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• Blessy Augustine, University of Western Ontario

Perhaps we can think of our time as characterized by precarity. From ecosystems to economic systems, everything that once appeared solid is now exposed as delicately balanced, on thin ice. Within this situation, we find our own individual lives overtaken, threatened by that which has come to define us—our labour. At one end of the spectrum is the precarity caused by the constant pressure to perform and at the other end is “poorly paid, unprotected, insecure work.” From Santiago Sierra’s “Twelve Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes” to Mika Rottenberg’s “Dough,” artists have looked at different systems that exploit the labouring body, while others have emphasized the right to be unproductive. This session invites papers from researchers and artists who look at the issues related to labour and work, especially how precarity is created through movement (economic migration), work permits, productivity, exhaustion—of both human and natural resources.

keywords: labour, precarity, exhaustion, productivity, migration

session type: panel

Stitching Together an Empire: Inka Control of Women’s Labor

• Katie Elizabeth Ligmond, University of California, Santa Cruz

Textiles were the emblematic prestige item of the Inka empire, who sought to control the labor of their subjects above all else. The Inka spoke Quechua, as do some eight million people currently living in the Andes, and their word for beautiful is “wairuru” literally translating to “well-made.” The Inka held control over all wairuru textiles, which had their own name: cumbi. While male subjects of the Inka empire were expected to complete labor tribute, women faced their own kind of subjugation. All women were expected to weave for the Inka state, but the best were removed from their homes and cloistered in Inka centers. These “chosen women” were called aclla, and were simultaneously exalted as the most superior designers, but endured harsh conditions often being given as sacrifices or unwilling brides to Inka elites. Furthering their suffering, is the idea that pervades the Andes, that to produce a wairuru object is to deposit a bit of one’s own being into that object. In fact, many scholars now call such creations “subject-objects” to denote the idea that these masterworks embody the personhood of their makers. The iconography of Inka textiles has been much discussed, but little has been said about the bodies of the women who made these textiles, and the bodies of the textiles themselves. In this paper I propose that we focus on the materiality of Inka textiles as pieces of women’s own selves, thus, the Inka sought to control not just labor, but their citizens’ very souls.

keywords: Inka, textile, Pre-Hispanic, Americas, gender

“If the art ends up being pretty, making it here won’t be”: Examining Precarity, Neoliberalism and Artists’ Labour on CBC’s Crash Gallery (2015-17)

• Robin Alex McDonald, MacEwan University
• Wendy Peters, Nipissing University

In 2015 CBC launched Crash Gallery, a reality TV show in which artists eagerly compete against one another. Each episode involves three artist-contestants tasked with creating art under challenging circumstances, including being submerged into basins of water, strapped to inversion tables and flipped upside down, and suspended from the ceiling. Compensation for the artist-contestants is “TBD after casting” (Casting Call for Artists, 2015) and they labour in front of a live audience-jury for a “prize”—either a wet painter’s palette or a tiny trophy. While Crash Gallery has understandably been characterized as “outlandish,” “slapstick” (Morgan-Feir, 2018), and an “absurd” and “bizarre” “caricature” of art and artists (Balzer, Morgan-Feir and Prata, 2015), we argue that the series may present a closer approximation of artists’ labour conditions than such phrases suggest. In our paper, we propose an alternative reading of the series that understands Crash Gallery as a surprisingly revealing depiction of “labor conditions normalized under neoliberalism” (Couldry, 3). Specifically, the challenges involve artists competing under tight deadlines, for questionable pay and symbolic prizes, all-the-while romanticizing precarious and uncomfortable—even dangerous—forms of labour. Moreover, the series depicts artists as ideal neoliberal workers: passionate, flexible, efficient, entrepreneurial, inexpensive, impermanent, disposable, able-bodied, amenable to surveillance, willingly blurring the boundaries between work and leisure, and individually shouldering risk and responsibility. Reality TV has been characterized as “the secret theater of neoliberalism” (Couldry, 2008), while artists are increasing “hailed as 'model entrepreneurs'” and “exemplars of the move away from stable notions of 'career' to more informal, insecure and discontinuous employment” (Gill and Pratt, 2013, 26). Combining academic literature on neoliberalism, reality TV, and artistic labour with an original analysis of the series and paratexts about the show, we suggest that Crash Gallery presents a surprisingly relevant portrait of artists’ labour under neoliberalism.

keywords: neoliberalism, reality TV, labour, precarity

Obvious truths about working in the arts: How the labour of racialized cultural workers is consumed by the white-dominant sector

• Marsya Maharani & Petrina Ng, Gendai / York University

Toxic and discriminatory labour practices continue to proliferate across our cultural institutions, despite a significant rise of newly reformed institutional mandates and public-facing exhibitions that purport commitments to decolonization, equity, solidarity, and care (Ware, 2020; McNamara, 2020; Black, 2020; etc). Further, the ways in which abuses of power manifest in the daily experiences of BIPOC arts workers are eerily similar from one organization to another. Based on dozens of informal interviews with racialized arts workers in entry-level or middle-management positions, our recent research charts the patterns of racism, toxic masculinity, and exploitation happening across Canada’s art institutions (Gendai, 2023). We use gossip as a methodology, centering storytelling’s capacity to “map the contours of oppression” (Garneau, 2019). With a focus on building trust within racialized and equity-seeking communities, we’ve sought to understand the ways that the toxicity of our workplaces continue to silence, undermine, gaslight, exclude, and diminish us.

This paper grounds our gossip in scholarship on systemic racism in cultural institutions. Sara Ahmed’s work on how the intricacies of power uphold the status quo is useful as a framework to better understand how white dominant culture continues to shape museums as workplaces. Citing case studies in Canada and the US, we demonstrate how the same patterns of institutional violence have repeated throughout history, interrupted by waves of racial reckoning (D’Souza 2020; Fatona, 2011; Gagnon 2000, 2002; Golden, 2015; etc). We close by offering potential strategies on how to stop this cycle, citing the ways in which Gendai refuses to be “professional,” and consumed by white institutions.

keywords: equity, white-dominant culture, anti-racism, collectivity, governance