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," will be 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.
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