Work Comes Out of Work

I am depicted in the triptych above tending to details of an exhibition of Walker Evans photographs at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York in 2003. The photographs are reproductions of Walker Evans originals printed in the early 1970s for a retrospective 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, that Evans documented while affiliated with 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 definable in its boundaries, 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 emergence as a major artistic category and high-priced commodity. This "aesthetic 'rightness' was demonstrated in the sober presentation of Walker Evans photographs at Pace/MacGill Gallery. The seeds for my Three Portraits of Workers (Walker Evans) came as I flipped through an auction catalog during my lunch break from 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. While I was very familiar with Levine's project, I had never registered how the voracious art market had swallowed After Walker Evans into the economic system of scarcity 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 claimed to sound a death knell for the author and critique the patriarchal photography canon. While Levine's appropriation work was influential 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 context and politics of Walker Evans's project was not directly addressed in Levine's work. She was primarily interested in issues of authorship and gender that dominated her milieu. In his work, Evans kept with the leftist ideology of his day. It was crucial for the author to "disappear" in the production of visual records 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 leveled against it. I was hired to follow a conventional exhibition format that dislodged the present form the distant and recent past. The gelatin-silver portraits of mute and long-dead subjects suggested that a proud working class had disappeared. What art gallery would mount an exhibition picturing the subjects of contemporary poverty in America? Poverty is not as picturesque as it used to be.

My Three Portraits of a Worker (Walker Evans) were arranged to act out the persistent link Evans's worker portraits have to 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 erased political substance of the Evans photographs.

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 (in this case Lockhart) is often conspicuously absent from the production of works of art. In Lunch Break we are reminded that the privileged role of intellectual labor is conferred through the management of manual labor. Technologies have distanced the artist from material processes and into the open field of post-medium practices. These developments are not novel (they are a defining characteristic of the early avant-garde) and they contribute to the vast bureaucracy and service industry that is the contemporary art world.
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 a blue-collar persona. To this day, Richard Serra often appears in press photographs sporting a hard hat. His work is displayed in art institutions but made in factories.

For a young artist living in post 9-1-1 Bush-era New York, submitting to a day job is a fact of life. Time and labor become critical commodities. A commitment to art and livelihood are a constant negotiation. A gallery job is a standard compromise. After work the work begins.