Why Call It Labor? comprises four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.
This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein MĂĽnchen from September 12 until November 22, 2020. It includes contributions that form a theoretical, literary, and poetic extension of exhibition bringing together international artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class.Â
Instead of passing off art as a model for a better politics, we wish to test it for the signatures, the markers and forms of these deeply antagonistic relations of which art itself is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language, as well as with class languages in art; with art’s room for maneuver as well as with its limits and restrictions, curatorially, in writing and debate.