Katja Praznik - Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism

INVISIBLE LABOUR AND THE LEGACY OF YUGOSLAV SOCIALISM

KATJA PRAZNIK

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 2021

Toronto Buffalo London

utorontopress.com

Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN 978-1-4875-0841-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4875-3819-4 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-4875-3818-7 (PDF)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Art work : invisible labour and the legacy of Yugoslav

socialism / Katja Praznik

Names: Praznik, Katja, 1978 author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210146621 | Canadiana (ebook)

20210146699 | ISBN 9781487508418 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487538187 (PDF) |

ISBN 9781487538194 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Art, Yugoslav 20th century. | LCSH: Art

Economic aspects Yugoslavia. | LCSH: Unpaid labor Yugoslavia. |

LCSH: Socialism and art Yugoslavia. | LCSH: Yugoslavia Cultural policy.

Classification: LCC N7248.P73 2021 | DDC 709.49709/04 dc23

Title page and chapter opener ornament from Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock.com.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

For reading and rereading drafts of this book and for their incisive and insightful comments that helped sharpen my argument, I thank Eda ufer, Carine M. Mardorossian, Luka Arsenjuk, and my anonymous peer reviewers. I am grateful to Goran orevi, Dalibor Martinis, Duan Mandi and Jaka Babnik for granting me the permission to reprint the documents of their work.

Research presented in this book received institutional support by University at Buffalo in different phases: through a research grant from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, and a fellowship from the Humanities Institute. The publication of this book is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences Julian Park Fund.

Equally important was the support of colleagues at University at Buffalo. I am especially thankful to Kevin Leary, Cristanne Miller, and the late Roy Roussel the champions of University at Buffalos Arts Management Program, as well as to Amy Graves Monroe, Jasmina Tumbas, Marion Werner, Jaume Franquesa, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo. Beyond the realm of University at Buffalo I thank Serhan Ada, Tony Busch, and Sabina Potoki.

At University of Toronto Press, Stephen Shapiro has been the most kind and supportive editor with astute and encouraging comments on the manuscript.

For early mentorship and support I am indebted to Rastko Monik, Lev Kreft, Mitja Velikonja, and Vesna opi.

I thank my mother Mara Praznik for her continuing patience and support despite the ocean between us. Finally, I dedicate this book to my father Avgust Praznik, who demystified unpaid labour in the arts and academia through his persistent threats of buying me a beggars hat. His life was in my view an exemplification of Yugoslavias promise to working-class people and continues to inspire me even though he is no longer with us.

Earlier versions of this work previously appeared as Artists as Workers, Social Text 38, no. 144 (2020): 83115; Autonomy or Disavowal of Socioeconomic Context, Historical Materialism 26, no. 1(2018): 10335; and Ideological Subversion vs. Cultural Policy of Late Socialism: The Case of the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (SNST) in NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue Slowenische Kunst an Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, Badovinac et al. (eds.), Ljubljana/Cambridge: Moderna Galerija/MIT Press, 2015.

All translations from Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian, and Macedonian sources are my own unless otherwise noted.

In the spring of 2019 a photographer invited me to write an essay for an edited volume accompanying his exhibition in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The exhibition had been commissioned by a public art institution and was thematically focused on a social critique of various objects to which people ascribe magical or symbolic functions. I began my research by interviewing the author about his working conditions. At the time of our conversation he had been working on the exhibition for at least six months and the opening was still four months away. As I learned the unsurprising facts, a sense of indignation ensued. While the author was payed an honorarium the sum was pitiful three hundred euros. This figure felt even more egregious when I asked the gallery director what the overall budget for the exhibition was. It was 30,000 euros. The gallery prides itself on offering good working conditions for artists, explained the director, especially because the budget covered the material or production cost, in this case the cost of large still-life photographs. While I curbed my impatience and did not ask what exactly they would hang on the walls of the gallery otherwise, I spared no ink when it came to emphasizing that the actual labour of the artist involved in the exhibition was (de)valued at 1 per cent of the entire exhibition budget.

The protagonists of this book are art workers. The term may appear as an oxymoron because art in the West is predominantly considered as non-work. Unless discussed in the context of arts and crafts, most Western traditions undermine the labour in the name of a creativity they divorce from the actual painstaking work involved in creating art. The labour of art is neither seen nor defined as work let alone appropriately remunerated. I term this condition the paradox of art.

0.1. Jaka Babnik, Pygmalion, a pile of non-winning lottery tickets, exhibition view, Jakopi Gallery, Ljubljana, 2019. Photo by Jaka Babnik. Courtesy of Jaka Babnik.

Commonly perceived as an ingenious act of creation unaffected by monetary concerns, the invisible labour of artists, this unsightly cog running the wheels of the art world, is one of the most formidable contradictions of Western art. At once idealized as the opposite of work and used as a blueprint for contemporary capitalist work ethics, the lofty status of artists and the rampant economic exploitation of their labour is at the core of the paradox of art. The contradiction powering this enduring paradox lies in the perceived exceptionality and elevated status of artists labour, and the uncertain, poorly compensated, and socially unprotected working conditions of artists and creative workers. While scholars and international reports candidly ascertain that the largest subsidy to the arts comes in the form of unpaid or underpaid artistic labour, the question remains about what perpetuates the paradoxical status of artistic labour, glorified intellectually yet undervalued economically.

The artifice of this Potemkin village, as this book argues, lies in the historical disavowal of art as a form of labour. Informed by the Marxist-feminist critique of housework as invisible labour, my argument draws on an analogy between domestic work and artistic labour to uncover the mutual mechanisms of normalization and economic disavowal of these types of labour and the structural exploitation inscribed in them. Unlike the ways in which feminized domestic labour tends to be culturally disparaged, artistic labour is perceived as an act of creation and maintains a status of exceptionality; however, the indifference to labour involved in art makes it vulnerable to economic exploitation. The mystification of artistic labour that is its historical attachment to the idea that artistic practice is not work but creativity emanating from artistic genius is central to the paradox of art. Since artistic genius is racialized and gendered as a white male, the majority of artists, especially women, people of colour and of non-European descent are situated in a systemic setback of double oppression. In conjunction with the historical origins of art as a realm of freedom and autonomy that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, the mystification of artistic labour makes it possible to divorce its productive activities from other kinds of labour and enables a particular form of exploitation.