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Work ethic / Helen Molesworth ; essays by Darsie Alexander ... [et al.] ; catalogue entries by Julia Bryan Wilson ... [et al.].

By: Contributor(s): Publication details: Baltimore, Md. : Baltimore Museum of Art ; University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, c2003.Description: 245 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cmISBN:
  • 9780271023342
  • 0271023341
Subject(s):
Contents:
Work ethic / Helen Molesworth
Reluctant witness : photography and the documentation of 1960s and 1970s art / Darsie Alexander
Herbie goes bananas : fantasies of leisure and labor from the new left to the new economy / Chris Gilbert
Exchange rate : on obligation and reciprocity in some art or the 1960s and after / Miwon Kwon
The artist as manager and worker : the artist creates and completes a task
The artist as manager : the artist sets a task for others to complete
The artist as experience maker : the audience completes the work
Quitting time : the artist tries not to work
Summary: 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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book CGLAS Library Yellow 709.046 MOL (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 12337

Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 12 October 2003 - 4 January 2004; Des Moines Art Center, 15 May - 1 August 2004; Wexner Center for the Arts 18, Columbus, Ohio 18 September 2004 - 2 January 2005.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-239) and index.

Work ethic / Helen Molesworth

Reluctant witness : photography and the documentation of 1960s and 1970s art / Darsie Alexander

Herbie goes bananas : fantasies of leisure and labor from the new left to the new economy / Chris Gilbert

Exchange rate : on obligation and reciprocity in some art or the 1960s and after / Miwon Kwon

The artist as manager and worker : the artist creates and completes a task

The artist as manager : the artist sets a task for others to complete

The artist as experience maker : the audience completes the work

Quitting time : the artist tries not to work

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.