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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
      • Last year I gave a workshop at the Dumbo Arts Center on the topic of the artist’s website under the rubric of “Tools for the 21st Century.” In preparation for the talk, I culled examples of disparate artists’ sites and downloaded open source website authoring tools to demonstrate to the Adobe-less. Before these technical demos — which came at the end, and were brief — I instructed the participants (who had paid for a workshop in how to make a website) to question if they even really wanted a website.

        The room was full of artists of all stripes expecting me to tell them how to make their websites. It seemed to me to be a real “just the facts ma’am” type of crowd; most appeared to be there because they had already presupposed that they needed a generic artists’ website. In front of them, microphone in hand, I felt a kinship to the late comedian Bill Hicks, who often attempted to disarm his expectant and fidgety crowd in this manner:

        There’s dick jokes comin’ up, please relax. Folks, here’s the deal. I editorialize for forty-five minutes, the last fifteen minutes we all pull our chutes and float down to dick joke island together.

        The short opinion that follows is not a manifesto or a proclamation. It’s not a research assignment, not a judgment or a complaint. This is not about the value of art workers: that is an entirely different and more significant inquiry. This is a questioning, a presentation of a type of alternative — and at the end, I’ll tell you how to make a dick-joke website.

        The apex of vocational success for a visual artist is supposed to be an unencumbered studio existence comprised of “making work” all day long (and, having used up my Bill Hicks ration for this piece, I’ll refrain from suggesting what it is we’re supposed to be doing after 5 pm). There’s a low hum among artists that tells us we should aspire to having studio-only work lives full of assistants, espresso makers, and plenty of storage.

        While this is obviously not a realistic goal for most, neither is it a desirable or productive model for every artist. Aside from the fact that many of us are concerned with collaboration, community, and dialogue with other artists in addition to making our own work for exhibition, there are conceptual advantages to not being in the studio forty hours per week. For one, being a human in the world — for me, at least — is one of the main requirements of being an artist. The hermetics of a studio/art-world-only existence sometimes prevent an engagement with the world of working people — and let’s be clear: studio work is labor that should be valued, but in many cases it is most championed when it is solitary, self-generated, and full-of-itself. There is no clock-punching going on in this equation.

        Another requirement of art-making is problem-solving. Working to solve other people’s problems — the problems of my employers, administrators, departments, students, peers, and colleagues — has made me more dexterous in solving my own when I am in my studio. I’m not certain that, as artists, we should spend all day, every day solving only our own problems alone.

        Perhaps I take this position because I am pessimistic or lack confidence, or maybe because the current economic prospects make it look nearly impossible for non-international-brand-name artists to sustain a studio-only model for some time. But I don’t think I’m selling artists short in saying this: our work should be valued, but the job description of an artist is so much more than to produce salable objects for consumption. Artists with complementary specialties — writing, administration, teaching, organizing, curating, cooking — can bring a non-corporate, unconventional, can-do (or can-figure-out-how-to-do) approach into a workplace. Ours is an aesthetic and critical outlook that can serve more than just our own needs within the culture at large. In return, the workplace can provide monetary sustenance, healthcare, and a sense of community and outside responsibility for us.

        It’s not for everyone, but in the current economy, artists who previously survived off of their work are going to have to (re)-enter the civilian workforce. Assuming they can find jobs, this turn should not be envisioned as a punishment or a reckoning for these artists, but as an opportunity/challenge to reposition themselves in relation to a limited and limiting vision of the artist as sole studio proprietor.

        Artwork can be made in between shifts at a job. In the best cases, the work itself — and not just one’s time management skills — is challenged by the fact that this outside employment exists. On the flipside, it is also ideal when the position is open to being filled by an artist and the workplace welcomes a productive, if alternative and sometimes selfish, member of the staff onto its rolls. Historically, artists have excelled at carving out workable situations, the goal usually being least amount of man-hours for most amount of cash. But a new model can also exist, one where an artist retains agency while also getting paid to do complementary work which is informed by the subtlety, strangeness, and sure-footed temperament of the artist’s persona.

        And, about that website:

        1. Open Dreamweaver. File > Document > New.

        2. Insert dick.

        Dedicated to Sara V.

        Sara Greenberger Rafferty is an artist based in Brooklyn. Images and information on her work can be found online at Rachel Uffner Gallery. Also see: Artists in the Workforce Report, W.A.G.E., Adrian Piper’s job description, NYTimes, My Website Worksheet.

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    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery