Mapping Creative Labour in Contemporary Art

Mapping Creative Labour in Contemporary Art will assemble leading academics and practitioners in the field to form an interdisciplinary network of artists, art historians, sociologists and art workers to investigate current patterns of paid and unpaid work in the production and circulation of contemporary art. Work has become a leading topic in academia for the arts, humanities and the social sciences in recent years, but the scholars operating within this emergent field have not yet had the opportunity to reflect on its scope and survey its achievements and limitations. The need for this network to map the field has been given urgency by the difficulties faced by creative workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Panic! Report further demonstrates that the 'workforce for cultural occupations [...] is marked by significant exclusions, by class, gender and ethnicity.' (Brook, O'Brien, and Taylor, 2019) What's needed, therefore, is (1) a reflection on the academic field as a whole, mapping its knowledges and discourses of the art sector as well as identifying its biases and blind spots, and (2) the integration of the diverse working conditions of the arts within the academic field.

For a sense of the scale and diversity of the growing literature on the subject, see Dani Child "Working Aesthetics" (2019), Dave Beech "Art and Labour" (2020), Julia Bryan Wilson "Art Workers" (2011), Leigh Clare La Berge "Wages Against Artwork" (2019), Friederike Siegler "Work: Documents of Contemporary Art" (2017), Miya Tokumitsu "Do What You Love" (2019), Andrew Ross "No Collar", Mark Banks "The Politics of Cultural Work" (2007), David Frayne, "The Refusal of Work" (2015), Cecilia Widenheim, Lisa Rosendahl, Michele Masucci, Annika Enqvist and Jonatan Habib Engqvist (eds) "Work Work Work", Bernes "Art in the Age of Deindustrialisation", Zygmunt Bauman "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor" (2005), Andrea Komlosy "Work: The Last 1000 Years", Joanna Warsza "I Can't Work Like This", Precarious Workers Brigade "Training for Exploitation?" (2012), Silvia Federici, "Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle" (2012), Kathi Weeks "The Problem with Work" 2011, Ricardo Antunes "The Meanings of Work" (2013)

For this network, artists and academics with expertise in questions of labour in the cultural industries other "art workers" (studio assistants, fabricators, art suppliers, museum workers and communities of artist-run organisations) will be brought together in site visits and/or online meetings to compare a diverse range of social relations that are hidden behind the myth of the artist as the sole producer of artworks. The goal is for the exchanges to make it possible for the first time for the experts in this emerging cross-disciplinary field to reflect on the field as a whole and map the full range of waged and unwaged work in art.

This network will be led by Dr Dave Beech (PI) Reader in Art and Marxism at University of the Arts London (UAL), with Dr Dani Child as Co-I, Senior Lecturer in Art History, Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

Beech is the author of Art and Value (Brill, 2015) and Art and Labour (Brill, 2020) which radically rethink the economics of artistic labour and the history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry. As Professor of Art as Valand Academy, Sweden, Beech was responsible for organising major international research events such as the bi-annual Parse conference.

Child has published widely on the subject of art and labour. Her monograph Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism (Bloomsbury, 2019) is an important contribution to the shift in art history away from the myth of the lone artist towards the network of makers and support workers that make art possible. She is also experienced in organising academic events and panels. Child is Co-I on the AHRC-funded project 'COVID-19: Impacts on the cultural industries and the implications for policy'.