The Artist As Producer, Quarry, Thread, Director, Writer, Orchestrator, Ethnographer, Choreographer, Poet...

Texts by Brook Andrew, Walter Benjamin, Heman Chong, Ekaterina Degot, Hal Foster, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Isabel Lewis, Adam Linder, Suhail Malik, Tara McDowell, Emily Pethick, Terry Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Tirdad Zolghadr
Does the way artists work today impact the ecology of art? Has the pluralism of art given way to a pluralism of roles that artists may occupy? What are the contemporary conditions of labor producing this new state of affairs, and what re-skilling does it ask of artists? These are some of the questions addressed in The Artist As, which comprises a number of contributions that seek to understand or explain the ways artists move through the world, and how that movement might necessitate other roles to pursue a project, a position, a politics, or a practice. For any given project, the artist may act as producer, quarry, thread, director, writer, orchestrator, ethnographer, choreographer, poet, archivist, forger, curator, and many other things first. Rather than self-identify solely as painters or sculptors, artists are now free to occupy specific roles temporarily, in what could be described as a kind of “occupational drag,” which is taken from Elizabeth Freeman’s term “temporal drag.”
Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne
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