AUGUST 3rd- 19th
If Work brings into conversation artists, curators and writers who have spent the past year investigating the relationship between art and labor for the 2022-23 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. Its title is drawn from IATP’s Distinguished Faculty Guest Julia Bryan-Wilson and her text Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, which traces the development of the ‘art worker’ in the 1970s as a collective political identity. What the category implies, she argues, is that the labor of art has shifted from a focus on the processes of artmaking and towards the broader socio-political matrices in which artists produce. The writings of philosopher Herbert Marcuse are identified as exercising particular influence on this transition, as he believed that revolution should synthesize work and art: “If work were accompanied by a reactivation of pre-genital polymorphous eroticism, then it would tend to become gratifying in itself without losing its work content.” That is, if work were combined with instinctual gratification—play—then it would be pleasurable without losing productivity, a bulwark against alienated labor.
ARTISTS: Annabelle heckler, Brett Ginsburg, Chris Kojzar, Željka Blakšić AKA Gita Blak, Kayla Weisdorf, Kearra Amaya Gopee
Li-Ming Hu, Lily Moebes, Naomi Lisiki
CURATORS: Francesca Altamura and Miranda Samuels
PUBLICATION: Laura Serejo Genes & Kiyoto Koseki
Based in New York City and supported by Jack Shainman Gallery…
––Words by Christine Bootes, 2022–23 IATP Cohort
