Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro
The Impossible Artist
Contemporary artists in general face a very real and potentially crushing dilemma: the artist makes works that are intended to say something important, to make a difference, to create an affective, intellectual or emotional bond with a viewer.
But once the work leaves the studio, it tends to dissolve into a world of ‘stuff’, of an intolerable surplus of similar objects in the world. As if that wasn’t enough, the art system then creates systems that require them to compete in galleries, fairs, collections, and museums, in a fast-paced marketplace of financial, intellectual and reputational speculation.
For an artist with political convictions, these contradictions can become even more acute. Can and should the artist turn a blind eye to everything that happens once the work circulates in the art market? Is it OK to make objects of desire for a system with which you have strong ethical disagreements? Are good political intentions enough to isolate an artwork from the context in which it circulates? These questions have plagued artists throughout the 20th and 21st century. Many artists have realized that the well-intentioned contents of an artwork alone do not provide any real guarantee that it won’t become another trophy possession on someone’s wall. Others have looked beyond their individual artworks to create systems that generate resistance to or friction with a broader art system that they understand to be incompatible with their artistic and political intentions. Ana Amorim’s work is a beacon within this latter tradition; by committing herself to strict and binding conditions around the production of her work, she has been able to avoid many of the contradictions around ‘political’ art and live a life of remarkable artistic and ethical consistency.
Amorim’s art is framed by two key texts: Conceptual Decisions which set the terms for a decade of daily artistic practice (1988–1997) and The Art Contract which shaped the conditions under which her art could circulate from 2001–2017. This second text was signed “The Impossible Artist”, acknowledging the draconian and unfeasible terms she had set for herself (such as refusal to exhibit in any space that included corporate logos). In both texts she laid down very systematic and predictable rules for how her art would be made and, crucially, how it would be displayed. These two texts cover some three decades of intense production, marked for the first decade by the commitment to make maps at the end of every day which would accumulate to make large-scale calendar-like works, each year following a slightly different process. This map-making became its own discipline, finding multiple formal solutions, several of which are represented in this exhibition.
The idea of making art based on rules is not new in art, we can think of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s aspiration to make works over the telephone, On Kawara’s visual recording of the day’s date, Tehching Hsieh’s one-year performances, or Roman Opalka’s number counting. In all these cases, the following of a set routine creates a kind of ‘ground zero’ in which the artwork will materialize only through the actual labor involved in its making. The redundancy of the proposal is self-fulfilling, leaving little or no space for inspiration, moments of genius, or similar romantic ideas often associated with art making. What we are left with is a type of physical evidence of a real time that has passed, and the relentless commitment to an artistic project that could not have been realized in any other way.
Amorim’s texts point in two apparently opposite, but complementary, directions. On the one hand they point to a refusal to participate in systems she disapproves of, a turning away that recalls Herman Meville’s fictional character Bartelby and his catchphrase, “I would prefer not to.”1 On the other, unlike Bartelby, they lay out a deep commitment to undertake a very labor-intensive process within strict and transparent parameters, using language that recalls a legal contract. The contract is the basis of our legal system, and its origin from the Latin means to ‘draw together’ (con-trahere), to create a bond or connection.2 What Amorim’s contracts express is a strong desire to be tethered to her commitment to art making, to make public her wish to integrate art and life. This formal commitment to art making makes explicit the difference between producing art (for its own sake) and being an art producer (for a system that demands it).
Her refusal, her ‘I prefer not to’ gains special poignancy precisely because it coexists alongside such an impressive labor-intensive commitment to art processes. The refusal is not one of grandstanding and standing by to pass moral judgement, but instead a conscious decision taken as a consequence of the work itself. We know how much labor is involved in the work — it’s in the contract — but we also know that the labor resists being transformed into someone else’s value. In this case the contract serves not to maximize the value of a transaction and labor, but to constrain it within the ethical framework of the artist. Amorim doesn’t just denounce a system of capitalism she disagrees with, or even worse, simply illustrate its abuses (as so much ‘political’ art does), she instead uses the very building block of Capitalism, the legal contract, to set the terms of the production and the consumption of her labor. In this, her proposal is not only radical, but also subversive, logical, and not without humor.
The question of labor is central to Amorim’s work. Karl Marx famously struggled with artists, as their work did not follow the industrial logic of alienation of the worker to create excess value for the owner.3 Artistic labor is, in theory, self-fulfilling and non-alienated, and while it does have an associated market economy, it is not one based on efficiency or the mechanization of human work. Marx himself compared Milton writing Paradise Lost to a silkworm making silk: led by compulsion, not financial reward.4 By structuring her labor through a contract, and de-mystifying the process completely, Amorim creates a deliberate tension between the conditions of her labor, and its subsequent exploitation. If art labor is still a refuge of genuine human (non-alienated) activity, then it should not be allowed to circulate in venues that could compromise its dignity.
By going to the question of labor, and its ‘regulation’ through contract, Amorim has hit at the heart of the contemporary art system and proposed a system that, while ultimately unworkable, stands as a thoughtful form of resistance while avoiding any sense of victimhood.
Amorim let her Art Contract expire in 2017, and since then has let her works circulate more widely. While this was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the Quixotic nature of her extreme position, it did serve to protect the production of her work from any kind of market pressure. She was able to work in a glorious isolation that is visible in the evidence of the maps themselves. The day-to-day we see in these maps largely consists of grocery stores, childcare, walks, cafés, but also the support work she carried out on behalf of indigenous communities and the MST. What it notably has less of are gallery openings, art fairs, biennials, panel discussions, and all the events that constitute the ‘art world’ with its codes, consensuses and competition. We see that the contract was perhaps less an ideological statement on art and its circulation and more a form of protection, a personal code of conduct to make sure her art connected with the world, her world, and not just the art world.