Art and Labor: Some Introductory Ideas
Art and Labor: Some Introductory Ideas
Art and Labor: Some Introductory Ideas
Jessica Stockholder
© 2004 JESSICA S T OC KHOL DE R
Art & Labor:
Some Introductory Ideas
The two kinds of thinking need not be divorced from one. Our question
is: why has the thinking that grows from physical labor been relegated
to the lower status? What effect has this had on art, not only on the
ways in which it gets made but also on the values that get ascribed to
these various kinds of making?
We wonder, does art reflect our means of production? Artists used
to be understood as craftspeople. Art was an object made by hand.
Perhaps art was the repository of more eccentric impulses than those
generated by the making of life’s necessities—soap, toys, furniture,
houses—all made by people locally and with available materials. Now
we are aware of very little, if any, of the making of the things we need.
It happens elsewhere, often overseas. We are able to have many things
because they don’t cost what they would if we ourselves were the
makers. Where Marx worried about alienated labor—the effect of
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workers making things that they themselves could not afford to buy—
today we experience the opposite (but no less alienating) phenomenon
of being able to buy things that we could not afford to make. It is of
course a great pleasure to have all these things and to be able to
engage with such an enormous pool of significance and stimulation.
But it is also painful and numbing to be so divorced from the making of
things and from the people who make them for us.
Our art today reflects this distance. And so, a lot of art, on the face of
it, seems to be not about making but about currating. To collect things
and re-arrange them is a widely respected form of activity. Art mirrors
our lack of production or, more precisely, it mirrors how acceptable
modes of production—what we are willing or unwilling to do—have
changed. Just as many of us are not willing to mend our clothes or
clean our homes and are willing to pay other people to do those things
for us, art conflates the luxury of choosing what we want to do with the
menial tasks that make that luxury possible: painting, keyboarding,
stitching, sanding, editing.
Art making has traditionally been the placeholder for the continuation
of learning through making that we all engage in as children and which
some of us continue to engage in as artists and tradesmen. Do we need
this part of ourselves to be reflected in the culture we live in? Or are we
happy to be rid of such reminders of the physical world together with
its awkwardness, its frustrations, and its mortality?
Jessica Stockholder
Joe Scanlan
June 2004