Art is work

Preston Street Union | Random Art Machine | 2017

I'm an artist - and I'm also a freelance writer for business. It's the glue that holds together my rather more patchy income from art commissions. It means I'm exposed to a lot of current thinking in business and administration and I have often toyed with the idea of using its processes, and especially its jargon and imagery, in my work.

In fact, business thinking has found its way into my work, but in a rather more mundane sense. It turns out that, because of my (largely self-taught) project management skills, I have often been the one doing the heavy admin lifting in artist-led projects. From setting up shared studio space to organising exhibitions and running groups, I'm usually toiling away on scheduling, fundraising, logistics and budgeting while others are doing what we all like to think of as the 'creative' parts. At one point, having slogged away for 18 months doing so much admin for a large shared studio space that I had no time to get my hands dirty, I was forced to admit that the project (and not my neglected paintings) was The Work.  It felt OK to me, but no one else really saw it that way. I had demoted myself from fellow artist to 'boring admin person who's always banging on about health & safety and filing accounts'. 

More recently, through my involvement with Preston Street Union, I have been thinking about labour, including the organisation of labour and the value of different types of labour. It's partly in honour of our name, which was gifted to us back in 2015 by Trevor Pitt. We have frequently adopted the costumes of manual labour (hard hats, hi-vis, butchers' aprons) and made a start on creating a union banner, but rarely got to grips with labour (small 'l') in any activist sense.   

During 2019 - 2020, we made a couple of pieces of work about Exeter's historic wool trade as part of a commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. While the final works had some merit, the real interest for me lay in the way we created and developed them. The work that went on show at the museum felt rather inadequate as a representation of a huge and rich archive that included a group development workshop run by an artist-plumber, fascinating conversations with expert craftspeople, group debates about organisation and work processes, in-depth practical research and, yes, heaps and heaps of admin. 

It's why I take issue with artists I've met over the years who want to describe art as 'play'. To me it seems like a way of diminishing what we do - making it sound indulgent, relaxing, value-less. It can be all those things - and certainly a quality of playfulness is something most artists strive to protect within their practice. But the wider business of art? Well that's work, no doubt about it, and people need to get paid for it. 

So I'm delighted over recent years to have noticed an increasing number of art projects that take work as a theme. Initiatives such as RADMIN ("admin as a site for meaningful work") and the FeralMBA have placed business practice (and the failure of the 'business as usual' model) at the heart of art practice. I'll add more as I remember or come across them, in a spirit of keeping up with the admin.