Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  “Galleries by their history and nature are super elitist,” she explained. “Because my practice is about building alternative worlds and alternative ways of seeing things and reimagining space, then if you are just doing that in a contemporary regular gallery you are not doing what you are saying. Turning a space like a bank or a church, taking something and totally reimagining the space, is just as important as the work that you are showing.”

  It’s not that she’s opposed to galleries, or to what people often call, with implied capitalization, the Art World. It’s that her art is about bringing people in who might feel excluded from those spaces. At the same time, she said, “If I get an opportunity to exhibit in some big art gallery, I am going to do it. I am always trying to figure out a way of surviving financially.” Finding a way to survive and to make the work that matters to her requires a combination of selling art, applying for grants and residencies, and collaborations. She’s taken part in group shows with other printmakers, including an exhibition in Liberty Hall, a Dublin union hall with a storied history, and done solo shows in cafés and small galleries. And she tries, she said, to make sure each exhibition is more than just an exhibition, that the space has food and drink and is a place where people can connect with one another as well as come to purchase art to adorn their walls.

  The coronavirus pandemic scrambled but did not halt most of O’Shea’s projects. In early June 2020 she was working as a producer for another artist, Marie Brett, for a project looking at the cholera pandemic in Ireland in 1832. The prints she was making at Crawford the day I visited, in January 2020, were the beginning of something else, for a project at A4 Sounds in Dublin called “We Only Want the Earth,” which had been postponed, but not canceled, due to the pandemic. She had to postpone, too, an artist’s residency in Dublin that she’d been looking forward to, but the pandemic gave her the opportunity to use the support of the residency to host conversations online. She’d been looking forward to the retreat time, but in a way the lockdown—which she spent with family in Kerry—also allowed her time to nurture herself as an artist, letting her make things without immediately worrying about having to sell them. She also appreciated the way the lockdown let her spend more time talking to people far and wide, and apply those conversations to her art. “I think I am literally the opposite of the lone artist in the studio,” O’Shea said. “My studio is the world.”

  LOVE HAS BEEN WOMEN’S WORK FOR MOST OF HISTORY; EQUALLY, FOR most of history, we have presumed that the artist is a man. That lone artist in the studio, splattering paint everywhere, unwilling to leave even to eat, compelled by his genius to work or die trying, is a myth that many still believe in, unaware that it, too, is a product of history and a particular culture’s image of itself.

  The image of the male genius has been with us a long time, as celebrated as the wife in the home is unsung. Not only that: the genius is defined almost literally as the opposite of the woman in the home. Megan Garber at The Atlantic, pulling the etymology of the word “genius” from the Oxford English Dictionary, found that one of the derivations of the word was “male spirit of a family,” as well as “personification of a person’s natural appetites, spirit or personality of an emperor regarded as an object of worship, spirit of a place, spirit of a corporation, (in literature) talent, inspiration, person endowed with talent, also demon or spiritual being in general.” That’s why, Garber noted, the women are often airbrushed out of the story of the genius. Women are muses (or the wives who clean up the mess) in this narrative; rarely do they get to be artists themselves.1

  This is also why we have a hard time thinking of what the genius does as work. Look at all those words: spirit, demon, spiritual being, object of worship. “Natural appetites” aside, most of them are ethereal, implying something a little bit magical. As Garber wrote, “a fealty to genius is its own kind of faith: in transcendence, in exceptionalism, in the fact that gods, still, can walk among us. And genius, itself, is its own kind of infrastructure. We have organized our art around its potential; we have organized our economy around its promise.” That faith in genius has slipped into many places we never expected to find it: breathless paeans to it dot the tech press and sports journalism as much as art-world publications. It convinces us that there is something that some people just have that the rest of us can’t, no matter how hard we work. It elides the real skills that some have worked for, and it often, in fact, allows some to take credit for other people’s work.2

  This elision of skills, of the labor that creative workers have put in, is the flip side of the elision of caring labor into an innate quality of femininity. In both cases we are led to assume that people are born with a tendency toward a certain type of work, a belief that along the way teaches us that work itself is natural. Just as the assumptions made about women’s unpaid housework spilled into other types of work, from teaching to retail, our ideas about artists have colored our reactions to the work of programmers, scholars, and even, in a way, athletes. The romantic attachment of the artist to his work is the counterpart of the familial love women are supposed to have for caring work, and these two halves together make up the labor-of-love narrative that shapes our perception of work today.

  This occurs with artists because there does seem to be something magical about works of art that have lasted for decades or even centuries: the piece that strikes to the heart, the beautiful and the profound. Why do some people feel the need to create art? “They had the time and the means by which to do so” seems like an incomplete explanation, though the drive to create things for pure enjoyment is perhaps one of the most deeply human things we do. Even a Marxist art critic like John Berger, well attuned to the ways society’s inequalities made it possible for some to make great art and others not to, wrote of the “mystery” of art—“and by mystery,” he wrote, “I mean the power of a work of art to affect the heart.” Lewis Hyde argued that art was a form of gift, unsuited to the capitalist economy, because the artist was “gifted” with talent and therefore made a gift of his art to the world.3

  Be that as it may, art can and very much does exist under capitalism, and for many people it is a job of one form or another. For some of them it is a side gig, for others it pays nothing at all. Some teach art, some sell it, some criticize it, and many assist in the making of it but never see their names on a gallery wall. Artists may work to delight the soul, as Hyde wrote, but their work is nevertheless material, existing because someone took substances—paints, clay, stone, film, even their own bodies—and turned them, as Berger wrote, into “‘artistic’ material” and created a work of art.4

  If the term “genius” has spiritual roots, so does “creative.” As cultural critic Raymond Williams noted, these words developed in tandem, with “creative” at first a term for something not done by man, but by God. The shift to apply the word to art made by humans maintained the sense that, as literature scholar John Patrick Leary wrote, building on Williams, “creativity was a work of imagination, rather than production, of artistry rather than labor.” This split between art and work continues to mystify the work that goes into making art.5

  But the early arts were themselves a form of worship or magic-making, and it is not easy to separate this aura from today’s arts even when they’re held in “ego-seums” that double as tax shelters for the world’s richest. Religious paintings on cave walls or carvings in temples were offerings to the gods first before they were there to be admired by humans. Only later did art become something done for the enjoyment of mere mortals, and later still did it become something that could be reproduced and shared broadly.6

  Our modern idea of the artist as someone special, gifted, and outside of the normal bounds of society was born in Europe during the Renaissance. It was at that time that the wealthy began in earnest to invest some of their vast fortunes into art, and the artist began to have a unique reputation—after all, wealthy merchants wanted to ensure that they hired the best to paint their families and their possess
ions. Oil paintings were, Berger wrote, “a celebration of private property.” They were, of course, also a form of private property themselves. For the artist, though, they were a job.7

  The ability of artists to trade on their individual reputations rather than the reputation of a guild was a result of a society that began to emphasize the individual, that was hierarchical and structured around the idea that inequality was natural. Still, most artists were painting portraits and the like to make a living, not because the spirit had suddenly struck them to depict the richest man in town or his prize cow. The emergence of great works of art from this period is in a way in spite of the format that many of the artists worked in, yet the desire of the wealthy patrons of the arts to collect the best art possible helped to create our idea of the genius creator driven by something both bigger and more ephemeral than money.8

  The tension between artist-as-worker and artist-as-visionary is rarely visible in the art itself, but sometimes you can see it if you squint. Berger pointed to the paintings of the regents and regentesses of an almshouse for old men, done by Frans Hals in the winter of 1664, when Hals himself was an old pauper. Did the relationship of power that the governors held over Hals shape how he painted them, in their matching austere black? The fact that so few acknowledge this dimension of the work of art, Berger wrote, is mystification.9

  With the slow decline of patronage, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, and with the development of industrial capitalism, the market grew for art as a commodity, a store of value in itself. Before the Revolution, French artists needed credentials; afterward, more people could attempt to become artists and sell their work. Such a flood of new workers meant a need for new institutions, and this expansion, art critic Ben Davis wrote, “gave birth to bohemian society and the modern art movement, symbolically inaugurated by the ‘Salon des Refuses’ of 1863, when a number of important artists rejected by the salon demanded to be heard on their own.”10

  The Industrial Revolution’s impact on art lay not just in the rise of a new bourgeois class with disposable money to spend buying decorations; it also, strangely, helped to shape the notion that art is opposed to work. As mass production spread, the unique art object gained value precisely because it was not produced by machines. As the work of craftsmen declined in favor of the factory, the artist became separated still further from the artisan. Art, a term that had simply meant “skill” at one point, became a term for what we now think of as the fine arts, and indeed, to be contrasted to skilled labor as something that could not, in fact, be taught. An artist was thus a special kind of person. Like caring work, art work was something outside of and contrasted to capitalist production—but while the carer presumably works out of love for those cared for, the artist has a romance with the work. No longer did art need religious value; it was now a higher good in itself.11

  But all of this hype for the value of art being stronger than its value as a commodity doesn’t change the fact that artists, too, have to eat. The “starving artist” cannot in fact live on air, and we should remember that all the great works we’re aware of came to us because the artist had some means of subsistence. Most artists are not able to make “pure” art that only satisfies their souls; most of them, like Frans Hals, have had to compromise with the demands of the market. The idealization of the artist as a mystical being served, as Williams wrote, not to solve the problem but merely to soften our realization of it. Artists may have resisted the turning of their art into a product for the wealthy to purchase, but capitalism is not so easy to escape.12

  The romantic image of bohemian artists living on whatever they could scrape together, carousing and painting and dancing and free-loving their way through life and the occasional radical political action, has its roots in the reality of artists in the 1800s cobbling together a living and a community. It is an image of people who reject the concept of “work” as we know it. Yet that romantic image reinforces the idea of artists as gifted individuals, whose needs and desires are set apart from the rest of the world. Artists might be “dangerous,” their art potentially subversive, but bohemian chic made an excellent site for “slumming” by those who wanted a taste—just a taste—of radicalism with their arts purchases.13

  Some critics of capitalism, meanwhile, looked to reunite art with labor in order to make work itself more enjoyable. John Ruskin and William Morris, though from different political perspectives, both, in historian Eileen Boris’s words, “defined art as man’s expression of his joy in labor and lamented the fact that modern civilization had robbed work of pleasure.” To Ruskin and Morris, art was anything crafted by hand to be beautiful as well as useful; although the movement that sprang up in their wake often fell short of their goals (particularly of Morris’s revolutionary socialism), it sought to break down the wall between art and work, creating pleasant spaces in which to craft beautiful things. Morris argued that to really return pleasure to work, capitalism would have to be replaced, but that creative work could be a way to combat alienation. In practice, however, the arts and crafts movement, organized through groups like the Art Workers’ Guild in the late 1800s and early 1900s, celebrated handicrafts for their own sake, and often its attempts to reorganize the workplace to be less miserable simply rearranged the workplace to better suit its managers. The beautiful goods it produced mostly went to adorn the homes of the new middle class—“playthings for the wealthy,” as one critic described them.14

  Another group of artists with revolutionary aspirations also identified as workers and even attempted to organize as workers. Inspired less by Morris than by Marx and their own revolution at home, the Mexican muralists—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and others—called for a publicly funded art for public display, an art that would represent the people of Mexico, the workers and the colonized, an art that would be worthy of the revolutionary country they hoped to build. While the Mexican Revolution fell short of expectations, the artists drew on their experiences as rebel students and revolutionary fighters to build a political argument for their art. In 1922, the muralists formed the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors and wrote a manifesto pledging their membership to the Communist International and their support to collective art projects that would pay workers equally. They experimented with modern materials for making art (including automobile paint and industrial spray guns), published a radical journal, El Machete, and became involved in the broader Mexican labor movement. However, their art, too, was in the main purchased and commissioned by the wealthy, not the working class. Siqueiros argued, as had Morris before him, that real, pure art could only exist in a radically changed society; his revolutionary activities were therefore a way of “fighting for pure art.”15

  The Mexican muralists inspired artists around the world, but particularly across the border in the United States, where during the Great Depression artists and public officials alike sought to create, through relief programs, a more democratic public art. Through the programs of the New Deal, particularly the Federal Art Project (FAP), part of the larger Works Progress Administration, artists were hired and paid as workers, leveling the playing field for art creation for the first time. They were paid to make art in community spaces, where it could be seen by many more people than previously had access. Work was the subject, too, of much of the art, from photographs by Lewis Hine capturing factory workers in luminous black and white to Stuart Davis’s brightly colored abstracted workplaces. Artist and organizer Ralph Pearson argued that the printmaker should see themselves as “a workman among workers,” writing, “He prints his etchings, lithographs or woodblocks with hands which know ink and the rollers and wheels of his press. He works. He produces. He lives.”16

  Artists had to fight to be included in the relief program, arguing that the economic collapse had put them out of work as surely as anyone else, and challenging long-standing ideas of the artist as existing outside of the wage-labor system. The FAP put the focu
s not on the product but on the production of art; it stressed getting artists working, not their end result. That gave artists with a broad range of political views and styles of work an opportunity to experiment, to push boundaries, without needing to satisfy rich patrons. Artists organized, too, in the Communist Party’s John Reed Club and its offshoot, the Unemployed Artists’ Group, which then became, after its successful push for federal arts funding, the Artists’ Union. The union was not a union in name only; it bargained with and demonstrated against the FAP’s leadership and eventually joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the more militant of the two national labor federations. Not everyone approved of such organization, of course—one art critic wrote that unions were antithetical to art: “The very nature that leads him to be an artist makes him intensely individualistic. To such men the very thought of unionization is distasteful. They are not the same as coal miners.” But to many of the artists, the union made perfect sense, and aligned them with the vast numbers of Americans relying on some form or other of Depression-era relief.17

  While the FAP treated artists as workers, it did not treat all workers equally. The jobs for technical workers, gallery assistants, and fine artists were all supported, though not paid the same. In one important respect, though, the project did treat workers equally: Black artists were given the same wage as white ones, though they sometimes had to fight for their chosen subject matter (their own communities). In the end, the US government spent over $35 million on the arts between 1933 and 1943, resulting in tens of thousands of murals, sculptures, paintings, prints, posters, and photographs. Gordon Parks, Stuart Davis, and Dorothea Lange were among those who got work from the art programs, as were future art stars such as Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. In addition, the government poured money into community art centers, which not only displayed art but held lectures and classes so that everyday people could make art rather than simply consume it. The New Deal, in art historian A. Joan Saab’s words, provided a “redistribution of artistic opportunity.”18