Work Ethic develops a genuinely new way
of looking at the proliferation of new procedures for generating
art in the 1960s by focusing on the changed organization of work
in society at large at the time." —Alex Potts, University
of Michigan
During the 1960s, artists from Alan Kaprow and
Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol and Richard Serra stopped making "art"
as it has been thought of since the Renaissance. They staged performances
that mixed everyday life with theater and in yet other, often ironic
ways challenged the system of marketing, display, and aesthetic
discourse that ascribes exceptional monetary as well as cultural
value to paintings and sculpture. Work Ethic, published
in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by
The Baltimore Museum of Art, brings together a cross-section of
such radical endeavors and opens a fresh perspective on their genesis
and meaning.
Most of the avant-garde interventions considered
in Work Ethic entailed performances and other procedures
generally interpreted as linking a "dematerialization"
of the object with the free play of concepts. By contrast, Helen
Molesworth and her collaborators in Work Ethic set such
activities in the context of the workplace and contend that they
engage issues of management, production, and skill that accompanied
the emergence of the information age. The result is a major breakthrough
in understanding the structures and ambitions of a wide range of
art making.
Work Ethic reproduces all the diverse material—Bruce
Nauman videotapes to Roxy Paine's painting machine—in the
Baltimore exhibition and provides insightful discussion of each
piece’s history, structure, and significance. Four essays
introduce topics, like utopian fantasies of pleasurable work, that
are of general relevance to setting the material into a postindustrial
context. Throughout this catalogue, there is as well a lively dialogue
on the museum's relationship to art that questions the rules of
both the workplace and the art world.
The exhibition, "Work Ethic," was at
The Baltimore Museum of Art from October 12, 2003, to January 11,
2004, and at the Des Moines Center for the Arts from May 15 to August
1, 2004.