The Occupation of Art’s Labor: An Interview with Julia Bryan-Wilson
On November 28, 2011, Chris Mansour interviewed Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2009). Mansour and Bryan-Wilson talked about the history of the Art Workers’ Coalition and its political relevance today, in light of the increasing involvement of artists and artistic strategies in the Occupy movement. What follows is an edited transcript. Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) with the Art Action Group (GAAG), and the Black & Puerto Rican Emergency Cultural Coalition stiking outside the MoMA in 1970. —————————————————————————————- Chris Mansour: How did you come to study the artwork of what you call the “Vietnam War Era” and its relationship to the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC)? Julia Bryan-Wilson: In the beginning—when I was still a young graduate student—I was drawn to a performance by the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) that occurred in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1969. It was a bloody, visceral action that called for the immediate resignation of all Rockefellers from MoMA’s Board of Trustees. At the time I was thinking about performance art as a form of protest, and how bodies in space—occupying space—meant to register certain activist concerns. Digging further into GAAG, I learned more about how they functioned as a direct action offshoot of the AWC. I wanted to do a project about the AWC, perhaps plumbing its history and laying out what really happened there, because there had at that point only been scattered accounts, and most of them were by people who were involved themselves, so there was not much critical distance. To me the AWC was a compelling, if short-lived, organization. I was also very intrigued by how many artists and well-known figures within the circle of contemporary art criticism participated in it. So it was not just people like Carl Andre and Dan Graham, but also critics such as Gregory Battcock, who was the editor of significant anthologies about “minimal art” and “idea art.” Some critics like Lucy Lippard and what were referred to as “low level curators” also saw themselves working within and amongst the AWC. But my focus shifted the further I delved into my research, and increasingly moved away from a strictly chronological account of the AWC towards larger questions of the politics of artistic labor in this moment, a moment when labor itself was radically transforming because of a shift to a postindustrial age. To me the intriguing question became not, “What happened to the AWC?” but rather, “How did understandings of artistic labor change in the wake of the formation of the AWC?” Also, how was artistic labor and broader political activism in mutual dialogue for a few key figures, such as Lippard or Hans Haacke? With my book, Art Workers, I never set out to write the comprehensive history of the AWC, but instead to think about the redefinition of artistic labor through figures that are very influential in contemporary art history, whose work has never been substantially talked about in relationship to this activism. CM: The main redefinition of artistic labor, as you elucidate in your book, starts with the distinct division between art and craft during the Renaissance era, as articulated by the art historian Michael Baxandall. But art as a form of labor really takes sway with the development of capitalism as a social structure. You reference a lot of Marx’s writings on art as labor in your book to make this case. You also mention the Artist Guild in England in the 1800s, the Artists Union in the 1930s, and so on. How did these diverse conceptualizations of art as a form of labor influence the AWC, and how do you see the AWC’s understanding of art as a form of labor as differing from older aesthetic concepts? JB-W: Those involved in the AWC had many different, and quite uneven, levels of sophistication regarding Marxist theory. Some of them knew nothing about Marxism, and were kind of going along with the flow or absorbing things that were ever-present in the atmosphere of the times. Others, like Carl Andre, were rather more serious students of Marxist theory. Of course, Marxist theories are also contentious and contradictory with regards to how art might or might not function as a kind of labor under capitalist forms of production. Even for Marx himself there is some friction regarding the role of patronage, creating a product for a potential market, and how making art might be understood as “free” or unalienated labor. So when artists turned to what was often half-understood Marxist theory in the late 1960s to call themselves workers, it proved to be fairly unstable ground. But the people in the AWC did have some historical precedents regarding the relationship of art and politics: They knew something about the Russian Constructivists, who called themselves “art workers.” They also knew a lot about the WPA moment and the Artists’ Union in New York, because some of those involved were still around. But the AWC was founded during a totally different cultural context than the Artists Union in the 1930s. The WPA employed artists under the rubric of a state sponsored program. Artists in the 1960s–70s were working with strongly anti-governmental precepts, and it was difficult to make the WPA type of artistic labor fit their vision, since that was, in their minds, akin to making Social Realist murals under the guidance of a corrupt state. Those in the AWC wanted to be free to make recalcitrant art like Minimalism and Conceptualism. But they still wanted their work to be considered a form of labor. CM: You also note that the members of the Artists’ Union—who were employed by the government—were substantially wage laborers, whereas a lot of the artists in the AWC and those affiliated with it supported freelance workers. So was it the case that the kind of political mobilization that the AWC had to seek out was qualitatively different