The Aura of Labor: A Full Circle
As an artist I have been involved in the study and use of the multiple as a constructive element and its relationship to visual and industrial technologies as well as theoretical/scientific language. I feel closely tied to the slow revealing of process that has been an important language in the art making of the last two centuries, but I also understand myself as a part of the complications, some that seem problematic if not totally banal, that this revealing has generated. As a teacher of drawing, painting, printing and theory I am faced with providing some logic for learning to use the body, instead of new technology, to reproduce things that are more easily and quickly captured and produced digitally. Implicit in the disciplines that I teach is that "practice makes perfect" and that something personal/ psychological/expressive will be revealed through the movement from mind to body instead of mind to lens– one may already see how antithetical these ideas seem in the context of much contemporary art. These two practices have lead to a great deal of public discussion and personal study concerning labor, reproduction, catch phrases like "the obsessive", and the way these ideas connect to issues of representation (and sometimes become a kind of representation).

I am interested in discussing Labor as the most recent manifestation of Walter Benjamin's described "aura" of the artwork and some of the implications that this trajectory might present. There are important and contradictory impulses in the transference of power and quality from some prescribed aesthetic consensus to physical labor and its ties to the body (perhaps understood historically as the hand). There seems to be a covert Capitalistic and Democratic logic to placing value on human time and investment that, in its very existence as part of the vocabulary of contemporary art making, implies a distrust of the power of images and objects to express ideas; the inability of the artistic experience to fulfill our expectations; and, viewed through a particular lens, a disregard for the possibility of art, period. Also imbedded in the valuation of labor is a rationalizing of the creative territory that has always shaken the Capitalist/Democratic system because of its complication of use and necessity– art making being a focal point in discussions of the (excuse the word) post-modern, de-centered world of multiple truths and possibilities that runs so counter to the modernist tendencies of Capitalism to generate belief in unified progress.

I believe that a discussion of labor, as its variety and scope of definitions suggest, raises issues of larger systems at work in the making and distribution of images, information and objects. In noting “labor’s” connection to work and to human yield we must be aware that it stems from a distinctly Western ideology and hence from very particular connections between the discourses of time, space, effort, and progress. This is not to disregard existentialist, absurdist, or spiritual/enlightenment approaches to laborious repetition, only to suggest that most respond to traditional Western, Capitalist infrastructures. A complicated discussion of labor and its relation to contemporary art making eventually leads to some difficult but important possibilities. One scenario being that in all of our alternative/radical/creative/artistic intentions– the extension of personal and artistic freedom, the constant opening and enlargement of possibility, ever increasing inclusion in the artistic cannon, the breaking and deconstructing of boundaries that attempt to limit people and ideas– we have disallowed for the aesthetic stance, a cultural position, and a place from which to debate that has made art a useful tool to the variety of ideas for progress. By claiming all criticism and exclusion as hegemonic practice intended for the accumulation of power we are left with the pragmatic option of valuing labor and time. Time equaling value being the vary conditions of a “bourgeoisie," Capitalist system that artists, in particular, and art, in general, has purported to oppose. This seems like a complicated and fertile discussion, likely lacking in concrete answers, but filled with the potential for different forms of creating.