In recent years, the art world has come under a new kind of scrutiny from within. Almost every day we hear of workers resisting exploitation, questioning the conditions of labour in museums and galleries, calling out the deep contradictions that traverse the art world, and trying to imagine a new one. Many of these workers are themselves artists, and the scrutiny has also taken the form of artworks.1 This raises the question: can artworks themselves, given their reliance on the infrastructures of the art world, sufficiently scrutinise it, or must critique be levelled from without?
Avant-garde artworks have long been understood as a way of art scrutinising itself, each modern movement peeling away obfuscating layers of illusion and decoration. Modernist painting deconstructed and ultimately abandoned perspective, Surrealism and Dada ridiculed art’s bourgeois fantasies, Minimalism probed the viewing conditions of the gallery space, and finally Institutional Critique looked through the gallery walls at the shady power structures that rule over the art world. I say ‘finally’ because even the most eminent practitioners of Institutional Critique recognised that it has reached an impasse, never able to fully wrest itself from the problematic infrastructures it exposed, and ultimately becoming something of an institution itself.2
A broad hiatus of critique followed the assimilation of Institutional Critique in the ensuing boom years of the 90’s and 00’s. Many artists stopped worrying and learnt to love those power structures. Enter the YBA’s and their spectacular nihilism. But today, in an age of ‘permacrisis’, art’s self-scrutiny has returned with new force. Where institutional critique mostly looked skywards to glimpse the gods of the art world, the new critique fixes its gaze at ground-level to think with the precarious workers who not only make, curate and write about the artwork but also install, ship, clean and guard it.
Two recent objects can help us think about the status of the artwork in this tumultuous moment. The first is a book, The ABC of the projectariat: Living and working in a precarious art world (2021) by Polish writer, curator and activist Kuba Szreder, a kind of field guide for precarious art workers (he calls them the ‘projectariat’); and the second is an artwork, Invisible Art Handler (2021) by American artist Clynton Lowry, in which the art worker haunts the exhibition. Both redirect our gaze away from the gleaming art object and towards the invisible labour that is its condition of possibility—Szreder calls this the “dark matter” of the art world (borrowing the term from theorist Gregory Sholette) and Lowry makes it a ghostly presence in the exhibition. These objects’ success lies in their presentation of a negative space behind the glare of the art world, in which we might dimly perceive new possibilities.
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Kuba Szreder’s The ABC of the projectariat is a witty and thoroughgoing critique of today’s art world—exposing it as no less neoliberal and dystopian than the political climate in which it exists, only more deluded—and an urgent call to think outside and beyond it. The book is an idiosyncratic glossary of terms—Artyzol; Belt-tightening; Cynicism and Cliques; Dark Matter; Exclusion—each one a site of struggle and contestation, with histories rigorously drawn and debates vividly illustrated. Each term contains analogue ‘hyperlinks’ to other entries (eg. —> Exclusion), creating insightful constellations. Take the entry on Art workers. The very idea is seen by some as a contradiction in terms: people in the art world, especially artists and curators, don’t really work, some insist. If they do, it is for the sheer love of Art. For others, including Szreder, the term does vital ideological work in demystifying art, exposing it as an industry like any other, and implicitly demanding rights for the workers within it. Szreder ‘hyperlinks’ Art worker to Artyzol, a fantastical, tongue-in-cheek invention of the author: a gas that pervades the art world whose glamorous fumes intoxicate art workers into enthusiastically participating in it, whilst also making them forget to demand proper remuneration for their work.
The structure of the book somewhat mirrors the art world itself. An alphabetic glossary gives the illusion of a complete set, just as the global reach and full calendar of fairs and biennials present the art world as a totalising system. But the book’s open-ended paths of inquiry, discontinuities and productive partiality mirror the true nature of the art world as itself a fractured and open-ended part of the capitalist world system. This formal echo helps build the argument, for across the entries a picture builds (in my mind at least) of today’s neoliberal art world as a vast and uneven landscape that the eponymous ‘projectarian’ must navigate. Peaks of untold success are always on the horizon of this hierarchical terrain, surrounded by foothills fissured with dangerous pitfalls. (The geological metaphor is used advisedly, as Szreder has elsewhere analogised the art world as an iceberg of which we only see the tip—the artworks in their gleaming white galleries—while the vast submerged mass beneath is the invisible labour of countless unseen art workers.)3
Szreder calls for the ‘projectariat’ (artists, curators and art workers more generally) who want to see a form of art world emerge that is as progressive as much of its content to shift their gaze from the vertiginous peaks to the cracks beneath their feet. The peaks “glimmer with social energies not of their own making” sitting atop masses of “dark matter”, which denotes the invisible labour as well as the informal economic activity of all those engaged in the art world: “attending art colleges, buying supplies, spreading reputations, flocking to exhibitions”. It is this dark matter that, like the invisible labour of reproduction highlighted by feminists in the 1970’s, could be mobilised to create a new art world.
The means to create this new art world proposed in The ABC of the projectariat are broadly modes of protest (Art strikes; Exodus; Productive withdrawals) and techniques of solidarity (Instituting the commons; Interdependence) drawn from the toolkit of the labour movement.4 They revolve around the withdrawal of (paid and unpaid) labour from the privatised art world and the redirection of it into building a socialised one. A crucial argument emerges, if caveated, that we should not look to the artwork or the artist to instigate transformation of the art world. If anything, the revolutionary powers attributed to the artwork and artist might hold back change. In a crucial discussion in the entry Curatorial mode of production / revolution, Szreder challenges the idea (put forward by theorist John Roberts) that curators could transform the art world by being more like artists, positioning themselves as avantgarde outsiders and harnessing their “powers of negation”. Szreder counters that “Any power that artists have is not extra- or anti-institutional… artists are embedded in the institution of art and should not be considered romantic outsiders”. The myth of the charismatic individual creator-disruptor sustains the art world in its current form as well as the neoliberal economic order in which it thrives.
That is not to say artistic creativity is worthless. Szreder proposes that both the withdrawals of labour from the existing art world and the imagining of a new one be creative acts. The entry on Patainstitutions argues for surrealist play in the creation of a new art world. ‘Patainstitution’ is a riff on proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry’s term ‘pataphysics’ that Szreder glosses as “a mode of reflection motivated by the belief that ‘the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real’”. A patainstitution might be an alternative biennial, collective research institute or informal university, the radical structure of which might serve as a propaedeutic for an art world yet to come. And Szreder puts these ideas into practice in his own activities as a curator and activist. With other art workers, he mounts aesthetically vivid and astute demonstrations and strikes, develops alternative arts education, and curates “postartistic” exhibitions of “not not art”. For Szreder, then, if the (visible) artwork is to regain its ‘powers of negation’ it is the (invisible) art workers who must collectively, and creatively, negate the art world as it exists today.
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An act of negation is central to Clynton Lowry’s artwork Invisible Art Handler. The work was an augmented reality intervention into the arts space The Kitchen in New York in 2021-22, part of a group exhibition titled In Support. Lowry’s work asks a question about support structures: who are the supports upon which the art world is built? The answer necessarily includes the art handler. Invisible Art Handler did not appear in the usual exhibition space of The Kitchen, but in the building’s functional spaces and even backstage areas that are usually off-limits to visitors. In the lobby, the bathroom hallway, stairwell, workshop, utility closet and performance space of the building, Lowry placed QR codes which, when scanned, activated augmented reality scenarios on the viewer’s phone. On the screen the viewer would see the very same room they were pointing their phone at, except that in a certain place something strange would be happening: a light being adjusted by no-one, a piece of wood floating to a mitre saw and cut, a ladder floating up the stairs, a lone mop mopping the floor seemingly without human intervention. (These scenarios can be viewed here as 360° videos.)
The scenes we witness are both quotidian and otherworldly, soberly reminding us that the exhibition we are consuming is also a place of work, while also calling to mind a myriad of fantastical associations. A mop mopping the floor by itself is reminiscent of Goethe’s tale The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Disney’s Fantasia, where the fantasy of labour without labourer turns the world to chaos, as well as the (Marxist) idea that under capitalist relations, in which workers are alienated from their labour, inanimate objects are imbued with a magical and dangerous autonomy. There are subtleties, though, in the images on the screen that point beyond these initial interpretations. The mops, and other tools, are not, in fact, entirely alone. Software has been used—in a way that I can only guess at—to erase the worker from the scene, but the digital camouflage struggles at times to perfectly delete them. The contours of their bodies appear as a digital stain that looks like a person-shaped hole. With these subtle glitches what is staged is neither the making visible of these invisible workers, nor their complete eradication, but the haunting presence of an absence. Invisible Art Handler makes eerily palpable the idea of ‘dark matter’ articulated in The ABC of the projectariat, but does so in the form of what Roland Barthes called a ‘punctum’: something—an accident, a stain, a hole—in the image that pricks, even bruises, the viewer.
Lowry’s work, like Szreder’s, represents a kind of puncturing. Lowry is the creator and editor-in-chief of Art Handler, a publication, website and popular Instagram account that masquerades as a harmless trade magazine for art workers, but acts as an ongoing exposé of the inner workings of the art world through essays, events, and, preeminently, content that comes from a vast community of art workers shared on the Instagram account @arthandlermag. Art Handler opened a hole in the art-media landscape through which a witty and subversive proletarian culture now flows. The platform is a thorn in the side of the ruling class of the art world: the Instagram account has posted images shared by art workers that have upset the smoke-and-mirrors operations of numerous prominent galleries. Lowry also founded Jobs.art, an art jobs listings site, with the express aim of working against the pervasive culture of low- or no-pay work.5 Given the focus on construction equipment in the visual culture of Art Handler, we might say that Lowry’s work is a multi-headed tool that creates various holes in the art world.
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What can holes tell us? The ABC of the projectariat probes fissures in the structure of the art world, such as those between the precarious activity that sustains the making of art and the private interests that extract value from it. In these cracks Szreder finds not only reasons to negate the art world, but also the resources—he might say the ‘dark matter’—to produce new paradigms. Lowry’s ‘trade magazine’, Art Handler, is a powerful tool in this process of negation, a place for that ‘dark matter’ to come to light and collectively articulate itself, encouraging class-consciousness and desire for transformation. Invisible Art Handler reminds us that artworks, too, can imaginatively engage with these struggles. In this work, the art worker is figured as a ghostly puncture, conjuring a disturbing, negative image of the art world. I read it as something like a psychoanalytic diagnosis of a traumatic void that the art world as it exists today cannot come to terms with.