UC Irvine

Artists John Baldessari’s, Andrea Fraser’s and Fred Wilson’s works are typically understood as insisting on the avant-garde values associated with artistic autonomy, but they are also workers, with hybrid practices and professional identities that exceed such critical assessments. Baldessari has been a teacher as long as he has been an artist, mainly at Cal Arts, consciously knitting these roles together. Fraser collapses her work as a critic and theorist into scripted performances about the art world. Wilson works as a curator and educator to realize his institutionally-situated art projects that critique the social construction of race in museums. The practices these artists developed, and the organizations in which they have worked, are deeply implicated in the particular configuration of the postwar economy in the United States and are subject to historically specific social constructions of work.

I argue that in addition to the crises of authorship and artistic labor that artists confronted as a result of changing economic conditions in the postwar era, there was also a crisis of status and identity. Like the majority of middle-class workers who anxiously positioned themselves against manual and technical laborers vis-à-vis organizational or institutional hierarchies and new codes of professionalisms, Baldessari, Fraser, and Wilson developed practices and identifications that solved aesthetic problems as well as the problem of the worker’s prestige.

By examining scholarship about sociologies of work and art history with visual objects, I argue that these artists’ innovations required the same kinds of labor as the newest intellectual jobs in the broader American economy from the 1960s through the 1990s, and similarly positioned them as white-collar professionals. The stakes of this project include debates about the legacy of the avant-garde, the autonomy of art, and the identifications of artists who perform multiple and changing professionalisms. The positions Baldessari, Fraser and Wilson have occupied in the art world as workers index their identifications within the larger structure of the American economy in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Through these hybrid practices, they have produced themselves as professional artists by aligning with both avant-garde values and the economic values of American business.