Chisenhale Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in the UK and a new commission by Berlin-based artist, Maria Eichhorn. Highly responsive to context, Eichhorn’s work operates within the logic of institutional structures, enacting changes through precise and visually minimal gestures. Her ambitious, large-scale projects often take on the mechanics of legal, social and financial processes, making permanent interventions that evolve over time.
Following a site visit to Chisenhale in July 2015, which included a discussion with Chisenhale staff exploring their working lives, Eichhorn produced a two part work examining contemporary labour conditions. The exhibition began with a one-day symposium on Saturday 23 April, addressing ideas raised by the project. The symposium featured lectures by Isabell Lorey and Stewart Martin and was chaired by Andrea Phillips. The afternoon was devoted to a discussion with the audience, in which Eichhorn also participated.
At Eichhorn’s request, the gallery’s staff then withdrew their labour for the remaining five weeks of the exhibition. None of Chisenhale’s employees worked during this period and the gallery and office were closed, implementing leisure and ‘free time’ in the place of work. At the heart of the project was a belief in the importance of questioning work – of asking why, within our current political context, work is synonymous with production, and if, in fact, work can also consist of doing nothing. Eichhorn’s conceptual gesture was an implicit critique of institutional production and broader neo-liberal patterns of consumption, but it was also an artwork that dealt with ideas of displacement of the artist’s labour and of the artwork as work.
Eichhorn had previously made a number of works that presented an image of capital that called into question systems of value, including that of the artwork itself. For example for Documenta 11 in 2002, she established Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft, a public limited company in which she is the sole shareholder. Eichhorn stipulated that, contrary to the very purpose of the structure of the company, the capital that was initially invested must not appreciate in value.
Historical precedents for Eichhorn’s Chisenhale Gallery exhibition can be found in conceptual art and institutional critique, especially the activities of artists working in Europe and North American in the 1960s and ‘70s. For his Closed Gallery Piece, first shown at Art + Project, Amsterdam in 1969, Robert Barry exhibited only a notice on the gallery’s locked door, stating ‘For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.’ At Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1974, Michael Asher’s removal of the partition wall separating the gallery’s office from its exhibition space literally exposed the work going on behind the scenes. Eichhorn’s proposal operated a similar conceptual gesture, but here she foregrounded the work of the gallery’s staff through their absence.
As an artwork, Eichhorn’s gesture built upon the traditions of artistic withdrawal of labour established by the Art Workers’ Coalition and Art Strikes in New York in the 1970s, which enabled artists to understand and articulate their positions as cultural workers. It also resonated with contemporary debates led by organisations such as W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and recent discussions about theories of immaterial labour, whose concerns include the articulation of definitions of work remuneration. However, Eichhorn proposed the withdrawal of labour as an artwork – rather than withdrawing her own artistic labour – and focussed on the salaried employees of Chisenhale Gallery.
Eichhorn’s withdrawal of the staff’s labour can also be viewed in the context of the financial precarity of the organisation and of the sector. As a proposition focussed on non-production and non-participation, her work directly blocked the entrepreneurial business models and participatory engagement agendas that publicly funded organisations in the UK are encouraged to embrace. As such, it presented a challenging and timely examination of a complex set of questions around contemporary labour conditions and their implications within the context of art but also more widely.
In order to realise Eichhorn’s proposal and not compromise the ongoing operations of the organisation, Chisenhale Gallery’s staff were required to carefully unravel their working structure and address important issues relating to responsibility, accountability and commitment – from the financial security of the organisation to the distinction between ‘working’ and ‘personal’ lives within the artistic sphere. Eichhorn’s project was, ultimately, a consideration of how we assign value to time. She explored this by questioning how capital shapes life through labour, but also through a critique of the notion of free time and the binaries of work and leisure.
The work was constituted not in the empty gallery but in the time given to the staff and what they chose to do with it. This commission presented multiple opportunities for audience engagement, from attending the symposium to contributing to conversations that developed around the work. Eichhorn’s project directly confronted audience expectations of the artist, the artwork and the gallery. It was an artwork that existed as an idea in the public realm, operating by generating discourse, rather than through objects or images.
Chisenhale Gallery presented the first solo exhibition in the UK and a new commission by Berlin-based artist, Maria Eichhorn. Highly responsive to context, Eichhorn’s work operates within the logic of institutional structures, enacting changes through precise and visually minimal gestures. Her ambitious, large-scale projects often take on the mechanics of legal, social and financial processes, making permanent interventions that evolve over time.
Following a site visit to Chisenhale in July 2015, which included a discussion with Chisenhale staff exploring their working lives, Eichhorn produced a two part work examining contemporary labour conditions. The exhibition began with a one-day symposium on Saturday 23 April, addressing ideas raised by the project. The symposium featured lectures by Isabell Lorey and Stewart Martin and was chaired by Andrea Phillips. The afternoon was devoted to a discussion with the audience, in which Eichhorn also participated.
At Eichhorn’s request, the gallery’s staff then withdrew their labour for the remaining five weeks of the exhibition. None of Chisenhale’s employees worked during this period and the gallery and office were closed, implementing leisure and ‘free time’ in the place of work. At the heart of the project was a belief in the importance of questioning work – of asking why, within our current political context, work is synonymous with production, and if, in fact, work can also consist of doing nothing. Eichhorn’s conceptual gesture was an implicit critique of institutional production and broader neo-liberal patterns of consumption, but it was also an artwork that dealt with ideas of displacement of the artist’s labour and of the artwork as work.
Eichhorn had previously made a number of works that presented an image of capital that called into question systems of value, including that of the artwork itself. For example for Documenta 11 in 2002, she established Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft, a public limited company in which she is the sole shareholder. Eichhorn stipulated that, contrary to the very purpose of the structure of the company, the capital that was initially invested must not appreciate in value.
Historical precedents for Eichhorn’s Chisenhale Gallery exhibition can be found in conceptual art and institutional critique, especially the activities of artists working in Europe and North American in the 1960s and ‘70s. For his Closed Gallery Piece, first shown at Art + Project, Amsterdam in 1969, Robert Barry exhibited only a notice on the gallery’s locked door, stating ‘For the exhibition the gallery will be closed.’ At Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1974, Michael Asher’s removal of the partition wall separating the gallery’s office from its exhibition space literally exposed the work going on behind the scenes. Eichhorn’s proposal operated a similar conceptual gesture, but here she foregrounded the work of the gallery’s staff through their absence.
As an artwork, Eichhorn’s gesture built upon the traditions of artistic withdrawal of labour established by the Art Workers’ Coalition and Art Strikes in New York in the 1970s, which enabled artists to understand and articulate their positions as cultural workers. It also resonated with contemporary debates led by organisations such as W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and recent discussions about theories of immaterial labour, whose concerns include the articulation of definitions of work remuneration. However, Eichhorn proposed the withdrawal of labour as an artwork – rather than withdrawing her own artistic labour – and focussed on the salaried employees of Chisenhale Gallery.
Eichhorn’s withdrawal of the staff’s labour can also be viewed in the context of the financial precarity of the organisation and of the sector. As a proposition focussed on non-production and non-participation, her work directly blocked the entrepreneurial business models and participatory engagement agendas that publicly funded organisations in the UK are encouraged to embrace. As such, it presented a challenging and timely examination of a complex set of questions around contemporary labour conditions and their implications within the context of art but also more widely.
In order to realise Eichhorn’s proposal and not compromise the ongoing operations of the organisation, Chisenhale Gallery’s staff were required to carefully unravel their working structure and address important issues relating to responsibility, accountability and commitment – from the financial security of the organisation to the distinction between ‘working’ and ‘personal’ lives within the artistic sphere. Eichhorn’s project was, ultimately, a consideration of how we assign value to time. She explored this by questioning how capital shapes life through labour, but also through a critique of the notion of free time and the binaries of work and leisure.
The work was constituted not in the empty gallery but in the time given to the staff and what they chose to do with it. This commission presented multiple opportunities for audience engagement, from attending the symposium to contributing to conversations that developed around the work. Eichhorn’s project directly confronted audience expectations of the artist, the artwork and the gallery. It was an artwork that existed as an idea in the public realm, operating by generating discourse, rather than through objects or images.