Overview

""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.

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9780271023342

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Reviews

This catalogue, which includes stimulating essays as well as sustained catalogue entries on exhibited artists, is ambitious indeed. It attempts nothing less than a revision of how we understand the cataclysmic changes in art production during the 1960s. Curator Helen Molesworth proposes that what has often been called the 'dematerialization' of the artwork should be understood as a new relationship between the artist and her or his labor. In short, with the development of a new 'post-industrial' economic paradigm, Molesworth argues, artists began to put pressure on the socially charged bifurcation between manager and laborer in new ways. Most interestingly, in lieu of romantic notions of singular creativity, the artist began to divide into both worker and manager, and the work of art, to some degree, became the residue of this contradiction. . . . It is laudable and significant that this catalogue includes intelligent entries on the works of important exhibiting artists. --David Joselit, Yale University

The rich array of work by nearly fifty artists demonstrates how they have adopted administrative capacities and managerial identities, and favored conceptual processes over manual production, enacting modernity s paradigmatic shifts in labor. . . . Can art ever advance work s stoppage, or do its attempts result only in further refinements of products and markets? Leaving this question to the viewer s labor, Work Ethic succeeded in comprehending a significant field of recent artistic practice, casting an extremely diverse grouping of work within a unified but effectively complicated logic. T. J. Demos, Artforum

Author Information

Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Darsie Alexander is Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at The Baltimore Museum of Art.Chris Gilbert is Associate Curator at the Des Moines Center for the Arts. Miwon Kwon is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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