It is plainly our work that keeps us alive. And what is meant by “our” or “work” or “alive”?
What would it mean to make works that break with the compact of historicity? And consequently, of archival intelligibility?
—Simone White, “The Women Who Helped Me” (2024)
Dropout Piece is the hardest work I have ever done … It involved destruction (or at least complete understanding of) powerful emotional habits.
—Lee Lozano, Notebooks 1967-70 (2010)
I had a fantasy or make-believe colleague once who told me that all of his successes stemmed from his devotion to the company. While he doesn’t work with us anymore, that expression has remained with me, and even though I don’t judge commitment to mean the same as success, I think of the calendar as something that ought to be unladen. A congested schedule is a cause for concern, like that of Andy Sachs on the night of her boyfriend’s birthday, faced with the task of needing to be in two places at once.
Whether or not I believe this changes from day to day. But, paradoxically perhaps, the amount of relief I get out of seeing the line pass across an appointment on my phone is immense. The erasure of murkiness, ambiguities, that suggest an absence of commitment, née availability, constancy, from my life, has, over recent years, become my modus operandi. There’s this huge part of me that wants to be totally off the hook, till eventually it finds itself, without actually intending it, cancelling dates, hiding.
I am my own worst enemy.
I am trying to find a new way to work.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Sam Lipsyte’s obsession with exclusion, his stories of outsiders and misfits. In an interview he claims to see failure and “making it” as a part of a story we’ve told–and sold–ourselves as a culture, despite the fact that it’s largely bullshit. As Lipsyte explains, so much is determined by factors outside of one’s control, yet the myth, he notes, persists.
I’m starting to think that what Estelle Hoy said about the realms of annulment could also be said of commitment: either insouciance or (oddly) excessive labour will earn the accusation of an existential swindler.
Ghislaine Leung has written about her fantasy, her speculation, about being unlimited, and what unlimitedness might look like in a daily practice or exhibition space. In one passage from Bosses, a book about doubt and dependence, among other things, including the process of producing art, Leung says that a part of her believes that her best work will come to her when the material conditions of her situation coincide with her projection, when she is led to function in a way that makes it seem like she’s always the same.
‘It won’t work,’ she suggests, ‘if I don’t work 16 hours a day.’
The text contains a list of limits, limits such as: my financial ability, my need for stable employment, my commitment as a mother, my body, my political efficacy. It’s not difficult to imagine that my colleague, with the shame he’s felt about having other jobs, financial troubles, etc., is the heir to Leung’s projection.
But in another passage from Bosses Leung distinguishes between her ‘default way of seeing things’ and ‘my inability to be able to work on the same terms as that fantasy’ and finds there is no connection whatever between the two. Her fantasy has the capacity to pour everything into the practice. Limits are perceived as a hindrance. In reality she is committed to her child and committed to her art, and does not want to drop out or outsource either.
‘What I’m describing are not limits but life, other forms of life that are not your art-industrial life. I have dependents, friends, family, outside the parameter of my artist identity. Do I think of my daughter as a limitation? She’s not a limitation, she’s my life. I don’t want to – politically, emotionally, psychologically – see this as a limitation.’ She warns, ‘Whatever projection you have about how you should be working as an artist is definitely an internal one.’
During the time Leung was preparing her solo show Balances at Maxwell Graham in New York in 2022 she wrote an email to her gallerist. It said she was in a state of crisis, unable to work a fraction of the time assumed by societal models that preclude care work, but reluctant, unwilling, to sacrifice her work or her responsibilities: ‘I wish to do both art and care and in doing so change the terms of identity and labour within our industry.’
The central question she poses is, what if those dependencies could be turned around to become a resource for making artwork?
From Bosses:
‘I have a certain way of working with scores.’
Below that:
‘I write a score as a parameter of how a particular work gets shown. I produced this way of working specifically because I was interested in finding a mode of production that made space for a different kind of work, a different way of working for me – something that was generative, that I could do while letting life be what it actually is.’
{I instantly think of Cathy Wilkes, when she made Non Verbal in 2005 and wanted to move away from production, show a lack of making, or, at least, a different way of making, and succeeded. And for a different reason Pina Bausch, who pioneered the dance theatre movement in the second half of the twentieth century. An intentional lack of choreography means each iteration of a performance varies.}
Later on:
‘It gets the work out of sole authorship, it questions fixed objecthood or identity, because the identity of the work is always held in the question of interdependency.’
Over the past few years I’ve seen the scores resurface in various forms. Take, for instance, Browns, commissioned by Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany, for Leung’s 2021 exhibition Portraits: ‘All available walls painted in brown to standard picture-hanging height.’ Inevitably ‘available’ is where it got interesting. Apparently parsing the score prompted a kind of philosophical debate. At the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the score Holdings (‘An object that is no longer an artwork.’) was presented in its full edition of five. It populated the exhibition with materials from the Renaissance Society’s office and physical archives. ‘Fundamental to the production of alterity,’ we’re told, ‘must be the capability to produce the unknown, to generate, to de-create, to be unproductive.’ If she can’t give up the production altogether, she can at least shrink it.
Most recently it is in Commitments at Kunsthalle Basel, apparently inspired by what it means for an artist to invest in the production of an exhibition, the expectations of institutions, unsupportive labour conditions, and the boundaries she can set up against the unlimited self. Leung, whose practice is said to be inspired by her friend Ian White, rejoices in her limitations. Ian White:
What there is to be jubilant about is that limit is everyone’s material and it is always here. And this is where to start.
Leung’s Care, from 2024, illustrates the disparity between free childcare hours and the support she would need to cover working full time. Days, another wall-based painting from 2024, represents the division between preparation and pay. Evidently she is done with masking her situation.
Reading Jobs, 2024, in it: I am trying to locate her shame, fascinated with a kind of comparison, but so far the drive for stable employment prevails against any existential weight. This next image reminds me how frightened we are to lose face. Perhaps because it signals a risk has been taken.
The galleries are sparse, especially when Eight, 2024, and One Hundred and Seventy-Five, 2024, are deflated. But this sparseness is deliberate. Ed Atkins:
What is not here almost feels like a choice.
Surgery, 2024, reduces the volume of the final space by just one percent, the portion of Leung’s body that was removed via hysterectomy.
The morning after the show opened I returned to Bosses to glom on to something I’d read about Mary Robison. The American writer often rejected the label ‘minimalist’ in favour of Subtractionist, a move Leung, whose editorial process isn’t about having less but removing more, evidently agrees with: ‘I have made shows before that have used emptiness. … The removal was about power and it was violent.’ But in the process I was struck by something else entirely: ‘I stopped trying to keep a place in the system I thought I should be in.’
{Andy left Runway.} ◆
