Work Comes Out of Work*

*"Work Comes Out of Work" is also the title of a 1992 documentary about Richard Serra.

PART I

The triptych above depicts an artist/performer/preparator tending to details of an exhibition of Walker Evans photographs at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York in 2003. The photographs were touted as reproductions of Walker Evans originals and printed in the early 1970s for an Evans exhibition at MOMA organized by John Szarkowski. The three framed portraits on the gallery wall were photographed by Evans in the 1930s. They are (from left to right) of a Cuban coal miner, writer James Agee, and a "dust bowl" migrant worker. The last worker is William Edward (Bud) Fields, a cotton sharecropper. He was among the rural poor of Hale County, Alabama, which Evans extensively documented as a photographer in the New Deal's Farm Services Administration. Some of these images were included in Agee's 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee's writing, coupled with Evans's images paid tribute to the Depression-era rural poor.

The positivist ideology that defined Depression-era photographs of the working poor faced critical revisions by art historians and artist in later decades. Early practitioners of documentary photography offered up debased subjects as universal representations of a proudly resilient humanity. These contradictions were examined in Martha Rosler's 1981 essay, "in, around and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)." This important essay is worth quoting at length:

"...a documentary image has two moments: (1) the "immediate," instrumental one, in which an image is caught or created out of the stream of the present and held up as testimony, as evidence in the most legalistic of senses, arguing for or against a social practice and its ideological-theoretical supports, and (2) the conventional "aesthetic-historical" moment, less definaeble in its boundries, in which the viewer's argumentativeness cedes to the organismic pleasure afforded by the aesthetic "rightness" or well-formedness (not necissarily formal) of the image. This second moment is ahistorical in its refusal of specific historical meaning yet "history minded" in its very awareness of the pastness of the time in which the image was made."

The second moment described by Rosler defines the exhibitionality of documentary photography and its emergenge as a major artform and high-priced commodity. The "aesthetic 'rightness'" demonstrated in the sober presentation of photographs at Pace/MacGill Gallery colored my relationship to the Walker Evans images. The seeds for my Three Portraits of Workers (Walker Evans) came as I flipped through an auction catalog while installing the Evans show. In the auction catalog (Sotheby's, I think), I came across the image below, a re-photographed Walker Evans portrait of a sharecropper, Allie Mae Burroughs, by Sherrie Levine. The voracious art market had, evidently, recuperated After Walker Evans into the economic system it intended to critique.

As the auction catalog displayed, a direct critique of originality and the fetish quality of Evans "masterpieces" was ineffective. Completed over 25 years ago, Levine's postmodern strategies complicated conceptual art practice. She sounded a death knell for the author and critiqued the patriarchal photography canon. While Levine's appropriation work was influencial to artists of the 80s and 90s, it did little to destroy the exchange value of a Walker Evans photograph. The price of vintage modern photographs skyrocketed in the 90s along with the value of Levine's own copied masterworks. The historical specificity and politics of the Walker Evans photographs was not directly addressed in Levine's work. She was primarilly interested in issues of authorship and gender that dominated her milieu.

In his work, Evans kept with the Leftist, anti-bougeouise ideology of his day. For him, it was crucial to produce a visual record of the under-represented working poor.

In my work, I did not want to revisit the Evans portraits as a nostalgic exercise, nor did I want to prolong a chain of postmodern self-referentiality. Yet, like it or not, my job as a gallery preparator was to maintain the illusion of a unified art exhibition that willfully ignored critical revisions levelled against it. I was hired to follow a conventional exhibition format that simplistically distanced the past from the present and reinforced class distinctions. The gelatin-silver portraits of mute and long-dead subjects suggested that a proud working class had disappered and was a thing of the past in America. My Three Portraits of a Worker (Walker Evans) were arranged to act out the persistent link Evans's worker portraits had with actual manual labor. I was able to foreground my typically hidden activities as a gallery worker by surreptitiously making photographs after the gallery had closed. I was interested in creating a dialectical work that acknowledged the specific historical and political meanings of the Evans photographs.

PART II

Shortly after I completed Three Portraits, the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea exhibited four large color photographs entitled Lunch Break by Sharon Lockhart. The photographs depicted two preparators working around Duane Hanson's hyper-realistic sculpture, Lunch Break (1989). The sculpture features three construction workers (dummies) taking their lunch breaks among ladders and scaffolding.

The exhibition's press release claimed that Lockhart's photographs open "a discourse on the idea of the worker: from the museum worker to the construction worker and full circle to the absent artist-worker." The contemporary artist is often absent from the production of a work of art. Technology has distanced the artist from material process. Most photographers do not print their images, sculptures are produced commercially, and some painters no longer paint. These developments are not novel. They are a defining characteristic of art practices that were derived from early 20th century avante-garde movements. Contemporary artists are not simply producers in a fixed system, sphere, or market, they offer various competencies and posibilities for the creation of artworks.

In the 1960s conceptual artists (neo-Dadaists), under the influence of Duchamp, saw the trajectory of their work as a devaluation of the artist's hand. These artists adopted the role of aesthetic managers. Works were mechanically produced (Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra) and photographically reproduced (Warhol, Rauschenberg). In submitting the production of artworks to the workshop and/or assembly line, the conceptual sculptor's relationship with manual labor became fetishistic.

"Much work is made outside the studio. Specialized factories and shops are used...It is still art. Anything that is used as art must be defined as art. The new work continues the convention but refuses the heritage of still another art-based order of making things. The intentions are different, the results are different, so is the experience." (Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture: Part III, 1966)

Despite breaking with the past, notable sculptors have aggressively maintained blue-collar personas. To this day, Richard Serra often appears in press photographs sporting a hard hat.

PART III

In Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 (2002), Serra plays a Masonic master architect and builder named Hiram Abiff. Serra's Masonic manifestation closely adheres to the contemporary image of Serra. In heat-resistant gear and hard hat, Serra "splashes" Barney's signature material, liquefied Vaseline, instead of molten lead. This symbolic changing of the guard is the climactic encounter as the film concludes near the top of the Guggenheim Museum's spiral.

The generational divide between Serra and Barney is higlighted in Cremaster 3, but the film also betrays an evolution in masculinity. The traditional white male body (Serra) gives way to the oscillations of gender play, eroticism, and mythological themes(Barney). The technologizing of work, warfare, and sculpting in modern life has supposedly tranformed the male body into a fragmented site that is utilized by Barney.

Barney's work emphasizes athleticism, but the culmination of his physical prowess is not heroism. In all its metamorphoses and permutations, Barney's body is still at work. He carries out exhautive performances that acknowledge that work must still come out of work.

The toolboxes below were used by Barney and his staff during the installation of the Cremaster Cycle retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in 2003. The toolbox stickers allude to the Cremaster mythology: Oakland Raiders great Jim Otto, Ford Mustangs, the National Hot Rod Association, and the hardcore band Agnostic Front.

(This essay was written in 2003 and revised in 2007)