Working Aesthetics

Labour, Art and Capitalism

Danielle Child

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350022409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte e politica

Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic, but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century? With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

CHAPTER ONE

The deskilling of the artist: Lippincott Inc. (1966–94)

The 1960s is a key decade for considering labour in artistic production. This was a decade in which artists began to identify as ‘art workers’, formed unions (in the United States and UK) and demanded workers’ rights. The process of making art also changed during this period with the birth of conceptual and establishment of performance art among other ‘dematerialized’ or non-object-producing practices. Lesser known, is the birth of the art fabrication firm. The years 1966 through 1971 saw the emergence of at least three fabrication firms solely fabricating for artists in the United States: Gemini G.E.L., Lippincott Inc. and Carlson & Co. Of course, this was not the first time that artists had employed others to make their work; artists have long contracted foundries to cast their sculptures and employed assistants in their studios. However, this chapter will contend that the origin of art fabrication firms, such as Lippincott Inc., can be understood in relation to the particular historical moment in which they emerged, both within the field of art history and in relation to the contemporaneous phase of capitalism.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the existence of artists’ fabricators gained attention in art discourse, arguably for the first time since the exhibitions acknowledging fabrication in the late 1960s and 1970s.¹ This visibility accompanied what Claire Bishop has called the ‘social turn’ in art, doubtlessly stemming from conversations around the English-language publication of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics in 2002.² Journal issues and books considering ‘collaboration’ often give a nod to contracted labour in art, while unproblematically co-opting and collapsing art fabrication into one of many collective practices. Most notable is Artforum’s issue devoted to ‘The Art of Production’, published in 2007 amidst the contemporaneous debates on collective practice, while Julia-Bryan Wilson’s Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009) makes visible Robert Morris’s ‘collaborative’ process of working with contracted workers, including those employed by Lippincott Inc., on his 1970 Whitney show.³ Bryan-Wilson’s most recent contribution – Art in the Making (2016) – co-authored with Glenn Adamson, devotes a chapter to ‘Fabricating’, which introduces fabrication as a mode of art making alongside alternative ‘materials’.⁴ Others seek to establish a legacy for the art fabricators, as in Jonathan Lippincott’s book – Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s (2010) – devoted to images of his father’s fabrication company.

Rather than appropriate the aforementioned art fabricators for a larger collaborative agenda, this chapter intends to understand the fabricators within the context in which they emerged, not only as companies making for artists but, rather, as businesses within the economic sphere. In this chapter, it is argued that the emergence of the art-specific fabrication businesses within this period is a response to the wider ideological conditions of a gradual ‘deskilling’ of work within America throughout the twentieth century, as identified by Harry Braverman in Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974).⁵ The contracting of industrial manufacture and the deskilling of the artist from his/her manual skills is considered in terms of the wider labour conditions within the period. Beginning with the art historical context of deskilling (i.e. the rejection of the artist’s hand in making art), this chapter will look closely at the deskilling thesis as proposed by Braverman through to the Fordist ideology that dominated American life in the 1960s, before returning to consider the working practice of one of the contemporaneous fabricators – Lippincott Inc. – and its relation to the ‘dematerialization of art’ identified within this moment.

‘The Dematerialization of Art’

In 1968, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler opened their essay ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ with the following statement: ‘As more and more work is designed in the studio but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio is again becoming a study.’⁶ This statement testifies to an emergent phenomenon in art making in this period, that is, the separation of the idea from the physical form of the artwork. The works of art discussed in ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ are those of a conceptual nature. Writing in the early moments of conceptual art and taking their lead from Joseph Schillinger’s schema, Lippard and Chandler envisaged a move to a ‘post-aesthetic’ art to come in the near future. Although conceptual art is the article’s concern, its opening statement is, furthermore, a reference to minimal works, on which Lippard had previously written.⁷ It was the artists associated with minimal art who began to use the early artists’ ‘fabricators’ in America in the 1960s; Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris were among them. For 1960s conceptual art, the onus was on the idea. A conceptual artist did not necessarily produce an empirical object; if they did, it was often surplus to the idea. With minimal art, objects were produced, but not always by the artist, thus pioneering the utilization of industrial production methods. Thus artists working within both movements could be said to be adopting a form of deskilling – in the sense that artists do not physically make their works – within their respective processes. The subsequent industrial aesthetic in minimal art provoked formalist commentators such as Michael Fried to detect a shift to ‘objecthood’ in sculpture, while Clement Greenberg discussed minimal works in terms of a ‘non-art’ aesthetic.⁸

The denigrating terms attributed to these works in the criticism of Fried and Greenberg signal a period of disrupture within art history. In the 1960s modernism reached its peak in America; the publication of Clement Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961) neatly reduced almost a century’s worth of painting into a teleology, beginning with Manet through to the implicit contemporaneous modernist painters (presumably, colourfield painters).⁹ With the help of Kantian aesthetics (purporting self-criticism), modernist painting was reduced to a number of ‘cardinal norms’ (the boundaries of which, Greenberg argued, were tested by the modernist painters) based on its medium-specificity including flatness, two dimensionality and opticality, which ultimately led to a notion of aesthetic autonomy. After adopting and continuing the (Greenbergian) formalist approach to painting, evident in his Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (1965) catalogue essay, Fried attacked the newly emergent ‘literal’ (now minimal) art in his essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967).¹⁰ The work was denounced as inherently ‘theatrical’, due to its relationship to the viewer and the temporality of this relationship. Fried’s contention thus lay with the presence of others to ‘complete the work’ and the reference to the outside world (objects).

Although minimal objects could be read as a sculptural response to medium-specificity (reducing sculpture to its ‘essential norms’ of three dimensionality, mass and scale, for example) they marked a departure from the ‘flat’, self-contained, abstract paintings heralded in art schools across the United States. The three-dimensional works returned to art, reference to the outside world (something denounced in Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’) and also exposed the labour (through the choice of industrial materials and production methods) of industry that obfuscated the hand of the artist. The eradication of the hand of the artist dismantled the autonomy that Greenberg had attributed to the work of the American modernist painters from Pollock through to Jules Olitski.

It was not only minimal artists who, in the 1960s, sought to escape the confinement of aesthetic autonomy. Conceptual artists also sought to escape the reified art object (painting) prevalent in art criticism. In his 1988 essay ‘Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason’, Benjamin Buchloh states: ‘It is important to recognize that artists who continue to reject the idea of aesthetic autonomy have also had to abandon traditional procedures of artistic production (and, by implication, of course, the cognitive concepts embedded in them).’¹¹ Buchloh suggests that artists working in mid-1960s America responded to aesthetic autonomy through a form of deskilling as a mode of negation. Thus, in recognizing the ‘historical failure of the modernist concepts of autonomy’, a dialectic emerged between deskilling as negation or resistance and expressionism as instinctive (arguably creating an ‘unalienated subject’).¹² The idea of expressionism as an ‘unalienated’ form of (artistic) production is born from the Romantic philosophy to which much of Greenberg’s criticism of this period in indebted; thus deskilling marks a break with and a negation of his approach. Buchloh cites Ian Burn: ‘deskilling means a rupture with an historical body of knowledge – in other words, a dehistoricisation of the practice of art’.¹³ This idea of a rupture is particularly important for understanding the negation of a Greenbergian modernism that established a teleological view of modernist painting going back to the nineteenth century. In Intangibilities of Form (2007), John Roberts also acknowledges the artist’s move away from craft-based skills. However, he proposes that post-Duchampian art, in fact, entails a reskilling because of the artist’s rejection of craft-based skills in favour of developing new immaterial skills.¹⁴ He terms this phenomenon the ‘deskilling-reskilling’ dialectic.¹⁵

An art history heavily reliant on the influence of critics and patrons (perhaps for the last time) had produced a definitive criteria for modernist painting; artists wishing to break with this did so in an unprecedented manner. Other art historians of this period also recognize the distance, in the new sculptural forms, from the art practices that had come before. In her canonical essay, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1986), Rosalind Krauss shows how sculpture adopted new forms that may be more aligned with architecture, landscape and site construction, for example with the earthworks.¹⁶ Again, these are works that require many hands and are indexically tied to the outside world through their materials or the site-specificity.¹⁷ These new works, for Krauss, are a logical rupture with modernism in which the artist is now free from an ascribed medium-specificity to new possibilities within the newly ‘expanded field’.¹⁸

The emergence of the art-specific fabricators occurred at the time when artists were reacting to the aesthetic autonomy of painting, taught in art schools and penetrating the museum space. Given the origins of minimalism as a reaction to Greenbergian aestheticism, it is hard to believe that the emergence of the fabrication companies was solely a response to artists’ quests simply for an industrial aesthetic. Moreover, these were artists interested in processes, as evidenced in both Morris’s and Haacke’s work. Buchloh writes: ‘Indeed an object only takes an aesthetic meaning when its referentiality has been abolished, when it no longer reminds us of the labour invested in its production.’¹⁹ Both the artists associated with minimalism and those, like Haacke – working on the edges of conceptual and process-based, social art – purposefully broke with the aesthetic convention, exposing the labour of others in differing ways. For Robert Morris, it was the labour of industry, for Haacke, the participation of the public. Furthermore, the establishment of these firms extended beyond appearances to working practice. Lippincott Inc. co-founder, Roxanne Everett, often approached artists to work at the firm further complicating the idea of a desired aesthetic.

In this chapter, I propose that the dematerialization of art can be thought differently, beyond the art historical discourse and into the social and economic sphere. Through the sculptor’s employment of contracted labour, dematerialization could be understood as a reaction, conscious or not, to the implementation of a Fordist ideology in mid-twentieth-century America. As Max Weber acknowledged, ‘The technical and economic conditions of machine production … today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism … with irresistible force.’²⁰ The artists discussed here were neither sheltered from nor unaware of the wider political and economic conditions under which they made work. In fact, as Bryan-Wilson’s important book testifies, the artists who employed firms like Lippincott Inc. were very much invested in the politi...