Art Labour

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge. As I've written about before, this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her.

Messy adaptation for a performance prop.

It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not personalize your actions or feelings, and partly inspired by hearing about the mental health benefits experienced by others who've shifted their perspectives, I prefer these days to describe myself as someone who makes and mends rather than say I'm a maker. In a way, making and mending is even how I approach audio and video editing. For such a long time my identity was wrapped up in being an academic researcher and educator. It is a much freer existence being someone who researches, writes, podcasts and makes. If anyone ever sees art in anything I do, then how wonderful, really, but I will not impose that view by plastering myself with labels.

This is one of many things I talked over with Sally. She had strong feelings about art labour and unpaid voluntary labour, which are so often one in the same. I know by experience now the difference between making and mending under your own steam and doing it because someone else needs it done. I ought to point out here that these are jobs I have offered to do and have done them happily. While I was painting old light-coloured elastic with black fabric transfer paint because I have these things from what other people have discarded (a whole other topic I will come to), my head started brimming with these thoughts. I felt so relaxed, happy in my work, concentrating on the next daub, and it struck me how much stress I've had in my life from work I desperately wanted to do and which I defined myself by that made me gravely ill. And yet as a child I would spend endless hours beavering away at making, then making something else out of the scraps, and hoarding and finding other things to do with other scraps, because everything is potentially useful. And I think remembering that wee girl in the cold box room and the things she did intuitively, or tried to see if they'd work, and often did, was what my talks with Sally, and mulling them over a lot in the past year, gradually helped unlock. 

We had deep conversations about waste and value. We were of one mind when we found we both saw worth in the things others discard as waste, or those things which simply become waste with a mysterious story. Now, as it was when I was wee, I'm surrounded by others' hand-me-downs and unfinished things. If I didn't take them in, they'd likely go to landfill, and especially if they have further use, I will find something to do with them to avoid that, even if they're piling on top of me until that eventual day when they come into their own. Luckily, I live with someone who feels exactly the same; he picks up every washer and screw he spots in the road. This is why I have bits of clothing elastic and gloopy transfer paint - things I'd never have consciously decided I needed but have come to possess, and, hey, didn't they turn out to be useful?

For me, the actions of making and mending have worth beyond their outcomes. Performing the process - more familiar to me as someone who researches live performance and process art - has its own merits. During a challenging half-term with a grumpy teenager and a positive asymptomatic Covid case in the house, my resting heart rate has been through the roof with stress. But that immediacy, that liveness, that one-step-at-a-time process that is always in a state of becoming and revealing the fruits of your labour, all have such a calming effect. I guess it's what app developers insist on calling mindfulness, but that doesn't capture the visceral, tactile nature of the doing from which emerges that momentary serenity. 

So there is value in the work, just none that is recognized monetarily or socially. Instead, it is valuable in terms of well-being, in mitigating the harms we do to our planet, in refusing to feed the beast of capitalism by just buying something new, in making time to be in your own company (which I'm aware comes with privilege), and by actively taking charge of a situation and problem-solving it.