The Work is the Work: Labor, institution building, and collectivism on New York’s art margins

Abstract

What does it mean to work? And how have artists responded to this idea in their own practices? At the dawn of the 1970s, neoliberalism became firmly entrenched in the parlance of the economies of the Global North and more locally within American municipalities. New York City encountered a particularly serious set of growing pains which manifested in social unrest, acts of organized resistance, and municipal gridlock. This project investigates the concurrent practices of artists across several scenes in 1970s New York including Nitza Tufiño and Taller Boricua in East Harlem, Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery in Midtown, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ downtown sanitation projects. I suggest that these artists labored to step into the vacuum created by neoliberal policy and build localized infrastructures which challenged the status quo of institutions, articulated social space, and mounted defenses of workers’ rights and class visibility. I argue that their respective uses of unorthodox materials, performance, information, and heritage to explore the nature of work and the function of art acted as a counterbalance to neoliberal pressures reshaping the city (and the global economy) during the same period. For these artists, the interrelationship between art and work was immersive; one could not happen without the other. As these artists operated outside of the conventional art market, their practices were particularly ambitious and all-encompassing in which boundaries between art and life were fully transgressed, perhaps due to an acute awareness that their practices were situated on the margins of New York’s art world and, in some instances, on the margins of capitalism.

The performance scholar Baraba Kunst asked what art could be expected to produce in proximity to capitalism, and this paper will consider this framing question as a starting point for an investigation. Broadly, these artists labored in service of creating safe spaces for expression, providing communal education, raising political and economic awareness, building new markets, and cultivating non-traditional audiences.