ART AS LABOUR; ARTIST AS LABOURER
“The labourer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place. His ‘disinterested look’ means a disjunction between the activity of the hands and the activity of the eyes. We can call it an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience is not the experience of an aesthete enjoying art for art’s sake. Quite the contrary, it is the redistribution of the sensible, a dissociation of the body of the Platonic artisan whose eyes were supposed to focus only on the work of his arms. It is a way of taking time he does not have. This is what emancipation first means: an exercise of equality that is an experience of dissociation of the body, space and time of work.”
Jacques Rancière’s description of aesthetic experience is one without an aesthetic as we know it in the visual arts. There is no image as such, but enough social signposts to bring an image to mind. Contra aesthetic, it is a deeply political scene. “The labourer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place.” Designated as a labourer, we are immediately thrown into an activity that is determined by production over creativity, reification over daydreaming. This is a place far, far away from art for art’s sake.
I first ask: What labour and production is taking place in this non-place? And When? Is it the quaint scene of the seventeenth century artisan, where and when Rancière likes to build his proletarian characters within bourgeois power narratives? Or is it a cartel drug lab, where half-naked women cut drugs in a snowglobe of cocaine-shuttered light. Or is it the studio setting of the contemporary painter, taking a breather to gaze at the stillness of the image that has been worked through and over, over time?
Work and time, labour and art are the things I have been working through and over these last few months (my recent article GIVE UP ART discusses similar ideas). Rancière’s philosophies of the poor, education, aesthetics and politics has helped me with these ruminations; rumination being a psychic process that focuses and leans into the negative content of the past or present.
Rancière defines aesthetics not in relation to art or beauty, or the man of taste considering the work of art at a distance, a disinterested distance, but within the not special, not unusual or interesting (ordinary) workaday. Certainly not a cocaine snow globe.
For Rancière the relationship between politics and aesthetics came long before the relationship between art and aesthetics. That is why Rancière’s passage on the labourer is exorcised of the artifice of aesthetics a la art. There are no distentrested objects to consume for art’s sake. There is just the labourer and the setting, whatever, wherever and whenever that workaday setting may be.
Rancière’s labourer has no time, but still takes the time. This taking of time to reflect and pause, to occupy a moment without labour, is freedom, what Rancière calls emancipation, and in this instance “aesthetic experience”, or other instances, the “distribution of the sensible”. Distribution is important in Rancière’s terminology. Especially when you ask some critical questions, such as: Who gets to take or enjoy aesthetic experience? For whom is aesthetic experience for? The art of the past proffers a picture of what Rancière’s scene might look like before the taking of aesthetic experience.
Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849), destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, portrays men at work in the sweat, dirt and smell of building stone walls. One heaves, the other breaks. As we look at the painting we can imagine others standing alongside us, the bourgeoisie, us and them experiencing the painting as aesthetic experience in the curtained and smokey parlour of art for art’s sake. In the painting’s setting there is a dog-ear of blue sky, the sun’s angle high, its flash, Polaroid. It’s meta in all the ways art interpretation and criticism is meta — self fulfilling prophecy or paradox. It’s a strange painting, especially considering Rancière’s vignette and the Realism that Courbet propagandised through his art.
I have been ruminating on Rancière’s labourer based on the idea that the contemporary artist is still a labourer after all this time, with less freedoms or power under the wing of an arts administration that calls the shots. The artist is not so distinct from Rancière’s labourer as the artist might claim. What is the difference between the artisan in their workshop, skilfully making objects within the setting of the local community, versus the artist making objects for the gallery and its collectors. Are Courbet’s stone breakers artisans, artists or labourers?
The only difference is the setting, and the meanings attached to labour. The artist’s work, after it goes public, speaks more than the artisan’s mute craft and pragmatism. The contemporary artist is above community and utility. The contemporary artist speaks; the contemporary art audience speaks; and money whispers in the aisles.
Two years ago I discussed — in a text named To be: The Painter — Philip Guston’s (or John Cage’s) chimeric observation on the ontology of the artist at work:
“I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’”
I responded to the anecdote: “When the almost too famous line is spoken aloud by painters, or in the presence of painters, it is never elaborated upon. There is no need to elaborate: it is understood, absolute, tout court. It is a line that stages a possibility. The line unburdens the painter of all their fears, their “past”, their “friends (let’s from now on call a spade a spade: ‘influences’) & “enemies”, their “art world”, “and above all” else, their “ideas”, releasing them to do the doing of painting, before the verb of painting inevitably, and sometimes regrettably, becomes a noun.”
I return to Guston’s anecdote here in the context of Rancière's labourer for the same reason the artist finds it difficult to unpack the studio of all the above. What Guston’s anecdote signals is that there is something very sacred about isolation for the artist when working. Without such isolation in body and mind, the act of labour becomes invested in the outside world. The question I have for the gallery artist: After you jettison everyone and everything from the studio, why on earth do you invite them back in? Why do artists exhibit, especially in settings that are about the sale and flip of art objects? What is art for? Is it simply the consumption of luxury goods so the privileged can exercise aesthetic experience minus the exercise of labour?
The artist’s hope of jettisoning everything, even extricating themselves from the process, is the only way towards art in Cage’s and Guston’s mythology. If we create synonyms for “the past”, “your friends”, “enemies”, “the art world”, what Guston is referring to here is exterior influences. Coming from Cage, the composer of negation, is understandable. But you can understand why artists like Guston are attracted to this idea of complete erasure and exorcism, like Rauschenberg erasing or exorcising DeKooning for his own material and reputational gains.
To my mind, labour and aesthetic experience go hand in hand. Perhaps, as labourers, artisans and artists, we can only experience aesthetic experience in relation to labour. Whereas the soft-handed transaction of art as commodity in the public sphere of galleries and art fairs is not aesthetic experience. These types of transactions are empty gestures. Aesthetic experience, for the artist, is the blind and empty labour of art making which, from time to time, opens a fissure in space and time, no bigger than a dog-eared sky.
Andrea Fraser asks “What do I, as an artist, provide?” I find this question hard to swallow, as it points towards the service industry. Provide? Whom? The galleries? The artworld? The art administration? The artist? I ask: “What is art for?” Maurizo Cattelan answers both our questions, but more importantly, Rancière’s distinction between the hand and eye, making and looking: “I don’t know what art does for people who look at it, but it saves people that make it.”
—James Merrigan