The Work that Makes Us

The multi-collared profession of art making.

Operators at Eastern Airlines’ reservations center in Miami, November 1970. Photograph by Bruce Dale, National Geographic Creative

In his 1974 book “Working”,  the renowned Chicago oral historian Studs Terkel conducted a series of interviews of various individuals that constitute a cross-section of working class America to discuss their respective professions. Terkel’s book, like most of his lifetime’s research, provides a social portrait of the 20^th century American spirit in all its earnestness, its ingenuity, and sometimes even its naiveté, but always in its springing-eternal hope.

As I am nearing the end of an artist residency, working hard and trying to be as productive as possible in what is supposed to be (and is) a relaxing environment (but not one that is meant to just have a mindless vacation but to get artwork done), I have been thinking about that book. I have been fully confronting both the pleasures and difficulties of the work of art making, with its occasional breakthroughs, and its also occasional frustrations, uncertainties and self-doubt. But external to that, as it pertains to the larger subject of work, I have been reflecting on two questions: first,  how hard it is to situate what artists do within the traditional understanding of what professions are, and how artists (or art professionals in general) identify with the work that we do and how it eventually defines us.

Just in case you are anything like me, who has not thought too much about this topic,  there is an entire color chart that classifies workers by profession. Beyond the more familiar white collar (paid professional) and blue collar (working class, manual labor) categories, other collar pigmentations include gold (highly skilled professionals), red (government), orange (prison), brown (military), grey (those who work beyond the age of retirement), and even scarlet (sex industry). This chart is seemingly a historical accumulation of clichés and outdated concepts: “pink collar” for instance, which refers to service industry jobs, has that name because around the 1970s  when the term was coined these referred to jobs mostly held by women.

Most interestingly, in the case of artists, the classification system refers to them as “no collar”, which Wikipedia defines it as “Artists and ‘free spirits’ who tend to privilege passion and personal growth over financial gain”.

The “no collar” definition not only reinforces the idea that art making is not a real profession nor an activity that requires real expertise and knowledge (see my past column “Not Everyone is an Artist” ) but a frivolous hobby done for pleasure, as if artmaking were a hedonist endeavor like spending all day at a spa. It also evokes the historical perception that artists exist outside of the normative margins of society, which is why to this day non-artist parents often find incomprehensible that their children might pursue this path, as if it were a jump into the abyss of professional irresponsibility. Lack of collar also denotes no expertise required and a carte blanche to be that so-called “free spirit”.

To an extent I can accept how the notion of an uncollared (unleashed) agent can be applicable, but it is insufficient and too prone to the misguided preconceptions outlined above.  The lack of collar color in the classification chart does help illustrate the difficulties that non-art professionals have understanding what artistic work actually is (in Terkel’s book, which includes interviews with a gravedigger, a shipping clerk and a department store salesperson among many others,  the only conventional artist interviewed is jazz musician Bud Freeman, who speaks about his work more as a way of life, but not in any reflexive way about his craft). The fact is that the artist’s work can have elements from all the previously described colors. The profession historically draws from the blue collar tradition ( i.e. a skilled craftsman who performs a manual labor), but it also requires intellectual, entrepreneurial and management components. Furthermore, because of the ways in which contemporary art language has expanded, it can easily reach any of the other colors of the spectrum: artists can be red collar (when doing government commissions), gold (when becoming distinguished fellows or faculty in ivy league universities), and even scarlet (there is an important tradition of artists as sex workers). The art profession nowadays also allows for performative iteration, which is another way of saying that the artist’s language often requires a versatility for embodying different roles. I myself, at different points in my life and for the specific sake of art, have chosen to temporarily perform the professional roles (or at the very least the tasks) of truck driver, book seller, teacher, therapist, tarot card reader, political leader, cabaret singer, messenger, anthropologist, gym instructor, magician, security guard, optician, musicologist, telenovela historian, journalist, translator, interior designer, priest, radio broadcaster, playwright, historical reenactor, and linguistic ethnographer, among many others. I of course can’t claim that I executed these jobs successfully, but the point of inhabiting these various roles is not to master them nor pretending to do so, but to engage in a real-world, authentic manner with a problem in such a way in which the work becomes not something that one does but a way to understand, and also help others experience the questions of meaning presented by a particular form of activity. Inasmuch as we seek to act in the world beyond the conventions of mere outside representation,  the artist is always, in a way, an intruder of professions, a factotum: “all collar.”  In other words, being an artist is not being someone who does whatever they want; it is a profession where one has to construct their own boundaries and rules. Speaking of jazz musicians, one of my favorite quotes is by Branford Marsalis: “there is no freedom in freedom, there is freedom in structure.”

My second area of reflection about work, as I said, concerns identity. In “Working”, Terkel depicts the way in which work —specifically blue collar, back-breaking work— dehumanizes.  In this introduction, Terkel writes:

 “For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent.  The blue collar blues is not more bitterly sung than the white-collar man. “I’m a machine”, says the spot-welder. ‘I’m caged”, says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. “I’m a mule”, says the steel worker. “A monkey can do what I do”, says the receptionist. “I am less than a farm implement”, says the migrant worker. “I’m an object”, says the high fashion model. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.” “There is nothing to talk about”, the young accountant despairingly enunciates.”

I fully relate to that feeling. As a public programmer at museums, many of you always saw me running around presenting and moderating lectures and panel discussions; one day a theater technician working an event referred to me disparagingly as a “suit”, which hurt me more than I expected. On another occasion, an artist once called me to complain about an issue connected to a contract we were negotiating with her, objecting to a particular detail in the language of the agreement. She kept referring throughout the conversation to “the museum” as an abstract evil entity intent on taking advantage of her until, to her (and my) surprise, I exploded in anger. I felt dehumanized and objectified, as she kept referring to me as a mere peg of a machine and not a human being that was  collaborating with to complete an agreement. I told her to stop treating me as a non-person even while I was supposed to sign the contract on the museum’s behalf. I recognize now— and am embarrassed to admit— that I overreacted, but my frustration with being seen as a museum appliance or  “a suit”, in the views of others was real. In any case, the anecdote exemplifies how many who work in an office or within an institution often fear losing ourselves in it, in the same way that Terkel’s subject express.

Still from the movie After Life, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998

And because of the monotony of bureaucratic work, life can begin to feel like an extended state of unexamined meaninglessness. A poignant parable of this can be found in the 1998 Japanese film After Life, a dark comedy directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda about what happens after death. In the film, recently deceased people find themselves in a bureaucratic- looking waiting room where they meet a social worker one by one. There they are told that they have a couple of days to pick one happy moment in their life that they can recreate in film so that they can go on to eternity living it.  one of them, Ichiro Watanabe, is/was a 70-year old who had lived the most uneventful bureaucratic life imaginable and he unable to think of a single happy moment. He is given thousands of video tapes of his own life to review, but practically all of them are interminable periods of him working at a desk.

At the same time, it is also true that as humans we are conditioned to find meaning  in everything we do, and this meaning we put in our work gives meaning to us. This was my greatest fear while I was in museums: being defined by my job. I observed the greatest minds of my generation allow themselves to be defined by the institution they worked at, and once they left the museum for one reason or another they had  to leave those identities behind and build (not always successfully) new ones or walking around the world as shadows of their institutional selves in nostalgic recollection of who they once were. This helps us understand how pernicious institutional identities are, and how when allow them to define us it is all over, so it is best to be keenly aware that these identities are ultimately spurious and fleeting. A Mexican dealer friend who runs an eponymous gallery— let’s call him Ernesto Gutierrez— best said it on one instance years ago where a corrupt and mediocre government employee who had been empowered to be director of an important museum was trying to push him to do an unsavory deal; he rejected it, saying that it would undermine his credibility as a dealer forever. The corrupt government official did not seem to comprehend what “having credibility” meant. My dealer friend then explained: “I will not do this because I will be Ernesto Gutierrez  for the rest of my life, whereas you will be nobody after the end of this administration”, which proved to be true.

And this is perhaps a silver lining that artists have going for themselves, even while they are at the end of the echelon: like my dealer friend, they will always be themselves, because being an artist, even if it can be considered a profession, is not really a “Job”. Vik Muniz put it best a few years back when he was discussing in a conversation how a financial advisor was trying to help him with his finances, telling him at some point that if he followed a certain path he could retire. “But why would I retire?” said Muniz. “So that you can do whatever you want afterwards”, said the financial advisor. “But I am doing exactly what I want to do now”, said Muniz. The financial consultant was confused by the concept that artists just never retire.

But in case this is not clear yet, the last best way I can explain this point is not through anecdotes, nor movies, nor collar colors, but with an artwork— one of the most important and emblematic works of the 20^th century, in my view: Robert Morris’ 1961 “Box With The Sound of Its Own Making”- a meta, conceptual and post-minimalist commentary on the act of making itself. Art making is a process of mutual identification where the work makes the artist as much as the artist makes the work. In other words: our collar is the color of the works we make.