Parker Krieg | 'Wages Against Artwork,' a Review
Parker Krieg teaches interdisciplinary and exploratory studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki and taught in the global studies program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
In his last major work on aesthetic theory, Theodor Adorno argued that “if artists want to survive in a corporate capitalist society, they must organize themselves externally.” Leigh Claire La Berge’s recent book, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019) examines the current state of this organization and explores how artists, activists, and institutions are responding to the increasingly unwaged conditions of labor in society, and unwaged creative work in particular. Her argument is the preface. “The turn of socially engaged art toward function, this art’s seeming abandonment of autonomy,” she writes, “is grounded in the decommodification of labor.” While artists throughout history have operated in “strange economies,” the particular character of artwork in the post-Fordist era is defined by a “slow diminishment of the wage alongside an increase in the demands of work.” In this light, La Berge offers a comparative look at the aesthetics of socially engaged art, covering an impressive array of artists that both incorporate and represent a general condition of living beyond the wage.
Wages Against Artwork arrives at a time of organizational fervor and will be of interest to anyone who has followed the conversations hosted by Amplify Arts and contributors to the Alternate Currents blog. Examples of this include the organization W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) who develop certification standards and compensation models for different types of work in art institutions and cultural nonprofits. It includes museum workers who have created public documents that expose discriminatory and exploitative arrangements in high profile institutions. It likewise includes practices of workers’ inquiry, originally developed by autonomist Marxists in Turin and Detroit in the 1970s, but now applied to the arts and entertainment sector. Combined, these conversations contribute to an ongoing critique of the way that finance/debt, philanthropy, and norms of the nonprofit sector define the value of art and labor, and thus reproduce existing inequalities in the spheres of culture, economy, and politics. Wages Against Artwork situates this socially engaged aesthetics in relation to the past half-century of precarity faced by cultural workers who nevertheless occupy a unique position to subject those conditions to critique through their creative labor.
La Berge’s historical case draws on two major sources, Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review, 1974/1998), and Silvia Federici’s 1975 pamphlet “Wages against Housework” (PM Press, 2012). Braverman’s classic of political economy tracks the changes of working life in post-industrial society. For Federici, the “social factory” identified by Italian critics provides a critical map for understanding production outside the traditional workplace (e.g. domestic and care work). Within the international Wages for Housework movement, Italian feminists like Federici argued simultaneously that “wages are needed and wages are not enough” (La Berge, 8). These thinkers allow La Berge to recontextualize a myriad of past theories of aesthetics and politics. As post-Fordist labor is characterized by a crisis of value creation and exchange stemming from the inability to measure new forms of immaterial, affective, and intellectual production, the so-called artworld is likewise driven by finance, debt, and abstraction that blurs the line between curation, creation, and subjectivity. La Berge’s examples richly illustrate how artists and organizations have taken up social engagement as an aesthetic response to changes in the real economy.
In chapters on student debt and institutions, La Berge discusses a publication by BFAMFAPHD collective, Artists Report Back, which found that “ten percent of art graduates are working artists” while “sixteen percent of working artists are arts graduates” (77). The paradox is that avenues for professionalization have become obstacles in themselves. For instance, Cassie Thornton’s “Fedora Archive” project explores how students now make debt as a part of making art, estimating that her graduating class will “produce and absorb about $3.2 million of student debt” (42). The Fedora Archive resulted in a show that featured a CV on a wall and an actor who played the artist-as-job-seeker whose graduate experience prepared her to market herself as human capital disciplined by debt she produced as art. Putting on display the subjectivation of an economic process (i.e. “debt as medium”) is one example of how Wages Against Artwork frames socially engaged aesthetics as internalizing and working through its objective conditions.
Because institutions make the production and transit of culture possible, the book highlights examples of collaboration between Global North and South which place “monetary remuneration to the Global South” as their “central orientation” (109). The Karrabing Film Collective, for instance, is composed of Indigenous Australian filmmakers and the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, who serves as a kind of spokesperson for her “friends and family” in the collective when addressing settler audiences and academics. The films “record late liberalism,” functioning as mode of endurance amidst a settler-colonialism whose extractive outlooks are reframed by indigenous ontologies (109). La Berge highlights the tension that Povinelli herself puts forth: if it is contradictory to have a white, American professor whose mobility and cultural capital allows her to speak on behalf of the collective, the larger scandal is that the state requires anthropologists to “certify indigenous land claims” (108). This rich discussion leaves further opportunities to link the decommodification of labor with territorial dispossession, particularly around mining and petroleum, and consider how cultural institutions might reimagine their role through partnerships with indigenous-led organizations.
Two figures that embody or otherwise perform decommodified labor each receive their own chapter: animals and children. “The necessary question is not,” when it comes to animals in art, “Are animals artists?” La Berge suggests. “We should rather ask, How do animals in art represent artistic labor?” (123). She joins thinkers like Donna Haraway, who calls for a “zoological Marx” that might explain how the presence of animals in art undoes distinctions between life and work that govern the cultural economy. Turning to Jannis Kounellis’s 1969 installation, Untitled (12 Horses), featuring 12 horses tied up to the walls of the gallery, La Berge finds that they are “represented in the gallery space as deskilled workers,” and additionally as “deskilled artists,” in support of Braverman’s thesis (142). When it comes to children, there is an extended engagement with Caitlin Berrigan’s 2012 project, Lessons in Capitalism, which “performs a tension between the economic knowledge of adults and the artful play of children” (164). As commonly understood, childhood remains a state of being that is both outside the market and pre-economic. Is play a mimesis of work or is work the ruin of play? And how does neoliberalism “play” on this relationship? La Berge reformulates the utopian image of childhood in the Frankfurt school. It isn’t that children are “essentially playful.” Rather, they have developed an historical “monopoly on the representation of play” (170). Perhaps it is instructive that Berrigan has moved on to geology as a medium, joining Anthropocene artists in reimagining the physical “agency” (i.e. the work) of nonlife in the production and sustenance of the biosphere.
Wages Against Artwork marks a significant development from post-Occupy critiques of the middle-class character of contemporary art rhetoric, such as Ben Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket, 2013). In these accounts, it is no longer sufficient to claim the art itself somehow does “the political” in some way. Rather, one must attend to the real abstractions of labor and social relationships that materially determine and assign value to creative efforts. If there is a new militancy, it does not reside in the extremity of the demands so much as the level of energy required to obtain them: is it particularly radical to be compensated for work? To be paid equally for similar work? No.
While socially engaged art returns the focus to the immediate and the mundane, La Berge argues that it is still capable of articulating radical demands. To this end, other reviewers have suggested that Wages Against Artwork should address past movements like Black Women for Wages for Housework, in order to highlight continuities between past and present activism (around multiple inequalities) within the movement to recognize unwaged labor. However, the “against” in La Berge’s title retains the tension that also existed in the 1970s. It is not solely a demand for compensation and recognition. It is also a refusal to accept certain divisions of labor as a natural condition when, in reality, they bear a historical character in the reproduction of capitalist relations. The same goes for the relationship of art (and artists) to society. In this sense, La Berge strives to retain art’s sense of critical autonomy against the conditions and expectations set out for it. Such a double movement, made possible by the external organization of artists, is capable not only of “capturing aesthetic theory for labor,” but holds the promise for transforming how life and work are understood in society.
References
Braverman, Harry. 1974/1998. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: MR Press.
Davis, Ben. 2013. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. New York: Haymarket.
Federici, Silvia. 2012. “Wages Against Housework (1975)” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press/CommonNotions.
La Berge, Leigh Claire. 2019. Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art. Durham: Duke UP.