Melanie Angarone

ARTS 252 Making and Meaning

November 5, 2014

When I think of the word labor, I imagine physical, manual, and repetitive work,
either in a factory or in a field. I also think of low wages and poor working conditions;
the word labor connotes difficulty. In our class activities and readings, I have been able to
see why and how artists utilize labor experiences to create and influence their art. When a
person puts so much of their being into a task, the fruits of their labor become art, as does
their experience of working.
In our primary introduction to labor, I got my first taste of producing art in a
simulated work experience. The process of this checkerboard activity was physically
taxing, and I began to realize the objective of the lesson was not so much to make a
finished piece, but to concentrate on the laborious act of penciling in hard-to-reach
squares. This idea of placing importance on the art making process instead of the end
product is not a new one, and is something that artists began doing in the 1960s. In Helen
Molesworths 2003 article The artist as manager and worker: The artist creates and
completes a task she discusses how process art started; it was born from the desire of
artists to place value on their time and effort in their art making process (234). She says
of the artists of the 1960s: Instead of valuing art objects as commodities to be bought
and sold on the market, they advocated an art practice that valued artistic labor as such
(Molesworth 236).
The labor of workers and artists alike are intertwined in that they both involve a
process to create a product, and this is how they are paid. In her work, Mierle Laderman
Ukeles addresses the topic of labor in her partnership with the New York Department of
Sanitation (DOS). As the artist in residence with the DOS, Ukeles brought the labor of
sanitation workers to the forefront of the publics knowledge, and they are not usually
exposed as such. She places emphasis on the unseen workers and the human relationship
with waste that is often overlooked. Just like in our sounds of labor project, we expose
the details of the laborers who keep businesses and communities running; the sounds and
work they produce are a form of art.
I have never participated in labor like those Ukeles addresses, and rarely even in
the way we worked on Sola Gratia farms. By physically planting and uprooting the
vegetation made I could see the process on the land when we were finished. The focused
mindset I had while repetitively digging into the dirt and transporting the plants was not
unlike the way I feel when I engage in making works of art. It is a physical and mental
process that involves me completely when I am invested in my work. I place value on my
work based on this process, as do many of the artists we examined. When I know that I
invested the time and labor in a piece, it is evident in the final product and I personally
place more value upon it.








References
Molesworth, Helen Anne. "The Artist as Manager and Worker: The Artist Creates and
Completes a Task." Work Ethic. Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2003.
234-36. Print.