LABOR : Who is working on the project?

Labor practices determine the speed and scale of an artist’s production. For example, artists who work in groups can share skills, labor, and time. Collectives often acknowledge that in working together ideas coalesce; labor and creativity cannot be disconnected. Well-known contemporary artists often reach beyond the scale of their own labor in order to meet the demands of galleries, non-profits, or commissions, relying upon contract workers, apprentices, or interns. Recall the fantasies that for many arts graduates begin inside art schools, of endless circulation and visibility: ten new artworks, twenty artists talks, and three solo shows annually. This necessitates labor practices that are impersonal and potentially exploitative.

Artists who make labor visible in their work often do so to investigate power dynamics. For example, Justseeds artist cooperative members “work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheat paste on the streets—all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.” Mierle Laderman Ukeles Transfer: The Maintenance of the Art Object

(1974) involves a performance of cleaning and caretaking within a museum. Fred Wilson’s Guarded View (1991) asks museum visitors to see the staff who protect the objects on view. Tehching Hsieh in One Year Performance 1980-81, clocked into his studio for eight hours a day. W.A.G.E’s (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) mission is to establish a model of best practices between artists and the institutions that contract their labor. and Carrot Workers Collective’s projects,  (a London-based group of current or ex interns), focus on the conditions of free labour in cultural sectors. Artists involved in Participatory Action Research methodology believe that those most impacted by research should design, conduct, and present that research. The artist Jeremy Hutchison asked workers at factories to “make a mistake” in their production, making visible the poetics of dysfunctional objects. The editor to a book about OBGYN famously added “misogyny” to the index, adding a feminist intervention that only a final worker could do.   

While these artists represent labor practices, the labor that enables their own work is often not discussed. Artists rarely speak about their own working conditions when presenting their work and art history books continue to depict artists as solitary workers whose claims to solidarity with the working class is tenuous at best.

Raymond Williams explains that the very concept of “medium” as central to the understanding of types of art reduces the labor and social relationships involved in production by focusing attention to the finished qualities of any project. Williams writes that this occurs when “medium is intermediate agency, between an ‘artistic impulse’ and a complete ‘work’; or medium as the objectified properties of the working process itself. To have seen the working process differently, not with the specializing senses of ‘medium’, but as a particular case of conscious practice, and thus ‘practical consciousness’, would have endangered the precious reservation of art from the conditions, not only of practical everyday work — that relation which had once, in a different social order, been accepted — but of the capitalist system of material production for a market.” [[[ add more from Chapter three, “From Medium to Social Practice,” in Raymond Williams’s book, Marxism and Literature traces the conditions and narratives that overshadow the materiality of artmaking as labor. He describes how value is reinscribed from the labor/skill set that produced the work to the medium (eg painting)…   TBC and then reified ??]]]

Artists produce art by making meaning with the labor that they claim for themselves — determining when they wish to work, what to make, for whom, and whether or not their work will be given away freely, sold, or traded. Ben Davis claims that “the position of the professional artist is characteristically middle class in relation to labor: the dream of being an artist is the dream of making a living off the products of one’s own mental or physical labor while being fully able to control and identify with that labor.” In Of Supply Chains, we focus on who works on the project in order to recognize that labor often extends beyond the author who is credited for the work. For example, you might work alone, sewing fabric in your studio, or a family or friend might help you assemble a sculpture. Members of a collective might help you write a text. A co-worker might take photographs for you. A public employee might provide research material for your project. Contributors to an open source project might help you with your work.

People who might be working on the project include you alone, your family or friends, a collective, members of a business, members of a public institution, or members of a commons. You might sew fabric along in your studio. You friends might help you assemble a sculpture. Members of a collective might help you a write a text. A co-worker might take photographs for you. A public employee might provide research material. Contributors to an open source project might help you.

TOOL : Who has access to the tools or technology to create the project?

Tools and technologies determine the scale, quality, and formal constraints of projects. For example, Impressionism developed with the invention of the portable paint tube, which allowed artists to work outside. Medium-specific artists often acquire the tools necessary for their work, but public artists and project-based artists often require tools for projects that change with each project. When form follows concept, artists often rely upon work for hire contractors or fabrication companies whose tools are not available to the artist beyond the fabrication contact.

Many artists seek out staff, faculty, and administrative positions in art departments precisely in order to access a wide variety of tools. When students graduate, getting access to their school’s facilities and tools may no longer be possible. Artists often adapt their practices in relationship to the tools available: a sculptor might go from building large objects to doing performances. Collective purchasing of expensive and large-scale tools by weavers, filmmakers, and woodworkers often enables experimentation and ongoing development. Other ways to access tools and technologies include day jobs, apprenticeships, internships, community centers, schools, and residencies.

Some artists and designers wish to make their tools and technologies they use available to others. They may feel that the availability of tools follows an open source ethos, makes the process visible, or cements social relationships. For example, Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca No.5 (2000) digests food in real time and Suplerflex’s Copy Shop teaches visitors how to make copies. In Pedro Reyes’ project Disarm  (2013) he turns guns into flutes and shovels, circulating tools for violence into tools for construction and music back into neighborhoods in Mexico City. Public Lab shares and adapts spectrometers and other tools with a community of citizen scientists, following the Free Culture Movement of the 1990s dictate that work which cannot be replicated is unfree. Publication Studio is an international collective of artists who use budgets from short-term exhibitions to purchase printing and binding equipment that then becomes available to members of the collective at the end of the exhibition.

In Supply Chains, we focus on the people who can access tools and technologies because the work itself is often interpreted based upon the tools used to produce it. For example, work made with CNC fabrication facilities is often experienced in relationship to CNC sites as elite spaces with resources and power that are difficult to access, rather than democratic sites for neighbors that Makerspaces aim to become.

Locations where tools and technologies are available include free software, the dark web, tool libraries, maker spaces, and collective studio spaces. Tools might be accessible only to you alone, to friends and family, to a community, a business, a public site, or a commons. For example, you might be the only person who has access to the tools and technology for the project; you might use your own computer. Or, perhaps you, your family, or friends have access to a shared table saw. Perhaps a community or collective shares a printer, or members of a business have access to equipment, or members of a community college can access a ceramics wheel, or members of a commons access a composter or Free / Libre / Open Source software.

Copyright: How is your copyright licensed or assigned?

All original work that you create is automatically copyrighted according to United States law and cannot be copied, distributed, built upon, or shared unless you allow it by license or assignment. As the Digital Media Law Project explains, “owning a copyright also gives you the exclusive right to prepare “derivative works,” which are the original works in new forms – for example, a translation into another language, or a movie made from a novel, or a revised or expanded edition of an existing work. Someone who does these things without your permission is infringing your copyright, and the law provides you recourse.”

In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote that property is theft. Many artist feel that a system of private ownership of art creates a system of theft; with collective ownership property cannot be stolen because it is already held in common. According to CreativeCommons co-founder, lawyer, and writer Lawrence Lessig, “there has never been a time in history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.” From patents on seeds and DNA to Facebook user agreements that allow Facebook to take our imagery for any purpose, intellectual property law often protects private profit rather than the common good. Many artists sense the tension between a legal system based on private ownership and an ideal that art and culture should be freely available.

In practice, however, many art institutions take control of artists’ copyright. For example, a common agreement between an exhibition space and an artist gives the exhibiting institution, not the artist, rights to royalties made in association with images and reproductions of that artist’s project. The artist Jennifer Dalton encourages artists to cross this section of the agreement out, often making photography illegal in her exhibitions in order to control the circulation of her projects and representations of it as imagery.

Artists who wish to challenge concepts of authorship and property in their work often make copyright an essential component of their projects. For example, Sherrie Levine re-photographs existing works of art, SuplerFlex’s CopyShop encourages museum visitors to make copies of copyrighted works, and FutureFarmers’ Flatbread Society turned a public artwork into a commons owned by all residents in Sørenga, Bjørvika in Oslo. Architect Santiago Cirugeda creates free, technical and legal tool kits to help people recreate his projects . The Free Culture movement of the 1990s advocated for collaboration, sharing, and reuse of existing cultural products, and led to the creation of Creative Commons licences.  In 2015 Getty Images demanded that the documentary photographer Carol Highsmith pay a $120 fine for copyright infringement because she posted one of her own photographs on her own website. She subsequently learned that Getty Images had charged fees to many users of her images, an unlawful act since Highsmith had been donating thousands of her images to the Library of Congress since 1988 for use by the general public at no charge. There is a pending $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Getty for “gross misuse” of 18,755 of her photographs.

There are many ways to license and assign your copyright. When you license your work, you lend (license) your copyright to someone, controlling how they use it and how long they can use it for. For example, you might licence a drawing to a band for their album and also to an author for their book cover. When you assign your work, you transfer (assign) your copyright to someone else for specific uses. You can assign some or all of your rights but you are giving away those copyrights forever. For example, you might assign use of a drawing to a clothing designer for their website so that no other website will ever have that drawing on it. When you sign a Work for Hire agreement, you sell your copyright entirely. Anything you create under that agreement belongs to the person hiring you as
if they created it. For example, you might make a drawing for a toy company under a work for hire agreement.

To make your work available in the Public Domain, you must lend (license) your copyright to the public as a whole. Under the Public Domain, anyone can use your work for anything, including commercial or political usage. For example, you might license your drawing with a Creative Commons CC0 license and opt out of copyright protection. Creative Commons licenses were created to allow authors to choose exactly how they wish to lend (license) their copyright so that others can copy, distribute, build upon, and share their work according to the license they choose. For example, you might license your drawing with a CC-NC-SA license so that others can build upon it and share it for non-commercial purposes.

NARRATE: Who narrates the project?

Narration is the term we use for the way a project is represented. We narrate our projects when we create a website, show documentation, give a lecture, talk to friends, or in any way describe our projects. Artists and designers who desire that their projects be written and spoken about in a manner that aligns with their intentions can work with communities, businesses, and institutions to shape each project’s narration. We believe that by actively taking responsibility for narration, we can impact the life cycle and circulation of our projects.

Artists often model the narration of their projects on the presentations and writing of art historians and critics. Art History and Criticism emerged as academic disciplines in Europe and North America in the late 19th Century to create a rational basis for art appreciation. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century in the United States that an artist became a common figure on campus, teaching art and speaking about their own work.  Many artists and designers perpetuate the modernist proposition of art speaking for itself  by saying that their projects need no explanation. This allows others to account for and interpret their projects. In school, students may experience tension as some teachers support the legacy of the autonomous art object  while other teachers require that their student’s writing reflect a research-based practice. Narration is a site of contestation over who speaks, about what, and in which context.

Michel Foucault in his essay What is an Author (1969) addresses the relationship between author and receiver, work and context, calling into question the assumption that the maker determines the work’s meaning. He asks:  “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?” He continues this line of thought by posing this final question: What difference does it make who is speaking?” Hito Steryl reminds us that the use of the English language in press releases written by art interns is “an accurate expression of social and class tensions around language and circulation within today’s art worlds and markets: a site of conflict, struggle, contestation, and often invisible and gendered labor.”

We ask: How can we create work stories that reflect the world we want to live in? By including production practices and supply chains in the narratives we share, a wide range of choices for organizing work, compensating workers, and producing art become visible and open to contestation (Proposition Number 5). What might we hear or read in this narration, that is often left out of contemporary work stories? We might narrate our art contexts, not just our artworks, including work stories in 1) community,  2) collaboration, 3) labor, transfer, and 4) support structures.

1. We might acknowledge the ways in which work stories change in relationship to geographic, identity-based, or professional communities. We might practice our re-telling in front of the people who experienced it, and incorporate their reactions in our work stories. Narrating a project beyond the scale of experience is difficult because we must choose which aspects of the project to reveal from the multitude of relationships, conflicts, and contradictions in our supply chain. Talking about a project within a community might come across as an intimate re-telling of a shared experience from one person’s perspective, or this sort of public retelling might feel unnecessary because the listeners already know the story. For example, Bill T. Jones presents his work in three performance modalities, Jeanine Oleson asked performers to recreate a performance from memory in Hear Here, and Adrian Piper publicly corrects art critics to maintain her work story.

2. We might include voices of co-laborers or collaborators in our narration. Historically, many important women in collaborative teams have been excluded from narration and therefore public recognition. These women gained visibility as support figures or, in some cases, remained invisible, although they were the actual, unattributed creators of the work. For example, Artemisia Gentileschi, Camille Claudel, Jeanne-Claude, Ray Eames, and Ellen Wexler were barely recognized for the majority of their careers. The inclusion of collaborators and co-laborers can take many forms: video, co-presenting, co-writing, or agreed upon quotations. Gayatri Spivak writes that, “the principle of quotations or citations is central: letting others speak in my text is not only a way of inscribing my work in a collective political movement. It is also a way of practicing what I preach… Letting the voices of others sound through my text is therefore a way of actualizing the non-centrality of the “I” to the project of thinking.”

3. We might narrate the ways in which our projects were produced, including labor and transfer practices. When arts discourse includes the labor practices of production, listeners and readers can debate the possibilities and problems so familiar to neoliberal economies (unpaid internships, precarious adjunct labor, unpaid exhibition invitations, debt-backed education) and practices rooted in solidarity economies (sliding-scale pricing, worker cooperatives, intentional communities, and free education). See each section of the Of Supply Chains texts for ideas about how to narrate each phase of the supply chain.

4) We might pay tribute to the support structures which allow us to make our projects, including our friends and family members and networks of mutual aid. We might contribute to the social practice of acknowledgement, familiar to authors who follow this format in books, thanking the people who have made the project possible. Solidarity economies may then be articulated not merely as “alternatives” to an unchangeable economy, but as already existing practices that are thriving around the world and in the arts sector as well, as solidarity art worlds.

Artists call attention to the conventions of narration by creating performance lectures, by presenting multiple perspectives by speaking as a group, and by adjusting the format of the lecture itself. For example, Andrea Fraser in her performance Official Welcome (2012) narrates a context in which an artist is introduced and gives an artist talk Mary Walling Blackburn refuses to create standard documentation of her work, Future Farmers and Peggy Buth create and disseminate personal research booklets for each project, and the Yams Collective gives public presentations with over ten members debating one another’s narratives. We at BFAMFAPhD have refused uncompensated invitations to appear in person, offering instead existing narratives about our work in forms that have been supported through grants or other

means.

Artists also shape narration by creating their own institutions and networks that publish, distribute, and represent artist’s projects directly. For example, Art + Feminism was founded in 2014 by Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, and Laurel Ptak, to organize Wikipedia Edit-a-thon’s  that both ensure women in the arts are included in this online encyclopedia, and to increase the percentage of Wikipedia’s contributors who are female. The visual artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda founded e-flux in 1996 as a paid service to distribute press releases and to fund project spaces, events, and publications. The poet Kenneth Goldsmith founded UbuWeb in 1996 to freely distribute avant-garde materials regardless of their copyright status, and a group of artists including Sol Lewitt and Lucy Lippard founded Printed Matter in 1976 to make space for artists’ publications; this led to Printed Matter’s founding of the NY Art Book Fair in 2005. Antonio Serna’s project Documents of Resistance reveals the lack of narration about the impact artist of color had on art activism in the 1960s.

As we recognize the power of narration to make practices visible and open to contestation, we also recognize the challenges in representing supply chains. We have seen the difficulty people have in tracing supply chains in other fields, including common practices such as “acknowledgements” in literature, “credits” in film, music/dance, and emergent practices like supply chain diagrams in service design, videos of construction in architecture, and lists of participants in visual art projects. Typical work stories are shaped to create author’s privilege, originality, and to accrue cultural capital or monetary value.   

Even when artists co-create with others outside of their fields of expertise in what is called socially engaged or embedded practice there are few cultural frameworks to narrate what is truly shared, enacted, transformed, and sustained. The narration of  Project Row Houses, initiated by Rick Lowe, is an example of how complicated it can become for an artist to be the spokesperson for a project that has many actors.  

We wish to acknowledge that supply chain narration is both our central focus and also an uncharted path in the visual arts. We ask: how can we  navigate our projects’ supply chains in ways that are both compelling and representative of the projects themselves without undermining the importance of a publics encounter with them? If we approach supply chain narrations as a set of practices and tools in which to emphasize and understand the implications of thinking about projects as sets of social relationships rather than fixed entities produced by solitary authors. then we support and reproduce solidarity art worlds.

The project can be narrated by the author, or by friends and family, community, staff in a business or public institution, or with members of a commons. For example, an author might give a presentation, friends and family might talk about the project, members of a community might write about a project, staff at a business might write text for the project website, staff at a non-profit might give a presentation about a project, or members of a listerv like Nettime might talk about the project. An author might work collaboratively with the groups above, or they might approve institutionally-produced narrations before they appear in public. The larger the institution, the more likely the institution is to control the written and spoken work stories related to any project.

Encounter

Artists and designers create work with the intention that their projects will be seen by other people. We call this an “encounter” with the finished project. The encounter might occur after months or years of preparation with the maker’s hopes that their desires to express truths, offer a vision, refine a craft, build community, or communicate without words is acknowledged.

While some artists deny the importance of the site of encounter, by suggesting that their work is uninformed by context, Miwon Kwon reminds us that material and conceptual references in projects imply both a particular location and audience. Each site where work is encountered is mediated by institutions and social contexts and has norms and rules that govern the way the project is experienced and understood. Elite museums and galleries have been “conceived as place[s] free of context, where time and social space are thought to be excluded from the experience of artworks. It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside of daily life and politics that the works within the white cube can appear to be self-contained—only by being freed from historical time can they attain their aura of timelessness”.

People arrive at sites of encounter when they are open — often only during normal business hours — with expectations about whether or not they can touch the project, about how loud they can be, and about whether or not they can introduce themselves to other people in the space.  Artists like Andrea Fraser demonstrate the social norms of galleries and museums by breaking them. In her performance, Little Frank and His Carp (2001) she rubs her body against the Guggenheim Bilbao Tino Sehgal, drawing from his background in theatre and dance, attempts to challenge conventional museum spectatorship through the use of actors who perform gestures that focus on lived experience rather material objects.

Other artists are interested in addressing the histories and politics of “encounters” in museums and galleries. For example, Guillermo Gómez-Peña  and Coco Fusco in the The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994), exhibited themselves in a cage in museums and at arts festivals. Performing  as “authentic” Amerindians, their project recalled the history and practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in theaters, and museums.

Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky, et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1 1971, consisted of an installation of photographs of buildings, and diagrams with data about their ownership and assessed land value. The exhibition of this project was scheduled for the Guggenheim Museum but was cancelled a month and a half before its opening due to the speculation that members of the museum’s Board of Trustees were connected to the real estate group and their holdings. Fred Wilson, whose project Mining the Museum, (1992-3) involved reassembling the collection at the Maryland Historical Society to make visible the curatorial biases that under-played the role of colonization, slavery and abolition in the State’s history. Also, the Guerrilla Girls (1985-present) have focused on gender and racial inequalities in the arts through a series of postering campaigns that aim to alert people to who is un-encountered and underrepresented in museums and galleries.

Linda Goode-Bryant speaking about racism in New York City’s art system in the 1970s, reminds us that no universal viewer exists. Artist-centric spaces in New York City like Just Above Midtown, Wow Cafe Theater and El Museo del Barrio were founded precisely because the art histories represented in elite museums and galleries predominantly excluded black, queer, and Puerto Rican artists. Community spaces, homes, work spaces, and other convivial sites of encounter are often chosen by artists for their capacity to embrace or create dialogue. Common Field, a visual arts organizing network, includes providing spaces and platforms for reception, and exchange. They also organize the semi-annual Hand in Glove conference to gather spaces with shared goals for artists.

Artist’s exploring the boundaries between art and life often shift the terms of encounter through participatory, and dialogical practices that take place in “non” art designated sites. The sound collective Ultra-red often brings community groups together in their churches or community centers to facilitate listening practices that have no representational trace. Zoe Sheean Saldana’s No Boundaries Lace Trim Tank (White), 2004 and her shopdropping series placed handmade copies of Wal-Mart clothing back on the racks for customers to purchase. and the consortium Estar(SER)  did a  recent action (February 2016) at the Federal Plaza in New York City where Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc once resided. Dread Scott’s, performance Money to Burn (2010) took place on Wall Street where among traders and tourists he burned money while encouraging those present to join him with their own money. Other examples of projects with unconventional sites of encounter include the staged projections in public spaces of The collective The Illuminator and the travelling boat that anchors in International waters serving as an clinic for women who don’t have legal access to abortion and other reproductive services. Women on Waves, is an activist art organization founded by physician Rebecca Gomparts.

Projects can be encountered at your home, a family or friend’s home or studio, at a community or collective’s site like a collective studio or a community space, at a business like a private museum or public site like a non-profit gallery, or at a commons like a fishery or GitHub.

ACQUIRE: Who acquires the project?

Acquisition legitimizes projects by providing storage, maintenance, and visibility for the project so that it will be available to current and future generations. Artists and designers often dream that their projects will be acquired by an influential institution, typically by a library or museum. While museums may not pay artists to acquire their projects, and have been known to obtain the objects in their collections illegally and to deaccession artworks without contacting artists or collectors, artists’ resumes which list artworks held in public collections represent enormous cultural capital.

Some artists and designers, however, believe that their projects should be cared for and acquired by people who share similar cultural, political, or environmental concerns. Recognizing that the entity which acquires a project will have control over the future narrations, encounters, and transfers that enable the project to circulate, these artists and designers have created acquisition networks that promote mutual aid, intimacy, proximity, and solidarity art economies. The  Fine Art Adoption Network (2009) connects unwanted artworks to collectors who otherwise cannot afford contemporary art, Antonio Serna’s ArtCommon invites projects to be held within a community and to circulate throughout the homes of neighbors, and Julia Sherman’s Art Tag Sale makes space for unwanted artworks to be sold anonymously in community centers for under fifty dollars.

Artists and designers who negate conventions of  acquisition often do so to question notions of individual ownership. For example, Professor William H. Jackson willed an oak tree to itself in 1832, and The Tree that Owns Itself continues to draw attention. And the artist Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter  immediately attempts to sell itself on the auction-site eBay whenever the artwork is plugged in. Pablo Helguera’s work X was distributed to over fifty friends and colleagues who agreed to receive prompts for actions that will culminate in a public gathering in 2080?, well beyond the likely date of Helguera’s death. In George Maciunas drawing Last Will he leaves instructions for the sale of all his Fluxes archives, prototypes, and original documents to be sold to pay off various debts and expenses. The drawing was acquired by Harry Stendhal who created the Fluxus Foundation

Looking https://exchangeworks.co/about-exchangeworks-ew-art-public/

Projects can be acquired by you, friends or family, a community, members of a business, members of a public institution, or members of a commons. For example, you might keep the work in your studio, your friend might keep the work in their bedroom, a community might keep the work in their gathering space, the work might be acquired by a private collection or a public museum, or it might be held in a commons like Wikipedia.

DEPART: Who is responsible for the project’s departure?

Departure is the word we use to describe the final resting place for a project and the materials associated with it. Departure is where project materials go when the author and the public no longer wish to give them attention. Art students are familiar with the dumpsters that overflow with paintings, sculptures, and disclaimed artworks at the end of each semester. Even famous artists cannot find institutions or people to care for all of their work. This often leaves enormous amounts of material for friends and family to sort through after they are deceased. Other artists believe that “there are already enough objects, more or less interesting, in the world,” and aim to make projects that are not energy or material intensive. We believe that by incorporating the final departure of projects into the work itself, artists and designers can shift the fantasy of cultural production from the future into the present.

This shift is difficult because artists and designers hope that their projects will be “discovered” by elite institutions before they die. They often archive, store, and hold onto projects rather than giving them away, selling them at prices that working class people can afford, or recycling them. A familiar and dominant example of a work story can be seen on MoMA’s YouTube channel where the commissioned short film I See links alienation to practice and success. A historian narrates an encounter with a sculpture, saying, “…and maybe this is what the artist Baranov Rossine tried to convey in his work, but at the time it was so experimental and unappreciated that the artist took a sculpture similar to one you are looking at and threw it into the river Seine. He was so discouraged that he wanted the water to swallow up and corrode his vision. But later he went back and recovered his work. Why, because somewhere at the back of his mind he had a lingering hope that someday, someone would feel what he felt, see what he saw.” In elite institutional contexts, narratives about artworks exclude as much as what they assert. The value of projects often accrues through the exclusion and invisibility of many people involved in the project’s production.

Artists who incorporate the final departure of their projects often do so to address environmental or social concerns. For example, Dennis Oppenheim’s Reverse Processing where the refined cement was returned to the location of of preliminary processing. The Salvage Art Institute confronts and articulates the condition of no-longer-art-material claimed as “total loss”, resulting from art damaged beyond repair, removed from art market circulation due to its total loss of value in the marketplace yet stored in art-insurance claim inventory. Claire Pentecost composted the American flag, Dee Hibbert-Jones asked viewers to vote on the future life of an artwork, and the artist Gustav Metzger and other artists influenced by the violence of nuclear weapons used the term “autodestructive art” in the early 1960s for works that “within 20 years, return to a state of nothingness.”

The people who might be responsible for the project’s departure include you, your friends and family, a community, or members of a business, public institution, or commons. For example, you might take your work to a landfill, your family might repurpose it, members of a community might ingest it, members of a business might burn it, members of  a public institution allow it to disintegrate or fall apart, and members of a commons might compost it.

TRANSFER: How are goods / labor transferred?

As artists and designers, we use cash non-cash transfers to get our projects done. We often gift, barter, and lend to one another because we do not typically work for a wage as artists. Some artists make projects that are not for sale, some artists are contracted by art institutions or collectors but are underpaid, and some artists are entrepreneurial and dream of future purchases, relying on non-cash exchanges while they build their businesses.

Artists and designers who make transfer visible in their projects often do so to investigate how social relationships are implicated in the production of a project. Some artists choose to include modes of transfer — barter, free gifts, or payment schemes — as integral to the meaning of the project itself. Members of the public are asked to consider the economies in which the project circulates. For example, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991 allows museum visitors to take candy from a pile equivalent to the weight of his deceased partner. Antonio Vega Macotela’s Time Divisa is narrated as an exchange of one hour’s labor from the artist for one hour’s labor from an incarcerated person. Basia Irland’s A Gathering of Waters, involves the collecting of water samples in a sculptural vessel that are transferred from community to community along the Rio Grande.  

While these artists represent modes of transfer in their projects, the actual transfers that enable their projects are often not discussed. For example, a co-author of this writing, Caroline Woolard, made tea available to visitors who paid with a local currency at MoMA in Exchange Cafe, but she paid the cafe performers $15 an hour with federal tender. She used remaining funds to purchase materials rather than paying herself. While she used to foreground local currency when telling the story of the project in public, she now talks about the production budget for the project as well. Artists rarely speak about their own systems of payment and exchange when presenting their work. The Carrot Workers Collective, Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), the Architecture Lobby, and the Non-Participation Archive all attend to the importance of ethical compensation in the arts.

Goods and services might be transferred freely, given in a network of mutual aid, or they might be borrowed, bartered, paid for, or stolen. For example, a drawing might be available for anyone to take for free, might circulate between friends, be available on loan for borrowers, or it could be traded for another artwork. It could be also be sold, or stolen.
We want to acknowledge  the connections between LABOR and TRANSFER because we feel it is important to address the relationship between the two. Readers likely have searched for jobs, only to find unpaid internships listed beside paid jobs. Arts graduates may have paid for school credits in order to work in internship programs. In arts contexts with immense capital accumulation, widespread networks of workers are engaged to produce artworks, many of them arts graduates and working artists who are (under)employed.

SUPPORT: How is the project supported?

We use the word “support” to consider the ways in which each artist or designer meets their own needs each day, in order to have time and resources to dream, practice, and work on any project. Support extends beyond the life of any particular project because support is necessary for livelihood and for social reproduction. Support ranges from past sales or grants, cash gifts, inherited wealth, and income generated by rental property and financial investments to credit card debt, student loans, mutual aid, and day jobs.

To make projects which may or may not sell in a country that does not have stipends for artists, a basic income, or social welfare, every artist and designer finds a way to support their projects. In this context, support is often presented and felt as a personal or interpersonal struggle for survival rather than a structural economic policy whereby wealth is redistributed more or less equitably. Support practices are often spoken about as personal choices in mainstream media. In reality, support is made (im)possible by decades of (dis)investment and policies that support accumulation based on race, gender, age, ability, and class.

Artists who make support visible do so in order to speak openly about the politics of social reproduction, about the often invisible practices that enable people to return to work the next day as healthy and capable workers. For example, Danica Phelps’ Incomes Outcome series represents the ways she spends money made from previous sales of drawings. The Non-Participation Archive documents and makes visible the moments in which artists and designers have not felt adequately supported by institutions, and have rejected invitations. The Canary Collective is a mutual aid network for people who have immune deficiencies that theorizes mental health “issues” as a labor strike under capitalism. The Robin Hood Investment Cooperative is an activist hedge fund which uses investments to make money for people with “minor assets” and to use surplus to fund commons-based projects.

Artists and designers can rely on many forms of support for their projects, including cash gifts or inherited wealth, credit cards, student loans, or mortgages, past sales or grants, day jobs, money generated by a rental property or financial investments, or voluntary, reciprocal exchanges of mutual aid.