certain structures for collaboration and take its meaning through the participatory actions resultant. There are also several latent collaborations at work here: there is a collaboration between myself and the IMA program’s thesis panel who will help to shape and structure the work; the collaboration between myself and my partner Kendra Sullivan (visual artist and poet) who will be conceptualizing, co-authoring, and participating in the work in North Adams; between the two of us and the curators of the museum (Jim Voorhies of the Bureau for Open Culture and Susan Cross of MASS MoCA); the collaboration created with the museum staff, members of the North Adams community and other artists who participate in the concurrent programming planned by the museum and its curators. A further point of collaboration can be thought of as a media-potential collaboration, as the online and printed materials may spark further dialogues with as-yet-unknown participants.

The staff of the museum made itself available to us as best they could without detracting too much from their work tasks. A small group accompanied us to Specialty Minerals for Dawn School, although we were asked to meet later in the morning to accommodate museum workers and the quarry’s schedule, somewhat corrupting the principle of Dawn School, but not entirely. Amongst the participants in the kayak building workshop, five museum or Bureau for Open Culture employees joined in.

Interestingly, the collaboration with Bureau for Open Culture was strained at times both by our inability to be present on-site full-time: our commitments to our jobs here in New York, my MFA degree, and the curator’s PhD program, teaching duties at Bennington College, their own resources being stretched by the aforementioned beer garden and a number of other collaborations with artists over the Summer, and by a general misunderstanding of the support that would be offered by the museum all factored into this difficulty. My initial project proposal set out five propositions for the development of an artistic research project over the Summer, based loosely around the theme laid out by the Joseph Beuys essay, and tying into some of the themes of the ongoing “The Workers” show in the main museum gallery. Only one of these was rejected outright, a project called “Focus Group” which re-connected with a piece by Carey Young from 2003 (see the section on Related Work by Other Artists for more information) in which she sought to teach negotiation skills to museum workers. Another piece, which revolved around a time clock and would have created a sort of time bank whereby museum visitors were rewarded for time spent in the museum also borrowed from Young’s 2002-2003 work for Kunstverein München was scrapped as well. In the end, we proceeded to undertake three pieces:

1. Dawn School, a continuation of a participatory performance project I had begun in 2010 which invited participants to meet in the early hours of the day and to visit overlooked sites (and situations) of labor on a Situationist-inspired walking tour. For this iteration we would invite factory workers to visit Specialty Minerals, a quarry and minerals processing plant located in neighboring Adams. Based on the understanding that a number of products extracted from the earth at Specialty Minerals are in use by the museum, this version of Dawn School sought connections not only between workers at the museum and workers at the quarry, but between the products sold by the museum and those sold by the minerals processing plant. In the video, scenes of the quarry mirror in some ways the landscape artist Jane Philbrick’s installation on the ground of MASS MoCA. Other products from Specialty Minerals are used in white paint and drywall, two references which occur periodically throughout the video as well.

2. Workers Leaving the Museum, a video installation which would be “built” over the course of several visits to the museum. We began by installing a pair of monitors in the Bureau for Open Culture space, and set out documenting the kinds of labor that were happening in the museum – from the administrative and managerial to hands-on fabrication and production.

3. All Hands On Deck, an invitation to museum workers to build a boat using locally-sourced materials, based on work I had done with Mare Liberum here in Brooklyn (see the “Collaborators” section, below). The kayak was to be constructed of invasive bamboo sourced locally, and covered with a salvaged banner from a show at the museum. Workers were invited to participate in the construction on the grounds that they would, at least poetically, be building their own means of escape from their workday. The boat as a romantic symbol of escape, adventure and exploration, but also a reference to the several boats had already been built as part of other projects in the museum (for the artists Simon Starling several years ago as well as for Nari Ward, on view at the time of this writing). Each of those boats had been built behind the scenes, so to speak, utilizing museum workers and museum resources though in the end being credited and shown as belonging to a single artist. We would build our boats outside, on the lawn adjoining the Bureau for Open Culture space in Building 8, and in the end, ownership would remain with the museum.

An early version of the boatbuilding event would have led to a launch within the Hoosic itself, but a week before the workshop, Hurricane Irene’s runoff brought water levels to record heights. The Hoosic did not overflow its banks in North Adams, though it did cause a wide range of damage in Western Massachusetts, and the water levels were sufficiently high to make a Hoosic-launch too dangerous to attempt. Instead, we took the completed craft, with a number of workers and curators from the museum to North Pond, a local favorite for swimming and boating above North Adams which had not been affected by the flooding.

An additional element is a talk about our experience which we presented at Bartleby’s Pen, the lecture series coordinated by Red76 and held in the Bureau for Open Culture’s Beer Garden.

Products and Presentation

The final outcome of this project which I will present as a finished work toward the completion of my thesis consists of a elements gleaned from the project at MASS MoCA, modified to fill the Black Box. For the installation, I have made a special edit of the video which will be projected on the sail of a catamaran of the same type that was constructed in the final segment of our project. Additionally, I will be printing and distributing a new broadsheet, this one as a reflection of the experience at MASS MoCA. The broadsheet will feature plans for building the bamboo kayak as well as excerpts from the video and the book that was published as part of Bartleby’s Pen, as well as a reprinting of the 1973 Joseph Beuys essay “I’m Searching for Field Character” that motivated the Summer-long exhibition. Other elements from the Summer will be worked into the space, including a chalk line drawn on the floor that traces the shape of the Hoosic River, the central, canalized waterway that runs through and around the museum campus.

Rather than simply presenting the work as a finished piece, and in keeping more in line with the spirit of the Beuys essay which inspired the original project, the boat structure itself will be set up by several of my collaborators from this Summer, during which time I will introduce the project. As indicated on the attached installation diagram, at one end of the space is a projector, aimed toward the catamaran’s sail. At another end of the space is a camera, which will record the action of the evening. This footage will eventually be added to the video, in a final edit which will appear on this archive page, as a component of my own website, and linked to both the Bureau for Open Culture website and Mare Liberum’s blog, www.thefreeseas.org.

Audience

The primary audience for this piece were the visitors to and workers of the museum when it was displayed there over the Summer. A secondary audience of key importance are the students in the IMA program, my colleagues. A third audience may encounter the piece in the archive of Bureau for Open Culture or of MassMoCA, or on my own website. As the title to the piece leaves it open to further manifestations at other museums in the future, I plan to continue to work on it, and may screen it again someday in another context.

Visual Materials

Video (rough)

The video for Workers Leaving the Museum will be projected onto the sail of the catamaran in the final installation on the weekend of December 16, 17, 18, 2011 in Hunter’s Black Box. At the moment, there are still some audio issues, mainly as a result of areas I had to cut background noise out and haven’t yet plugged in roomtone. The video is linear in that it was edited over the course of the Summer by adding video to a vhs tape player – I have tried to recreate the cuts and chronology that I arrived at organically through this process. In some places, for example to create an introduction sequence, I rearranged clips and/or introduced new material.

As an artwork, while it is also a form of documentation of a broader project, the video has its own logic which is separate from that project. I attempt to explain some of the choices I made in assembling the video below. Mostly, I was interested not so much in trying to compress nine months of experiences into a finished piece, but to tell a new story out of the material that I had collected, hopefully a truer story than I could gather from the face-to-face interviews. Though I had recorded interviews with more workers, I decided to use only three subjects whom I thought the most emblematic of the question. They are, for better or worse, all men. This was accidental, but it works for the video, as in some ways I see them as the same person — not in reality, but in the way they are represented in the video. The three characters, Art McConnell, Richard Criddle and Frank James were the best interviews I had there. Richard and Frank I interviewed on several occasions. Richard and Frank are both artists, in different senses. Richard is a professionally trained artist who happens to be working as a preparator for the museum – a job in which he is allowed to use his skills and make interesting work while supporting his family, even if he is not allowed in the end to attach his signature to pieces he has basically made himself, or with his crew. Frank is a stone mason, who also works part time as a bartender. In the video, he is working on a piece for the artist Jane Philbrick, and he speaks enthusiastically about Philbrick, the museum, and the work he is doing, which is not any run-of-the-mill stone masonry. Art is not an artist, but he does administrate over several large construction projects within the museum – and he oversees not just the technical aspects but also the museum’s facilities budget. His relationship with artists seems stressful, as he is often the one who establishes what the museum is willing to contribute to their projects. These three characters’ words intertwine with quotes I have selected and voiced, and they become a character that I think I see as the museum itself. This is not so far off. On the one hand, in such a small town, the museum really does get its particular character from the people who work there. Criddle, for example, has fabricated most of the furniture and furnishings used in the museum dining area. Art has been in charge of the museum’s facilities since before it opened, and the facilities bear his mark as well. Finally, everyone of the staff that I interviewed about MASS MoCA had nothing but the most glowing things to say about the museum itself, what it has meant to the town, etc., and this made selecting clips difficult sometimes as the goal of my project was not necessarily to promote the museum (though I think it’s a very interesting place) but to use the museum as a backdrop over which to raise some questions about the nature of immaterial – or cultural – production.

(Press ‘f’ to view in full screen mode.)

Scene-by-Scene Analysis of the Video

The video begins with an excerpt of the 1895 Lumières Brothers film from which this project takes its name. As I have described above, the Lumières captured a moment when their employees were leaving their factories. As Harun Farocki notes in his installation – on view at MASS MoCA this Summer as part of the “Workers” exhibition –this convention of showing workers leaving factories, rather than their workaday activities within them, is a trope that is constantly repeated in other films. Showing this moment of leisure and associating it with the workers’ situation as worker is an elliptical technique that would hide the actual fact of labor from the audience.

After the intro credit, we are met with the voice of Richard Criddle, head prepartor for the museum, who describes the way in which this particular museum operates. Contrary to many museums whose primary function is to display art, MASS MoCA’s in house fabrication tends to invite collaborations with artists who make use of these facilities. As Criddle puts it, “This big old factory complex has some small factories still in it, factories for creativity.”

The video then introduces us to Art McConnell, head of facilities and buildings for the MASS MoCA compound. Art’s role is to provide space, and make sure it is fitted out and ready for artworks to be installed by Criddle’s crews.

Criddle explains (over a montage of the building that Art was describing in the prior sequence) how seasonal workers interface with full-time museum employees on an as-needed basis.

An inter title asks, “What is the work of the artist?”

We meet Frank James, a stone mason who is working on a temporary contract laying the stone work for Jane Philbrick’s massive landscape work. His reply seems at first to be answering the question just posed, though in actuality he is attempting to explain the workings of Philbrick’s piece. James will appear later in the video to expand on his definition of Philbrick’s work.

A voice over, quoting a passage from Rosalind Krauss’s essay, tells the story of Thomas Krens, then president of the Guggenheim and alumni of nearby (to MOCA) Williams College and his initial conception of MOCA as a game-changer in the way that art would be produced and, the essay implies, received by the public.

A walkthrough of the “knuckle” the connection between the two branches of the Hoosic River that flow around the MASS MoCA site, in the below-ground storage and staging area. We pass a stack of styrofoam left over from Katharia Grosse’s monumental painting/sculptural installation (we are given a brief glane of this in the elevator scene just before). Kendra and Jim pose a question about a stack of crates which may or may not be remnants of a Carsten Holler piece. Carsten Holler’s work poses questions about the enjoyment of artistic works, recreation, and amusement. His piece for MoCA installed a carnival’s worth of rides which museum visitors were not allowed to ride on but could contemplate as art objects, readymades, etc.

The next sequence of shots, of a forklift, first stationary and then in motion, and a small guard’s booth in the rear courtyard seemed apropos to Holler’s work to me, in that they both seem reminiscent of his carnival rides. The one, which always looks like fun when you’re a kid, is also a backbreaking day job in most factories and warehouses. The other, a guard booth, is constructed in the vein as the rest of the museum which would seem to indicate some far off Swiss fantasy camp, rather than a situation of work with its inherent demands, frustrations, injures, injustices.

Criddle returns in the next scene to explain how he views his own engagement with the museum. Dara asked me whether the workers there had an analysis of their role as workers. Criddle more than anyone else I met there was able to talk about the delicate balance (his words) between being an artist and working as a professional artisan or fabricator. On the one hand, he is able to make his own work at the museum through working there, and in fact has fun doing it. On the other hand, he admits that ideally he would probably support himself through his art full-time.

We return to Frank James, who explains the work he is doing on the Philbrick project.

McConnell describes his experience working with artists in relation to the locality of North Adams and the particular restrictions or rules involved with working here as opposed to work in other sites. McConnell is obliquely referencing the debacle the museum faced when a German artist, Christoph Buchel, pulled his participation from a show that the museum was building for him in their largest gallery and which was both over budget and not meeting the expectations of either the artist or the museum. The Buchel story still strikes a raw nerve with everyone I spoke with at the museum, and I found it to be too bizarre, too far out of the ordinary to warrant including it even in mention in research project I was engaged in. That said, I like McConnell’s reference to it, without calling it out by name.

We follow our conversation with Art with an inter title that asks “What is a work of art?” A montage of scenes from the Bureau for Open Culture site in various stages of its use and installation in MoCA’s Building 8 is overlaid with an excerpt of Miwon Kwon’s essay. Kwon is tracing the conversion of what Benjamin Buchloh calls the “aesthetics of administration” to the “administration of aesthetics.” Clearly, Bureau for Open Culture responds to both, in that it has branded itself as a “Bureau,” and also must administrate other artists in order to produce work. Similar to the Office of Contemporary Art in Norway, Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial practice at the cusp between curation and artistic creation. In 2011, Jim Voorhies (the lead curator of BOC) published a short book called “The Future is Now,” which assembles relevant ideas about this intersection between curation and art production and includes text by Lucy Lippard, Harold Szeeman as well as Krauss’ aforementioned essay.

The excerpt from Kwon’s essay: “Generally speaking, the artist used to be a maker of aesthetic objects; now he/she is a facilitator, educator, coordinator, and bureaucrat. Additionally, as artists have adopted managerial functions of art institutions (curatorial, educational, archival) as an integral part of their creative process, managers of art within institutions (curators, educators, public program directors), who often take their cues from these artists, now function as authorial figures in their own right.”

In the next scene, Criddle, the artist/fabricator, takes us through MASS MoCA’s woodshop. The key to this scene is the idea that everything in the woodshop can be moved out of the way. It, too, echoes this Post-Fordist call to “be flexible,” and can be shifted depending on the needs of the artist for whom they are presumably building.

A selection of buildings at MASS MoCA. Hidden in one of them is a shop belonging to Richard Criddle – a bonus or perk to his position, but one that also binds him in another way, personally, to the museum. Criddle asked that I not show the footage in which he explained this somewhat secret benefit of his job. He prefers to keep a low profile about the space, in part because many other artists or would-be artists work in the museum and who wouldn’t want a large, rent-free workspace on site?

Juxtaposed to the various discussions of artistic production, I wanted to add some scenes of us building the kayak on the lawn at MoCA that day. Criddle comes in at some point to declare using a musical analogy that the way that artistic production happens today is more akin to a stage production. The artist is a producer. In the field of visual arts, “there is a cast” and with this cast, a list of credits that in the fine art business does not get published.

The next scene brings us closer to Jane Philbrick’s work, “The Expanded Field.” Her project is running behind schedule at the time of this filming, and in addition to a team of local landscapers (of which Frank James whom we met earlier is a part), Philbrick has also brought a crew of artist assistants over with her from her home in Sweden to finish the project in time. Her own project takes a line from a Rosalind Krauss essay as a title and a starting point, which at this late date in 2011 seems to have skipped over some essential developments — earthworks, land art, etc.

We begin to visit the quarry outside of town, and find another quote from Kwon’s essay:

“Thus, if the artist is successful, he or she travels constantly as a freelancer, often working on more than one site-specific project at a time, globe-trotting as a guest, tourist, adventurer, temporary in-house critic, or pseudoethnographer to Sao Paulo, Munich, Chicago, Seoul, Amsterdam, New York, and so on. Generally, the in situ configuration of a project that emerges out of such a situation is tempo- rary, ostensibly unsuitable for re-presentation anywhere else without altering its meaning, partly because the commission is defined by a unique set of geographical and temporal circumstances and partly because the project is dependent on unpredictable and unprogrammable on-site relations. But such conditions, despite appearances to the contrary, do not circumvent the problem of commodification entirely because there is a strange reversal now wherein the artist approximates the work instead of the other way around as it is commonly assumed (that is, art work as surrogate of the artist).”

There is so much to draw out from this quote, but I think it leads basically to the ideas of Relational Aesthetics, or more recently to the Maria Abromovic piece at MOMA last year The Artist is Present. According to Kwon, what is important is not solely the work of art, but the actual, physical presence of the artist. In considering the number of visits to the site in North Adams, and the decision to present the video as a work in progress, I think I was in some ways playing into this notion. I could have shot a video over the course of a weekend, edited it, come back up the following weekend and screened it. However, there was something more appealing about prolonging the process, or “dragging out the punchline” as Diedrich Diederichsen calls it in his book “On Surplus Value in Art.” Diederichsen refers to the auratic and secondary auratic objects. Clearly referencing Benjamin here, he is addressing the situation of the artists faced with easily reproducible commodities. His example, like Criddle’s in the preceding passage, is the artist musician or performer. As the recorded sound is no longer confined to a single object such as the record or even the CD but exists everywhere at once, if the performer is expected to make a living they must appear before live audiences in live performative settings.

At the base of the Krauss essay is an assumption that mass fabrication and thus inexpensive reproduction of art works such as the modernists Judd, LeWitt and Morris actually led to MASS MoCA. At the base of Kwon’s and Diederichsen’s is a similar pronouncement that the presence of the artist is all that matters now that the object itself is fully commodifiable. Even attempts to prolong the punchline, to prevent an object from seeming complete eventually fail.

Kwon: “Typically, an artist (no longer a studio-bound object maker, primarily working on-call) is invited by an art institution to execute a work specifically configured for the framework provided by the institution (in some cases the artist may solicit the institution with a proposal). Subsequently, the artist enters into a contractual agreement with the host institution for the commission. There follows repeated visits to or extended stays at the site; research into the particularities of the institution and/or the city within which it is located (its history, constituency of the [art] audience, the installation space); consideration of the parameters of the exhibition itself (its thematic structure, social relevance, other artists in the show); and many meetings with curators, educators, and administrative support staff, who may all end up “collaborating” with the artist to produce the work. The project will likely be time-consuming and in the end will have engaged the “site” in a multitude of ways, and the documentation of the project will take on another life within the art world’s publicity circuit, which will in turn alert another institution for another commission.”

In the next scenes, as a counterpoint to the Philbrick work, we visit the quarry, where museum workers are gathering limestone freshly cut after a blast earlier in the week. We again revisit the expanded field. This time the quarry itself is an artwork.

The final scene gives closure to the boatbuilding activity seen earlier in the video, as artists and workers take to the wind and leave the museum.

In the credits, the scrolling list of MoCA employees was originally presented on a second channel, looping constantly while the ethnographic video played on a larger screen.

Installation

Installation Sketches

Proposed Black Box Installation Diagram

Catamaran and sail as video screen and lectern, with chairs

Collaborators

In addition to the support and guidance of my thesis advisor, Marty Lucas, and secondary advisors: Ricardo Miranda, Rachel Stevens, Dara Greenwald, I was grateful to have the following assistance with this project:

Kendra Sullivan, a visual artist and poet with whom I have collaborated on numerous projects over the past two years. Kendra informed and helped shape the project at MASS MoCA since its inception, contextualizing, planning and orchestrating the project from the beginning, and helping gather video and audio on site…while co-authoring the various publications we attempted along the way. She also provided a fresh set of eyes to the editing process.

Stephan von Muehlen and Ben Cohen are 2/3 of the collective Mare Liberum, which we run out of the Gowanus Studio Space in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn. The collective is an experimental printmaking and boatbuilding project which began in 2007 as a continuation of the Empty Vessel Project, a 63′ Navy rescue boat that was moored on the Gowanus Canal and served as an arts and music venue for a period of 2 and a half years. As Mare Liberum, we have taught boatbuilding workshops, published instructional broadsheets, and have taken hand-built boats to waterways around the city. We also maintain a blog, at http://www.thefreeseas.org. For their involvement in the project at Mass MoCA, Stephan and Ben (with help from myself and boatbuilder/artist Marie Lorenz) developed the plan for the Bamboo Kayak and led the construction efforts at MASS MoCA.

Bureau for Open Culture is the curatorial practice of Jim Voorhies, originally begun in Columbus, Ohio, as a programming component for the college gallery of the Columbus College of Art and Design. The Bureau curated “I’m Searching for Field Character,” the show that invited myself and Kendra Sullivan to collaborate on a project at MASS MoCA in the Summer of 2011. “I’m Searching for Field Character” was installed in a small building on MASS MoCA’s campus, and functioned as a para-site to the Museum’s Summer Exhibition, “The Workers.” The title of the exhibition was borrowed from the 1973 Joseph Beuys essay of the same name, in which that artist declares the need for a socialist free state led by the melding of art into life and politics. The exhibition invited over a dozen artists to contribute projects based on artistic process on a staggered schedule over the Summer. Nothing was to be presented as a fully-realized piece, rather, artists were encouraged to share parts of their process and to create new works in-situ. For more information, see: http://bureauforopenculture.org.

The Staff at MASS MoCA. Particularly Richard Criddle, the Head Preparator, Art McConnell, Chief of Facilities and Susan Cross, Curator. All of the staff at MASS MoCA helped us to work over the Summer, by spreading the word when we were coming into town and helping us gather up subjects to interview. They also helped us to facilitate Dawn School, the talk at Bartleby’s Pen (the Bureau for Open Culture Beer Garden lecture series) and participated in the boat build at the end of the Summer. A full list of the current staff, all of whom helped us to realize this project, is featured at the end of the video.

Adven-ture: A book produced during the MASS MoCA residency

In late September, we led a discussion on the artist as adventurer, as a way of connecting the work we’d been doing over the Summer with ideas of chance in artistic production, John Cage being only the most recognized. The attached booklet, which we printed for the talk (part of the Bartleby’s Pen lecture series organized by Bureau for Open Culture and Red76), draws out the connections between the artist adventure and such experiments with chance. One of the ideas that was at multiple points in the discussion (and which occurs frequently on the video) is that there is a trade off between work and fun, and that, in the best case, art-work can be seen as a kind of fun. Often times, we take this promise of fun as an excuse for not being properly remunerated. The text of the book can be downloaded here: Adven-ture: Chance Fragments A transcript of the discussion is forthcoming and will be published later this year in a compendium of Bartleby’s Pen talks.

Press

North Adams Transcript
September 2, 2011

‘Art Pirates’ come to Port at Mass MoCA
John Seven, North Adams Transcript
NORTH ADAMS – Dylan Gauthier and the collective Mare Liberum are a bit like art pirates, building boats from scrap and reclaiming the waters around New York City as useful public art space.
Gauthier will team with fellow collective members Ben Cohen and Stephan von Meuhlin, as well as another boat-building artist, Kendra Sullivan, for a one-day workshop – “All Hands On Deck” – on Friday, Sept. 9, as part of The Bureau For Open Culture project that has been housed at Mass MoCA for the summer as part of “The Workers” show. The crew will be on site from Thursday through Sunday.
Gauthier’s hope is for a communal experience in boatbuilding that will bring people together to create and, hopefully, pass along the experience, as well as the fruits of it.
Mare Liberum is based in the Gowanus area in Brooklyn and specializes in maritime and boat-themed art projects. The group tries to get together annually and craft a new boat shape each time, built from whatever scrap material is available. Their intention was to forge some sort of relationship with the water that was part of everyone’s daily lives in the city, but with which there was little personal interaction.
“The place we’re working in had a lot of water,” Gauthier said. “The people who lived here didn’t necessarily interact with it all that often – or other than very formal ways aside from crossing bridges and looking down at the East River or looking out at the Hudson and saying ‘Oh! The Hudson!’ ” The Gowanus had been under a big gentrification plan that was halted because there was an EPA superfund site that got reinstated on the whole canal. The group works around this set of issues and often gets their material from the actual labor involved in gentrification, redirecting the materials in order to build the vessels through which residents might interact with the water.
“We had gone and talked to people in construction sites and they gave us their cast off plywood that they were using to pour concrete floors and things like that, so the project got started down there,” said Gauthier.
The group began about eight years ago, procuring a 64-foot, mahogany Naval rescue boat from the Korean War and using it for open studio space. This overlapped with other work that Gauthier was doing at the time, which involved reclaiming unused space in the city for art projects. The waterfront was one place in the urban setting that someone could stake a claim, even temporarily, and fashion an autonomous site. That is what the group has been doing to some degree ever since.
“From there, we’ve been getting into smaller and smaller boats, and making them more portable,” he said. “This project that we’ve been working on, which has to do with these bamboo kayaks, is the pinnacle of that. They end up weighing 30 pounds and are just bamboo wrapped in canvas and they allow for a single person to get out on the water wherever they choose.”
The group taught themselves how to build smaller and smaller vessels by consulting books from amateur boat builders dating back to the 1950s that were popular at the time, particularly those of John Gardner, a boat builder at the Mystic Seaport. At the core of their plans was to not keep their efforts to themselves.
“Our intention was to try and do this not just on our own as artist adventurers,” said Gauthier. “But we actually wanted to make this technology or these techniques available to other people, and so there’s a component of this where we’ve always printed plans and stories and gave people advice how to do this and held workshops.”
The group eventually devised their own dory that they could build using simple power tools and sheets of plywood.
“They’re not marine-grade plywood,” Gauthier said. “They’re fairly heavy and already used, so we had to adjust the shape of the boat to suit that. This was all done through experimentation and making a few that failed before they got out of the studio because you could just tell that they weren’t holding together.”
The group has upgraded the technology of their planning, now using 3D modeling software which allows a little improvisation – required depending on the materials available – to work along with the strict planning. This is the tactic planned for the North Adams appearance.
“We’re going to show up with a certain amount of materials ready to pull together,” said Gauthier. “But that said, the materials that we’re working with are unstable by nature, and we have bamboos that we’ve foraged and harvested and will be drying out as best we can, as best we figure out how to – try to cure it so it’s actually usable – and we’ll be taking some materials from the museum.”
Gauthier’s hope is that the result of the day’s labor will find it’s way to a body of water – obviously the Hoosic canals are out of the question, though he admits to wishing he could give them a shot. The ultimate goal of Gauthier and his collective are to pass along the experience and help others create further channels for collaborative seafaring.
“People would actually be in the end hopefully making something that they would want to take with them,” he said. “However many we end up making, the idea is that we give them to whoever wants them and we figure out a way to have an auction or barter with people who are interested in taking them and taking care of them.”
Mare Liberum can be found online at thefreeseas.org.
John Seven is the Transcript’s arts and entertainment editor. Photo courtesy of Mare Liberum
Bamboo and ziptie kayak building workshop in Brooklyn, N.Y., this August.
(c) 2011 North Adams Transcript. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.

2 Essays

The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum
Author(s): Rosalind Krauss
Source: October, Vol. 54 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 3-17
PDF: krauss-late-capitalist-museum

One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity
Author(s): Miwon Kwon
Source: October, Vol. 80 (Spring, 1997), pp. 85-110
Published by: The MIT Press
PDF: kwononeplaceafteranother

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