Labor as Myth

by Tiana Reid

"Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America." —"The Black Worker," Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois

A wholehearted sentence on the significance of microaggressions. A land acknowledgement. A gallery attendant making minimum wage is assigned to a corner. A white critic reviews a black curator's exhibition as a "labor of love." A labor as another word for "love." A love as another word for "labor." A press release cites the comparability of black and indigenous labors. A wall text stresses the importance of invisible labor, the work of visibilizing labors pluralized on display here. A fight against The Institution subsumes other fights, becomes the struggle. An embourgeoised account of the drudgery of emotional labor. A rest becomes resistance.

If my jocose opening brought something to mind, perhaps you, too, have noticed a contemporary tendency (trend?) in the culture industry to assign almost everything to the category of labor. If everything is labor, then what is labor? The art world instrumentalizes variations of black labor as an aesthetic thematic in a way that occludes the material conditions in which labor is enacted. In this realm—somehow figured as a realm of freedom and necessity—labor looms large and yet, when it comes to the art institution itself, sometimes not at all. Laced with good intentions, labor-focused curation can sometimes present a distortion, archived through linguistic force or writing. Labor gets presented as myth.

A couple of years ago, I was assigned to write a catalogue essay about Tau Lewis's show that was on view at a downtown Manhattan gallery. I visited the exhibition several times, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. One day a friend said, while revelling in the splendor of the sculptural assemblages, that the show was about women's work. I raised an eyebrow with curiosity and surmised Lewis's art could have been about labor to the extent that its production obviously required labor but, at the moment, I could not see where labor figured in beyond that. Later, I did more research on the appearance of labor in her art and noticed writers and aesthetes describing it, like my friend had, in terms of women's labor and the gendered history of crafters and quilters. So where I thought labor had been deployed as small talk, as platitude, others had put some thought into it.

All the same, the matter-of-fact comment stuck with me to this day, because it was emblematic of the hazards of the laborification of everything; one person's off-the-cuff interpretation is radically different from how labor is deployed rhetorically by museums and cultural environments more broadly—not only on the level of scale but also power and profit. My continued frustration is that a self-assured yet vague stamp of labor not only evades the seductiveness of serious contemplation but also arrests an analysis of materially existing labor relations. When labor is taken as fantasy, that is, as an abstract composition that does psychological work, we miss out on contending with the true crisis of labor that overwhelms today's society.

A 2023¯24 exhibition, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), celebrated women's labor in painting but also crafts, manufacturing, embroidery, furniture, and more. The AGO exhibition text asked: "How do we address the women whose creative labour has gone unacknowledged?" In the conclusion to her review of the AGO exhibition, the Globe and Mail's visual art critic Kate Taylor had an answer: "The main message in Making Her Mark is that you have to look at the categories from a different angle to discover all kinds of women making all kinds of art." This is what reform brings: the critical conclusion, printed in Canada's national newspaper that uses "civility" to quash dissent, that "all kinds of women" are represented in an exhibition that centers cis white European women working during a historical period when slavery was entirely legal. The exhibition tried to address this dispossession:

While this exhibition focuses on the art and labour of European women between 1400 and 1800, the silent labour of Indigenous and enslaved people reverberates through many of these objects. European women made and designed the luxurious objects on view here, like coffee and tea services. These items held goods that enslaved labourers, often women, were forced to extract and harvest. The domestic rituals that became embedded in European society, like afternoon tea or sniffing tobacco, bear traces of colonial violence.

Colonial violence leaves more than a trace. The professed "identity politics" era of academia and the art world in the 1990s has led to a resurgence of revisionist curatorial practices that use identity to re-narrate art history, which often (in the style of Katy Hessel's 2023 book The Story of Art Without Men ) reifies the structure of the institution, favoring petty racial and gender inclusion and liberal representation over social dissent and political action.

Contemporary museums and cultural organizations celebrate art's changemaking powers but are complicit in exploitation of labour at their very institutions.
Inside the museum's thick walls: portraits and playgrounds and performances and wordplay /
Outside: profound inequalities sanctioned by the state /
Also inside the museum's thick walls: profound inequalities sanctioned by the state.
Though there is plenty of antiblackness, racism, gender discrimination, salary inequity, and deeply entrenched hierarchy, museums—more than mere engines of predictable institutional inequity—are also willful supporters of imperial power across the globe. The examples run amok. In late 2023, Palestinian-American artist Samia Halaby's exhibition was abruptly cancelled by Indiana University due to vague "security concerns," which attempted to paper over the repression of Palestinian resistance. The top US museums generally hold endowments that invest in weapons and fossil fuels. Consider even the ongoing discursive and legal battles over the Benin Bronzes, which Mati Diop addresses in her new feature film Dahomey (2024).

What is more infuriating is that the museum, like the neoliberal university, profits from exhibiting various artistic critiques of those "outside" conditions, thinning to dust any putative divide between in and out. The temperature is heightened by a growing labor movement: a generation of urban professionals, strapped by student debt, who became disillusioned by the pursuit of their intellectual, creative, or arts-administrative careers through a series of economic betrayals (if the precarious could find a job at all): low pay, bad treatment, toxic environment, abusive conditions. Galvanized by the difference between their lived conditions and the idealism of the wall text, workers across Turtle Island in NYC, Philadelphia, Portland (OR), Milwaukee, LA, and elsewhere have been in various stages of unionization, attempting to tilt the reins of power, moving from despotic board member control to collective power.

The cultural establishment often argues "politics" has nothing to do with their very formation and yet they ruthlessly extract from black artists, black art, black labor, black history, and black people. In 2019, I was commissioned by the New York Times to interview several black writers and artists for a dossier of as-told-tos. The piece lay dormant for months until the murder of George Floyd and the following uprisings, the largest and most widespread protests in US history. It was then, and only then, that my interviews were published. It seemed that it was then, and only then, that the blackness of these artists became serviceable to the elite media institution. It was not merely that I felt a personal shame at my intellectual labor being appropriated in such an insidious way. Or even that I felt responsible for having stewarded the words of artists on their own work into this mess. Rather, it was that the vitality of the uprising had been demeaned in the record and that I had played a part. And it further revealed the transparency of white liberalism, a lesson I felt I should have already learned.

I bring up not simply labor as such but labor politics because if art and culture are going to be important right now and tomorrow, if there is going to be a tomorrow, the interventions must happen not only on a discursive or personal level but also a material and collective one. The matters I have raised here—the capitalist appropriation of art—rub up against the counterinsurgencies of labor politics (that is, the noted antiblackness, transphobia, racisms, Zionisms, and schisms in unions past and present) where bureaucracy, corporate creed, cruelty, exploitation by bosses, and personal ambition often meet in the name of "labor" itself. To put it another way, people of conscience who produce and write about art need to consider where exactly they are in this struggle.

The problem isn't about any one individual. Or even one issue. How could it be?

Aesthetic ideology has long offered cover to totalitarian statehoods. Activists and organizers this century have given us the portmanteau "artwashing" to describe how art is used as a promotional tool to legitimize other forms of abuse, dispossession, and labor exploitation. I used to think that this predicament was a two-faced sort of discursive condition—structural denial, maybe—saying one thing and doing another (as seen in the moat between an exhibition's declared hopes and what sites that stage such exhibitions stand for) but now I see it as part of a necessary whole. Cultural labor, alongside what some have described as the end of the workers movement and others have praised as a union boom, has come to mediate that gap between discourse and action. Labor might also serve as an interruption. In Inclusion Ruse (2024), an art installation and manifesto about collection and exhibition conventions, #MuseumsAreNotNeutral co-producer La Tanya S. Autry invites you to ask yourself: "What forms of power exist where you are? / What are you 'included' in? Is it a predatory formation? Is it a formation of imperialism, colonialism, slavery? / [...] Is your participation being used to legitimize someone or something? / Are you being tokenized? Minimized?"

Let me tack on another question: What will come of all of these "good intentions"? They settle into a parody of labor. The good intentions come to provide cover for institutions that reproduce the violence of imperialism. This violence manifests when the art industry suggests that they have nothing really to do with the making and maintenance of oppression, that in their "giving voice" to marginalized people (already breadcrumbs), they only do what they can to highlight inequalities while leaving them largely intact. Zooming out now: How can we prevent critiques of violence from themselves becoming complicit in violence?

I have been deeply skeptical of the art world for some time, just as I am of academia, two places where I work—but I am now even more skeptical of how museums, departments, publications, administrations, and programs attempt to piecemeal or retrofit my intellectual labor to suit their obscene brands. Now what about you and your work? My introduction, which I hope you have not forgotten already, used indefinite articles ( a sentence, a critic, a labor, a fight ). My hope is that you define how you live these words and fill in the blanks between what they presuppose and how they are enacted.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University where she teaches black literature. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Bookforum, Dissent, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.