Female Art Technicians: The Gendered Division of Labour in Contemporary Art Institutions

FEMALE ART TECHNICIANS The Gendered Division of Labour in Contemporary Art Institutions

Fanny Harle (2020) Royal College of Art Contemporary Art Practice Word count: 9500

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Contents

Prologue 4 Introduction 6 Methodology 7 What is the Gendered Division of Labour?

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Work, Labour: Overlapping or Separate Categories?

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Section One 13 Animal Laborens, Home Faber and the Craftsman

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The Value of Gendered Labour in Relation to Commodity

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Hardware and Software 18 Section Two 21 Experience as Knowledge 21 Conclusion 24 Bibliography 26

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With thanks to Josh Mcloughlin for his editing work and to Georgina Watson for her friendship (and her help in proofreading this).

This is dedicated to all the women who work in male-dominated fields.

Lead the way!

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Prologue My first experience of the gendered division of labour in the context of cultural institutions inspired me to pick up tools—drills, circular saws, routers—to learn how to use them and put these skills to work in exhibition building.1 This material and bodily knowledge then informed my creative practice, allowing me to call myself a ‘maker of things’ in the context of my work as a ‘cultural producer,’ meaning one engages in ‘the social processes involved in the generation and circulation of cultural forms, practices, values, and shared understandings’.2

I started working at Nottingham Contemporary as an undergraduate student in 2013 and was employed in various roles across the organisation until the end of 2018. During this time, I trained in woodwork in order to secure freelance work as a gallery technician. I was attracted to this form of (self-)employment for its higher wages and the hands-on nature of the work, which my office-based, administrative roles lacked. Until 2017, I was the only woman to have worked in this role since the gallery’s opening in 2009. During my years as an art technician, I struggled with an acute sense of workplace anxiety and found some physical and psychosocial aspects of the work very challenging.

My circumstances reflected a trend in the industry at large. The 2015 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey examined the race, ethnicity and gender characteristics of the workforce to promote a more accurate representation of America’s diverse population within museums and galleries. The findings show a sharp gender divide in the job category of ‘Preparators/Handlers’, of which nearly 80% of employees were male and just over 20% female.3 The report shows that many roles are highly gender-specific, with Facilities, Preparators/Handlers, Exhibition Design and Construction, heavily weighted towards males, whilst curating, administrative support and learning roles are dominated by women.4 Three years later, the same study found that ‘the gender composition of museum employees has hardly changed between 2015 and 2018. In 2018, museum staff were 61 percent female, 39 percent male, whereas in 2015 they were 59 percent female and 41 percent male’. The 2018 study focused on collecting data for intellectual leadership roles, which were recognised as ‘potential pathways to directorships’ because ‘while museums are staffed primarily by women, the most senior leadership position is still most likely to be held by men’.5 Due to this specific focus, there are no recent statistics available to demonstrate an im1 My first roles were office based, contributing to the planning and administration of exhibitions and public programmes. Exhibitions and public programmes departments are heavily staffed by women.

2 ‘Cultural production’ in Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, eds. A Dictionary of Media and Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 120. The notion ultimately has its origin in Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of the ‘culture industry’. See: Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).

3 Roger C. Schonfeld, Mariët Westermann, and Liam Sweeney, Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2015 (New York, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2015) <https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/ba/99/ba99e53a48d5-4038-80e1-66f9ba1c020e/awmf_museum_diversity_report_aamd_7-28-15.pdf> [accessed 19 July 2020].

4 See Figure 10 in Roger C. Schonfeld, Mariët Westermann, and Liam Sweeney, Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2015 (New York, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2015), 11.

5 Roger C. Schonfeld, Mariët Westermann, and Liam Sweeney, Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018 (New York: Ithaka S R, 2019) <https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/ba/99/ba99e53a-48d5-4038-80e1-66f9ba1c020e/ awmf_museum_diversity_report_aamd_7-28-15.pdf> [accessed 19 July 2020], 6–7.

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provement on the gender balance of roles in exhibition construction and art handling.

To date, no demographic survey has been conducted in the UK museum industry. However, a 2016 study commissioned by Arts Council England found that ‘The [UK museum] workforce lacks diversity with regard to gender, ethnicity, disability and education (as workers are very highly educated with the large majority over-qualified for their job role).’ The study highlighted gender as ‘the only demographic factor for which the picture looks less negative […] with a high proportion of women within the workforce’. However, the data revealed that ‘despite the greater number of women in the workforce, they are more likely to be earning less than the UK average salary than men’ who are ‘are slightly more likely to be in positions of management or organisational strategy […] which have the highest levels of salary within the sector’.6

These studies show that art institutions in the UK and US are highly gendered workplaces, with several roles dominated by one gender and a proven gender pay gap, with managerial and directorial roles weighted towards men. This undervaluing of women’s labour is even more extreme in the vast amount of unpaid work performed within the culture industry. As Australian curator Macushla Robinson highlights in her essay on women’s labour in the culture sector, ‘this [i.e. the art world’s] undervaluing of women’s work is more extreme than in many other aspects of Western society’.7 Robinson goes on to quote prominent German artist and writer Hito Steyerl, whose work explores notions of invisibility: ‘Free labour and rampant exploitation are the invisible dark matter that keeps the culture sector going’.8 Much of this ‘labour’, Robinson notes, is performed by women. The unpaid labour women expend working within the culture industry is largely unaccounted for because ‘it happens in the realm of interpersonal relationships’.9

It was in this gendered and exploitative environment that I began to ask myself: what are the underlying factors of my discomfort and anxiety in my role as an art technician? I often wondered why my fellow technicians or the art institutions employing us paid scant attention to the apparent underrepresentation of women in installations teams. These unanswered questions were the catalyst for me to take a sabbatical in 2018, supported by a-n The Artists Information Company’s Artist Bursary, during which I developed a network of fellow female practitioners. I documented my journey in a series of blog posts published on a-n’s website.10

6 Richard Naylor, Bronwyn McLean, and Caitlin Griffiths, Character Matters: Attitudes, behaviours and skills in the UK Museum Workforce (BOP Consulting with The Museum Consultancy, 2016), 2; 12; 22. <https://www. artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Museums%20Workforce%20ABS%20BOP%20Final%20Report.pdf> [accessed 19 July 2020].

7 Macushla Robinson, ‘Labours of Love: Women’s Labour as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter’, Runway: Australian Experimental Art (2013) <http://runway.org.au/labours-of-love-womens-labour-as-the-culture-sectorsinvisible-dark-matter/> [accessed 18 July 2020].

8 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy’, The Wretched of the Screen (New York: Sternberg Press, 2012), 92–102, 96. Cf. Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013).

9 Robinson, ‘Labours of Love’.

10 Effy Harle, ‘Women Art Technicians Unite!’, <https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/womxn-art-technicians-unite/> [accessed 15 April 2020].

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I was inspired to establish a local network in Nottingham by the work of various feminist initiatives, from small-scale self-organised groups in the UK, such as the Glasgow-based women’s welding collective Slaghammers and the Power Project based at the Livesey Exchange in London,11 to larger, overseas networks like Level It Women’s Art Handlers Network in the US12 and W*AH (Womxn Art Handlers), whose focus is to provide hands-on workshops for LGBTQIA+ people.13 Following their example, I co-founded FemTech, a collective of women working in the arts with an enthusiasm to develop the manual skills necessary for exhibition building and fabrication.14 In 2019, Laura Harris featured FemTech in her ‘Art + Museum Transparency’ report discussing the realities of work-based activism in the UK creative industry. The report highlights the importance of self-organised initiatives, like FemTech, in tandem with unionised workplace organising.15 This collective of hard-working women in the arts, including art technicians, artists and curators, recognise the value in coming together to foster a caring, co-working and mutually beneficial network as an antidote to workplace competition and precarious work conditions. FemTech grew out of my a-n supported research as a form of support structure and a practical solution to addressing the gendered division of exhibition construction.

Introduction While the importance of praxis in establishing peer-led groups and networking initiatives is clear, critical and theoretical analysis is necessary to critique the gendered division of labour.

This essay uses my particular experience of art institutions to explore the mechanics of the gendered division of labour. I will show that the workplace of the contemporary art institution functions within, generates and perpetuates ideologies of the gendered division of labour. I aim to answer the following question: how are normative gender roles and values recreated in the specific context of female art technicians working in the male-dominated field of production?

In the first part of this essay, I use the framework of cultural materialism to consider how capitalist and patriarchal ideology naturalises gender in the context of craftsmanship, production and in relation to tools in the workplace. I propose that the naturalisation of these categories in the context of work has a negative impact on the value of women’s work. My starting point is the gendering of the Marxist notion of the division of labour, as outlined by Iris Marion Young and Kathi Weeks. I use this gendering as a primary tool in my analysis, gendering notions of craftsmanship as defined by Richard Sennett and gendering notions of abstract labour as defined by 11 James Green and Maya Alvarado interviewed by Charlotte Fountaine, ‘Breaking Down the Barrier of Power Tools’ – Power Project, Another Side Cast <https://soundcloud.com/anothersidecast/ep-12-breaking-down-thebarrier-of-power-tools-power-project> [accessed 28 April 2020].

12 Level It Women’s Art Handlers Network, ‘About’ <https://www.levelit.network/about> [accessed 28 April 2020].

13 Sarah Hotchkiss, ‘Womxn* Art Handlers Carefully Deinstall Glass Ceiling of the Preparator World’, KQED, 25 October 2018. <https://www.kqed.org/arts/13843523/womxn-art-handlers-carefully-deinstall-the-glass-ceiling-of-the-preparator-world> [accessed 28 April 2020].

14 @femtechnottingham, Instagram. [16 April 2020] 15 Laura Harris, ‘Art + Museum Transparency’, Art Monthly, 429 (2019), 44.

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Marx. This highlights how notions of both work and craftsmanship are highly gendered in the context of the male-dominated field of exhibition production, and thus constitute significant barriers to female art technicians. I then offer an approach to examine the gendered meaning of tools in the workplace and rethink the relationship of technological elements of fixed capital and labour-force as set out by Marx. Drawing on Langdon Winner’s analysis of technology, I suggest and propose using the terms ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ to better understand the relationship between elements of fixed capital and workers as profoundly inflected by normative gender values.

In the second section of this essay, I examine and develop feminist phenomenology as applied by Iris Marion Young. I argue that whilst classical phenomenology supplies a toolkit for describing embodied experiences in general, the specifically gendered experienced of female art technicians means that feminist phenomenology in particular is the best way to make sense of and describe the gendered division of labour and to highlight the cultural sector as a site of gendered exploitation, as described in the Prologue. I highlight two examples of how feminist phenomenology has been used by contemporary cultural producers to describe the experience of the gendered division of labour in art-institutional contexts. The first is the research project and accompanying text Building As Body, conducted by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope (collectively known as Manual Labours) during a two-year residency programme at Nottingham Contemporary. The second is Document 0 by Chicana curator and cultural producer Teresa Cisneros, a result of an 18-months partnership between Cisneros and The Showroom.

Methodology My study requires different methodologies to examine different examples and inflections of the gendered division of labour. ‘Cultural materialism’ was first described by Raymond Williams as ‘a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of ‘arts’, as social uses of material means of production’.16 It examines historically ‘specific practices’ to understand how they relate to the ‘system of ideas and beliefs’ in which those ‘practices’ occur and how they express the ‘dominant meanings and values’ of their time.17 In this way, cultural materialism supplies a methodological toolkit for examining the ‘dominant meanings and values’ and ‘ideas and beliefs’ that produce and are produced in the context of the workplaces of contemporary art institutions.

Since I am also concerned with my experience of that context, and because that experience is gendered, I also adopt and develop feminist phenomenology to examine the lived experiences of the workers that are subjects of and to the ‘specific practices’ and gendered ‘productive processes’ of art institutions. In Edmund Husserl’s classic formulation, phenomenology is a method of describing the ‘structures’ and meanings of consciousness, conscious ‘experience’ itself, and the appearance of phenomena in consciousness, from the perspective of the one who experiences.18 16 Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: New Left Books, 1980), 243.

17 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 108–109.

18 Edmund Husserl, ‘The Structure of Intentionality’ in The Essential Husserl: Basic Writing in

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Phenomenology proceeds by: consider[ing] conscious experiences in the concrete fullness and entirety with which they figure in their concrete context […] It then becomes evident that every experience in the stream which our reflexion can lay hold on has its own essence open to intuition, a ‘content’ which can be considered in its singularity in and for itself.19 Phenomenology, then, offers a way of examining and describing ‘conscious experiences’ in their ‘concrete context’. However, because the experience of female art technicians (indeed, all experience) is profoundly shaped by gender values and meanings, classical Husserlian phenomenology can only take us so far. To account for and describe the ‘conscious experiences’ of women in the ‘concrete contexts’ of the gendered division of labour in the art-institutional workplace, I turn to feminist phenomenology and Iris Marion Young’s widely cited essay: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’.

Young gives an account of the various and often contradictory ways ‘feminine body comportment motility and spatiality’ are constructed, lived and expressed through movement.

Her approach is rooted in existential phenomenology and the ‘conviction’, drawn from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that ‘it is the ordinary purposive orientation of the body as a whole toward things and its environment which initially defines the relation of a subject to its world’.20 Young’s specifically feminist phenomenology ‘focus[es] upon the ways in which the feminine body frequently or typically conducts itself in such comportment or movement may be particularly revelatory of the structures of feminine existence’.21 Here the notion of ‘feminine existence’ denotes not ‘[Simone] de Beauvoir’s understanding’ of ‘a mysterious quality or essence which all women have by virtue of their being biologically female’ but ‘a set of structures and conditions which delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by the women themselves’.22 In an attempt to demystify women’s ‘remarkable difference in the manner of throwing’ and other task-oriented movements involving the body, Young argues persuasively that ‘habits of feminise body comportment’, far from natural, are normative. Gendered social constructions naturalise fragility, timidity, immobility, weakness, and inhibition as essentially feminine traits through the force of ‘habit’ and, to borrow from Butler, ‘repetition and […] ritual’. This shows how women’s culturally inscribed ‘bodily existence’ profoundly affects both women’s ‘conscious experience’ and ‘the self-consciousness of Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 86–112; Husserl, ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (Harper & Row, 1965), 122–129.

19 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2002), 116.

20 Iris Marion Young, ‘Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality’, Human Studies, 3.1 (1980), 137–56, 140. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).

21 Young, ‘Throwing Like A Girl’, 140.

22 Young, ‘Throwing Like A Girl’, 140. It is generally agreed that de Beauvoir ‘initiated [the] discussion on women’s lived experience’. See Sara Cohen Shabot and Christina Landry, eds. ‘The Water We Swim In: Why Feminist Phenomenology Today?’ in, Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 1–10, 1; and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Volume II: Lived Experience, trans.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2010).

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the feminine relation to her body’.23

For Young, the social constraints placed on girls and women manifest in the difficulty of projecting their full strength and capability toward achieving physical tasks that require force and muscular coordination. This disposition is intensified by the fact that opportunities for girls and women to practice and develop specific physical skills are rare. These limitations are imposed from a young age, as Young observes: ‘girl play is often more sedentary and enclosing than the play of boys’.24

Young identifies three contradictory modalities of feminine bodily existence: ambiguous transcendence, inhibited intentionality, and discontinuous unity, all of which are defined by the underlying tension between immanence and transcendence. The root of these contradictory modalities is ‘woman’s social existence as the object of the gaze of another’. Immanence and transcendence act on women’s bodies as opposing forces; the former anchoring the body in the now, the later pushing the body toward yonder. Young describes the risk of being trapped between these forces: ‘to the extent that feminine existence lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities’.25

Young’s work, however, is not without limitation. She uses gender as a binary category without elaborating on gender identity, with all its varied expressions and its relationship to sexuality. Although Young pegs her analysis to women situated in contemporary advanced industrial societies, she ultimately invokes an ahistorical gender essentialism and fails to incorporate the particularities of the ‘bodily existence’ of race, class and disability. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, Young’s analysis is tellingly ableist in its suggestion that women in sexist society are “physically handicapped”.26

Young also lacks a consideration of how capitalism subjugates women specifically through the gendered division of labour. This omission is surprising given Young’s emphasis on the gendered division of labour in her own work on the theoretical separation of patriarchy and capitalism within the Dual Systems Theory.27 The oversight in her feminist phenomenology might be explained by the studies she cites, most of which focus on the psychological development of younger or pre-adolescent children. This essay builds on Young by extending her analysis of early gender conditioning to the context of the workplace and placing it dialogue with the experience of the gendered division of labour.

Despite its shortcomings, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ remains a milestone in feminist phenomenology. Young’s critique of the contradictions of female embodied movement serves as a backdrop to the revision of ‘feminine’ body comportment, motility and spatiality. Young’s focus 23 Young, ‘Throwing Like A Girl’, 140–144.

24 Young, ‘Throwing Like A Girl’, 152.

25 Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, 143–148.

26 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’, National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 14:3 (2002), 1–32, 6. Cf. Jan Huebenthal, ‘Throwing Like a Girl: Dis/Ability and Embodiment in Feminist Theory’, 2014 <https://www.academia.edu/9731743/Throwing_Like_a_Girl_Dis_Ability_ and_Embodiment_in_Feminist_Theory_-_Jan_Huebenthal> [accessed 17 July 2020].

27 Iris Marion Young, ‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory’ In Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End, 1981), 43–69.

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on task-oriented body movement—as opposed to moving as a form of creative expression, like dancing—and the ‘confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things’ will allow me to describe bodily and functional movements in the occupational context.28 Young also provides a model of how to conduct feminist phenomenology: paying attention to and describing the way female experience, in particular female ‘bodily experience’, is shaped by and subject to ideological ideas and values that construct gender more broadly.

Taken together, then, feminist phenomenology and cultural materialism allow us to understand and describe both the ‘conscious experiences’ of female art technicians working in the male-dominated field of contemporary art exhibition production and the ideological values of ‘social practices’ in their ‘concrete contexts’.

What is the Gendered Division of Labour?

Before clarifying the gendered division of labour we must first ask: what is gender? Here, I adopt Judith Butler’s classic notions of gender and gender performativity. For Butler, masculinity and femininity—the characteristics, values and meanings associated with them—are not natural and innate but socially constructed. ‘Gender’, says Butler, ‘is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and naturalized’. Normative ideas of gender make certain ‘masculine and feminine’ traits seem ‘natural’ when, in fact, they are the effect of social relations and normative, that is, ideological values.29 Butler uses the notion of ‘performativity’ to describe how gender and gendered meanings are continually reinforced and ‘naturalized’: ‘Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body’.30 Even though gender appears as a natural, essential fact, ‘the appearance of substance is […] a performative accomplishment’. For Butler, there is no sense in speaking of the ‘body prior to its cultural inscription’ because the body is always-always ‘inscri[bed]’ by and in gender.31 Hence, throughout this essay, ‘gender’ refers to the socially constructed value system, ‘inscri[bed]’ on the body but is also profoundly constitutive of ideas and beliefs, that prescribes and reinforces certain normative meanings of masculinity and femininity. These meanings, in turn, buttress ideological conceptions of the difference between gendered subjects.

In The Problem With Work, Kathi Weeks develops a gendered theory of work. She begins by arguing that ‘work produces not just economic goods and services but also social and political subjects’, ‘not just income and capital, but disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members’. 32 Drawing on Louis Althusser, Weeks says gender is one of the main ways work produces or ‘interpellate[s]’ ‘social and political subjects’ and thus 28 Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, 140.

29 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 42.

30 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), xv; 163.

31 Butler, Gender Trouble, 166.

32 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011) 8–11.

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plays a central role in the exploitation of women’s labour-power.33 For Weeks, the workplace is a site of gendering: ‘work plays a significant role in both the production and reproduction of gendered identities and hierarchies: gender is re-created along with value.’34 The so-called ‘Dual Systems Theory’ applies a theoretical separation of patriarchy and capitalism. Heidi Hartmann suggests that while ‘patriarchal relations tend to bolster capitalism’, they are separate frameworks that have evolved through a partnership with each other.35 This separation is manifested in the distinction between the ‘public sphere’ of the workplace and domestic ‘private sphere’, both sites of feminist struggle. This separation has limited women’s struggle to the domain of the domestic, thus resulting in an internalised private struggle rather than a unified public one. Betty Friedan, reflecting on the ‘problem that has no name’ in the mid- twentieth-century US, said ‘The problem [of domestic labour] lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. […] Each suburban wife struggled with it alone’.36

Many attempts have been made by feminists to unify the struggle of domestic labour with the problem of waged labour. A focal point in this struggle is the argument around the value of women’s unpaid domestic labour, which has divided feminists since the 1960s. On the one hand, Silvia Federici argues that domestic labour should be absorbed by the system of wage labour through the wages-for-housework movement.37 On the other, Lise Vogel sees domestic labour as falling outside of the surplus-value creating logic of capitalism because ‘the products and services that result from this work are consumed directly and never reach the marketplace.

In Marxist terms, these products and services have use-value but no exchange-value.’38

The opposition between wages-for-housework and housework as ‘operating according to a distinct pre- or non-capitalist logic’, emblematises the problems precluding a unification Marxist and Feminist theory. To separate and silo these sites of subjugation—on the one hand, gendered patriarchal family relations of reproduction; on the other, capitalist relations of production—is to fail to address the shared history of these systems and how they work in tandem to produce, as Weeks puts it, ‘social and political subjects’. I argue that there is a link between the capitalist mechanism of division of labour as discussed by Marx and its patriarchal expression in the gendered division of labour. This link is critical to uncovering the inherent connection between capitalism and patriarchy and is the core argument behind Week’s elevation of the category of the gendered division of labour in her analysis of the capitalist structure of work.

Weeks follows Young in foregrounding the gendered division of labour as opposed to the totalising category of class to develop a materialist feminist critique of patriarchal capitalism.39 33 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 9; Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 85-127, passim.

34 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 9 35 Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Cambridge: South End Press, 1981), 1–42, 3.

36 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 1.

37 Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975) <https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/federici-wages-against-housework.pdf> [accessed 20 July 2020].

38 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (London: Brill, 2013), 17.

39 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work, 17–18.

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In Young’s view, such separation is itself a capitalist manoeuvre: ‘one of the defining characteristics of capitalism is the separation of productive activity from kinship relations and thereby the creation of two spheres of social life.’ Weeks points out that Young’s analysis of the gendered division of labour ‘enables a focus on gendered patterns of work ‘without assuming that all women in general or all women in a particular society have a common and unified situation’. 40 This element of differentiation in the definition of the gendered division of labour shares with cultural materialism a focus on the cultural and historical specificities of the object or phenomena observed. Throughout my analysis, I will employ the method of gendering, that is, reading ostensibly ungendered categories such as capitalist relations of production through the lens of gender in order to investigate the gendered division of labour.

Work, Labour: Overlapping or Separate Categories?

Hannah Ardent formulates the notion of the vita activa (active life), proposing a tripartite hierarchical scheme of human activity: labour, work, action. The lowest condition is represented by the solitary animal laborens, whose tireless labour tends to life’s necessities (i.e. reproductive labour). Next is homo faber ‘the builder of the world, […] whose whole value lies in the work performed upon [the materials of the world]’. Finally, Zoon Politikon, the highest human condition, is represented by political action.41 Arendt’s categorisation contrasts with Marxism, in which the category of labour, especially living labour, is of the highest importance. As Weeks notes, living labour is ‘conceived as a collective and creative human capacity harnessed by capital to the production of surplus value’ and thus is profoundly important to capitalist relations of production.42

Blurring the lines between work and labour, Arendt observes a number of alternative distinctions in the modern world to differentiate ‘between productive and unproductive labor, […] the differentiation between skilled and unskilled work, and, finally, outranking both because seemingly of more elementary significance, the division of all activities into manual and intellectual labor.’43 I will address these distinctions in section one, adopting and adapting Richard Sennett’s notion craftsmanship, which incorporates elements of manual and intellectual labour and the capitalist modifications of animal laborens and homo faber; unskilled and skilled labour.

Secondly, I will address notions of productivity and unproductivity by applying a gendered analysis of the Marxist notion of abstract labour—the common dominator for measuring human productivity—to analyse the gendered division of labour in the art-institutional workplace.

Weeks rejects both the Arendtian distinction between labour and work and the overarching Marxist category of living labour in favour of understanding work as a non-differentiated category, the meaning of which is detached from productivity. To that end, she ‘employ[s] a number of other distinctions’, including ‘the distinction between work time and non-work time, between work and life.’44 In my analysis, I adopt the classic Marxist definition of labour as most 40 41 42 43 44

Young, ‘Beyond the Unhappy Marriage’, 48. Cf. Weeks, The Problem With Work, 17.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 135–136.

Weeks, The Problem with Work, 14-15.

Arendt, The Human Condition, 85.

Weeks, The Problem with Work, 15.

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suited to examining the exploitation of living labour, but I consider Week’s ‘refusal to distinguish between work and labor’ as a fruitful approach to consider a world outside life as work.

Section One Animal Laborens, Homo Faber and the Craftsman In the prologue, I described the culture industry’s exploitation of women, namely the devaluation of their labour through the absorption of their unpaid labour and the industry-wide gender pay gap. In the first part of section one, I argue that the underrepresentation of women in exhibition fabrication serves to perpetuate ideas of the gendered division of labour. With reference to Arendt’s The Human Condition and Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, I highlight a lack of consideration for the gendered quality of skilled labour and its relationship to the division of labour.

Sennett offers a historical and materialist account of craftsmanship and the implications of an increasingly deskilled landscape of industrial production. He opens up a discourse about the inherent qualities of making as a human activity and hence its central role to humanity. At the core of his analysis, Sennett defines the intimate connection of ‘hand and head’ as a principal attribute that belongs to the realm of craftsmanship and which is central in the role of learning and practicing a skill.45 His two main arguments connect to this quality of craftsmanship: ‘I make two contentious arguments; first, that all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices; second, that technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination.’

Whilst the phrase ‘all skills’ carries a totalising suggestion, Sennett’s triangulation of ‘skill’, ‘technical understanding’ and ‘imagination’ furnishes a useful conception of embodied practice in the workplace.46 This bodily practice of repair and improvisation goes far beyond the particular social form of craftsmanship.

Sennett aims to expand the category of craftsmanship by dissolving Arendt’s division between Animal laborens and Homo faber and combining the attitudes and qualities of both under the umbrella of craftsmanship. As Sennett puts it, ‘Whereas Animal laborens is fixated in the question “How?” Homo faber asks “Why?”’. Sennett’s take is that ‘thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making’ and therefore Arendt’s separation of the categories of labour and work cannot hold.47 Sennett’s broad definition of craftsmanship encompasses a wide range of activities from carpentry to music making, cooking, and bringing up children. In calling into question the ‘fault lines dividing practice and theory, technique and expression, craftsman and artist, maker and user’, Sennett eliminates Arendt’s distinction between intellectual and manual labour and makes possible a gendered reading of craftsmanship. 48

However, Sennett fails to realise such a possibility, glossing over it in a single paragraph encompassing thousands of years: ‘From the earliest times, [when] weaving was a craft reserved for women that gave them respect in the public realm’ to ‘The development of classical science [that] contributed to the gendering of skill that produced the word craftsman as applying to 45 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 9.

46 Sennett, The Craftsman, 10.

47 Sennett, The Craftsman, 7.

48 Sennett, The Craftsman, 7; 10.

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men.’49 As a result, Sennett fails to integrate into his analysis the deep connection between specialisation in a given skill and the gendered division of labour. I argue that a gendered revision of craftsmanship is essential to removing historical obstacles to women gaining equal access to the toolkit of craftsmanship.

For Sennett, craftsmanship is a form of specialisation: the continuous development of skill through ‘knowledge gained in the hand through touch and movement’ and imagination.50 In this sense, it is in tension with a tendency of deskilling implied by the division of labour.

Arendt highlights the differentiation of unskilled and skilled labour as a modern phenomenon: Every activity requires a certain amount of skill, the activity of cleaning and cooking no less than the writing of a book or the building of a house. The distinction [between skilled and unskilled] does not apply to different activities but notes only certain stages and qualities within each of them. It could acquire a certain importance through the modern division of labor, where tasks formerly assigned to the young and inexperienced were frozen into lifelong occupations.51 For Arendt, the separation of ‘certain stages and qualities within each’ activity only ‘acquire[s] a certain importance through the modern division of labor’. Sennett overcomes this tension by putting the craftsman above the modern distinction of skilled and unskilled labour: ‘Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labour’. While Sennett’s broad definition of the craftsman is useful in eliminating the division between intellectual and manual labour, his exclusive attention to craftsmanship as a bastion of higher, embodied skill consciousness creates a problematic distinction between craftsmanship and unskilled and skilled labour. Whatever separation we allow between unskilled and skilled manual labour and craftsmanship, manual labour, in both its unskilled and skilled manifestations, contains a level of ‘intimate connection between hand and head’, which is not, as Sennett claims, the exclusive quality of craftsmanship.52

Both Sennett and Arendt lack an appreciation of the gendered aspects of the relationship between specialisation and the division of labour. Sennett’s practically gender-blind notion of craftsmanship and Arendt’s inattention to the specialization of work and the gendered division of labour precludes an examination of how these gendered categories are generated and perpetuated through the practice of cultural institutions and the implications for the women who work in them. As mentioned in the Prologue, contemporary art institutions exhibit a similar disregard for notions of the gendered division of labour. In addition to this, the workplace of contemporary art institutions also perpetuates traditional ideas of the male craftsman by maintaining a work environment dominated by men in the activity of exhibition fabrication.

In Section Two, I will demonstrate how feminist phenomenology has the potential to overcome these shortcomings by deriving analysis directly from the experience of the workers.

49 Sennett, The Craftsman, 23.

50 Sennett, The Craftsman, 10.

51 Arendt, The Human Condition, 90.

52 Sennett, The Craftsman, 7.

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The Value of Gendered Labour in Relation to the Commodity Previously, I observed the dynamics of the division of labour and specialisation. While I failed to find a gendered analysis of this particular dynamic, through the analysis of the distinction between different modes of labour (skilled-unskilled, intellectual-manual), Arendt highlights that this is a particular blind spot of Marx’s analysis itself: ‘It is interesting to note that the distinctions between skilled and unskilled and between intellectual and manual work play no role in either classical political economy or in Marx’s work.’53 However, when it comes to determining the value of work within the construct of wage labour, Marxism can offer some insight, particularly through the notions of use value and exchange value. These notions speak to the basic mechanics of capitalist exploitation in the context of nineteenth-century European working-classes in the manufacturing industries. What they can’t fully reveal, however, are the implications of the capitalist model of surplus value production in the particular context of art production. For that, I turn to Walter Benjamin, who applied Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to art objects to develop the theory of the ‘artwork as commodity’, characterised, on the one hand, by cult value grounded by ‘the concept of authenticity’ and, on the other, exhibition value connected to its redistribution.54 But the question is how the value of ‘art as commodity’ relates to the value of the labour involved in producing it, specifically to the value of the work of female art technicians.

As Gyorgy Markus notes:

In the Marxian analysis of commodity, “socially necessary labour time” determines the objective value of a commodity. Since it can only be applied to products which are socially reproducible, it has no meaning for genuine works of art’.55 In my analysis of abstract labour, I extend Markus’s thesis to the production of art to argue that ‘socially necessary labour time’ is not a helpful category in determining the value of labour in the gendered environment of exhibition production. And while works of art are unique commodities, in the context of wage labour, work involved in the production of unique cultural products like artworks and exhibitions is still governed by time pressures and is quantified according to the ‘socially necessary labour time’.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx describes ‘The Fetishism of Commodities And the Secret Thereof ’, highlighting the transcendent quality of commodities, whereby products surpass their simple use-value in the process of being circulated as commodities on the market: ‘This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commod-

53 Arendt, The Human Condition, 89.

54 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 26. <https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin. pdf> [accessed 21 July 2020], 3.

55 Gyorgy Markus, ‘Walter Benjamin or The Commodity as Phantasmagoria’, New German Critique, 83 (2001), 3–42, 3–4.

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ities.’56 One function of commodity fetishism within capitalism is to elide the exploitation that takes place in the process of creating surplus-value and capital, whereby the surplus value created by workers is alienated from them. Marx dedicates significant attention to unpacking the idea of labour-power as a commodity. He explains: ‘together with its own value, labour-power always adds to the product surplus-value, the embodiment of unpaid labour. This is continuously circulated by the finished product and converted into money just as are other elements of its value.’57 Here, Marx reveals one of the tricks of capitalism: ‘the money which the capitalist pays to the labourer for the use of his labour-power is nothing more or less than the form of the general equivalent for the means of subsistence required by the labourer.’58 The wages received in compensation for such value-creating labour are only ever sufficient, meaning the continuous need for the labourer to sell their labour-power within the construct of wage labour.

The value of ‘art as commodity’ goes through a unique transformation itself. Benjamin theorised the shift in the dual value of ‘art as commodity’ in the wake of the emergence of photography and film making as new sites of artistic production. For Benjamin, the value of art shifted from an emphasis on cult value rooted in the artwork’s authentic presence and supposed origin in the service of rites to the exhibition value of art, which depends on the distribution of an artwork.59 Benjamin traces back the historic process of the fluctuation these polar values of art to the oldest techniques of reproduction: ‘founding and stamping.’60 This tendency, brought on by the emerging technical possibilities for art’s reproduction, has reached an accelerated rate through the possibilities of digital reproduction.

While we can observe the polar values of cult value and exhibition value of artworks, this cannot be directly translated to market value as such. As Markus points out, artworks possess ‘no economic value in the proper sense, only an irrational, both economically and aesthetically accidental, price.’61 In the context of the art market, artwork value is measured in this ‘accidental […] price’.

But does this have any implications on the value of labour-power of a fabricator or art technician whose concrete labour contributes to the transformation of raw materials into works of art, exhibitions and other physical manifestations of art? Under the rule of wage labour, the roles of gallery technician and art fabricator are subject to the exploitative mechanics of wage labour, where the work is measured according to value of abstract labour as derived from ‘socially necessary labour time’. Even if the work of art which absorbed the technician or fabricator’s labour-power is not circulating within the art market as a commodity, and its value may not be translated into money, its value may be translated into the accumulation of cultural capital which will not necessarily benefit the art worker directly. It is against this background that the transaction between my employer and I or any other art technician takes place. In this context, 56 Markus, ‘The Commodity as Phantasmagoria’, 30.

57 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital, ed. by Friedrich Engels, First English edition of 1907, 2 vols (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1885), 115 <https://libcom.org/files/Capital-Volume-II. pdf> [accessed 20 July 2020] 58 Marx, Capital: II, 114.

59 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, 26.

60 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, 2.

61 Gyorgy Markus, ‘The Commodity as Phantasmagoria’, 4.

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the value of my labour-power is simply measured by the number of working days and hours.

Regardless of the specific task I perform during any given working day and the level of skill involved in that task, or the particular value of the artwork I work with, I am still paid based on the amount of time spent working.

Marx describes the dualistic nature of labour: ‘the equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour-power or human labour in the abstract.’62 In the specific context of institutional exhibition-building as a site of the gendered division of labour, the value of my concrete labour as produced by me, a subject actively self-identifying as female, is measured and quantified in homogenous units of abstract human labour. As Marx explains it, my labour is no longer an expression of different modalities of work: ‘The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour-power.’63 The flattening out of the individual’s labour-power into ‘definite masses of congealed labour-time’ is of significant importance to me because human labour-power in the abstract is quantified and measured based on a calculation of averages which negates differences of individual ability and other differentiating elements as part of the process of reducing skilled and semi-skilled labour to standard units of ‘homogenous congelations of undifferentiated labour.’64

Parallel to calculations of average labour-power is the setting of standard labour-time necessary for the production of any given commodity: ‘The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.’65 Let us assume that calculations of average labour-power and socially accepted labour-time happen simultaneously on multiple sites: on a national scale as well as on a smaller scale and within individual industries, companies, and single production facilities right down to the smallest units of the division of labour. The male-dominated work environment of contemporary exhibition production, where the measure of productivity is inherently biased, is just one of many cases where performing one’s supposed gender is a covert requirement of the tasks at hand and hence advantages or disadvantages people on different parts of the gender spectrum.

As far as abstract labour is derived from the average and ‘normal’ abilities of members of the collective working body, in a male-dominated work environment this will mean possessing ‘masculine’ as opposed to ‘feminine’ bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality, to adapt Young’s schema.66 In this context, the reduction of individual capacity and ability to abstract labour will have a negative impact on the work experience of bodies gendered female, non-binary, or TQIA+, because abstract labour-power is the marker within the process of quantifying all of 62 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital, ed. by Friedrich Engels, First English edition of 1887, 2 vols (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1887), 31 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf> [accessed 20 July 2020].

63 Marx, Capital: I, 9 64 Marx, Capital: I, 9–12.

65 Marx, Capital: I, 9.

66 Young, ‘Throwing like a Girl’, 137–56.

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our concrete labour. In the specific context of art and exhibition fabrication, where the characteristics or the job role include traditionally ‘masculine’ traits of the craftsman, ‘gender is put to work’, to borrow from Weeks: when, for example, workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalise impersonal interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients, or customers.67 As long as cultural institutions maintain a male-dominated workforce in the field of exhibition production, they perpetuate normative gender roles and values because ‘workers draw upon gendered codes and scripts’ to fulfil their roles. As far as workplace productivity is measured by the Marxist category of abstract labour which, in the context of the male-dominated workforce becomes a gendered category, it is gender-biased and implies the recreation and reinforcement of gender.

Hardware and Software In interrogating the gendered aspects of exhibition production, so far, I have examined two main factors: the gendered construct of craftsmanship and how this aspect of art production is measured by the gendered notion of abstract labour. Here, I will discuss the dynamics between ‘instruments of labour’ and subjects of labour (i.e. the workforce), by applying Langdon Winner’s analysis of technology to build on the Marxist categories of fixed and circulating capital in the context of gendered experience of labour.68 I suggest using the term ‘hardware’ to describe the technical apparatus of the workplace (such as power tools and machinery) and ‘software’ to denote the ability, skill and flexibility of temporary workers to adapt to the availability and suitability of tools. In my analysis, the ‘instruments of labour’ are hardware and the skill and flexibility of the ‘subjects of labour’ are software.

These terms refer more specifically to dynamics of technological landscapes, as I see workers’ interactions with and relationship to and through technology as a point of increased friction in the way the gendered experience is contextualised within the work environment.

In my experience, the activity of exhibition production within contemporary art institutions involves a daily confrontation, negotiation, and collaboration with technical elements of the hardware of a given workplace. The coping, productivity, development and dare I say, happiness of technicians at work will largely depend on their success to interact with the technological element of this environment. Within such a technical, skill-based workplace there is a requirement to possess physical making skills—or the ability to learn them on the job—which adds another layer of complication to a landscape already laden with underlying gender bias. Interacting with 67 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work, 9.

68 Langdon Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, 109.1 (1980), 121–36.

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technologies affects people on different parts of the gender spectrum very differently and, in my experience, favours cis-gendered men who feel secure enough within the highly competitive and precarious work environment to perform the qualities and behaviour patterns of the male expert or rather, in this case, a pseudo-tradesman69.

Capitalist production, as Marx sees it, is propped up by binaries: commodities are made up of their use-value and exchange value, and in turn, labour is expressed in the distinct forms of concrete and abstract labour. Similarly, when Marx talks about the sphere of production, he makes the following distinction: ‘between instruments of labour and subject of labour’. Through the labour-process these categories are ‘reflected in a new form: the distinction between fixed capital and circulating capital.’70 He describes the different value-creating potential of these separate elements of productive capital in detail: The circulating capital entering into the process of production transfers its entire value to the product and must, therefore, be continually replaced in kind by the sale of the product, if the process of production is to proceed without interruption. The fixed capital entering into the process of production transfers only a part of its value (the wear and tear) to the product and despite this wear and tear continues functioning in the process of production.71 ‘Wear and tear’ is an important factor here. In his account of the different ways fixed and circulating capital transfer value to the final product, Marx only applies wear and tear as a necessary consequence of production in relation to fixed capital. I would argue that wear and tear should also be used in relation to labour-power specifically as an indicator of the effects—psychological and physiological—arising from the exercise of one’s labour-power in the context of the abrasive environment of wage labour. The notion of wear and tear is especially relevant in the context of women working in male-dominated work environments. A Swedish study that compared physical and psychosocial working conditions and musculoskeletal symptoms between men and women working in gender-segregated workplaces concluded that ‘the level of low control and strain were more prevalent among women in male dominated workplaces’, meaning they experienced little or no ability to control their work conditions. A significantly higher proportion of women, compared to men, reported symptoms of psychological and physical strain as a result of their occupation.72 In considering how this applies to women working in the male-dominated field of exhibition building, we are confronted by a lack of quantitative evidence. As part 69 Although art technicians use a range of trade skills (like carpentry, painting & decorating, plastering etc.) in their job, they use these not in a specialised capacity. As people enter into the role of the art technician, they neither receive formal training, nor they are expected to have formal certificates (in the actual skills they are required to perform). Most freelance gallery technicians’ ticket to employment at the start of their career is a higher education qualification in an art-based subject and a bric-a-brac collection of DIY skills cobbled together as part of formal art education.

70 Marx, Capital: II, 95.

71 Marx, Capital: II, 109.

72 Lena Karlqvist, ‘Ergonomic Conditions and Health at Gender Segregated Workplaces’, The Ergonomics Open Journal, 5.1 (2012), 19–27.

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of my research project for A-N The Artist Information Company on the underrepresentation of women in the field, I developed a survey in collaboration with Art Tech Space. The survey remains unpublished as I chose to respond practically by forming FemTech, a female art technician collective. A draft of the survey is available online73 and outlines an approach to collecting data on female art technician’s work experiences, including: work security, work patterns, workplace training and development, and participation in professional community and experiences of gender-based workplace discrimination.

I also suggest the need for cultural materialist analysis of the technological elements (i.e. tools and machines) used within the workplace of contemporary art institutions to determine whether their specific histories—their origin, development and use—suggest a gendered quality to them. For such a study of tools and machines, I invoke the analytical framework developed

by Winner. He explores the interweaving of technology and society by theorising the notion of technological formations possessing political qualities. Winner’s contention is that ‘technical things have political qualities […] machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged [...] for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority.’ Through historical and contemporary examples of technological arrangements, Winner illustrates two distinct ways technologies can arrange and embody socio-political power structures. First, Winner describes ‘Technical Arrangements As Forms of Order’, whereby technical formations have been employed to solve particular social ‘problems’, ‘in which the invention, design, or arrangement of specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community.’74 The particular body of a building or campus could be discussed in this group, along with the arrangement of its technical facilities. The second, perhaps more ominous group of technologies ‘are cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships’, as in the case of a nuclear power plant, which requires a hierarchical power structure between its employees.75

An analysis of the technical arrangements of cultural institutions should take place within the first category. As Winner notes, once a piece of technology or system is set in place, ‘choices tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment, and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made.’76 This notion of fixity chimes with how Marx defines the varying degree of fixity in different elements of productive capital: ‘the elements of circulating capital are as permanently fixed in the process of production’ as opposed to ‘the elements of circulating capital thus fixed are continually renewed in kind.’77 Since the hardware and the system of exhibition production are already put in place by ‘material equipment, economic investment, and social habit’, these coordinates remain rigid. They require a large degree of flexibility from the workers who contin73 <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b3D8mbD9hzO_LKZJVzD9Df0fc0708osGcHtkFioqTlU/ edit#gid=0> [accessed 22 July 2020].

74 Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, 123–128.

75 Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, 123.

76 Winner, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, 127–128.

77 Marx, Capital: II, 116.

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uously need to adapt their skills to varying demands of different exhibition installs.

In order to further the study of the gendered environment of exhibition production a gendered analysis of history of the specific technical tools such as drills, saws and other equipment used as part of performing tasks is necessary in order to determine whether their specific histories have negative implications for female art technicians working in the male-dominated field of production. Winner’s framework is particularly suited for the cultural materialist analysis of the intersection of technology and society. In discussing the relationship between workers and technical elements of their work environment, I suggest the use of the terms software and hardware in developing on Marxist categories of ‘subjects of labour’ (as part of circulating capital) and ‘instruments of labour’ (part of fixed capital). I have also offered concrete tools to collect qualitative data from female art technicians in the form of a survey which I drafted.

Section Two Experience as Knowledge Young developed feminist phenomenology by fusing feminist theory and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology to examine the various and often contradictory ways ‘feminine body comportment’ is constructed, lived and expressed through movement. However, Young’s approach is not unique. Similar approaches have been used by radical feminism in the context of workplace organising since the 1960s and have recently been employed as a critical tool for the institutional critique of the contemporary arts industry.

Its mobilisation in the context of the gendered work environment of the postmodern office is documented by Michelle Murphy. She demonstrates this through the popularity of consciousness-raising groups that emerged in 1960s New York and gained prevalence by the women office workers’ movement. Murphy notes that ‘“Experience” was considered by radical feminists to be an alternate and more accurate source of knowledge about the status of women than already existent, male-produced knowledge, including scientific knowledge’.78 Consciousness-raising was used as a ‘discursive instrument’ which proved to be a ‘powerful technique for translating seemingly idiosyncratic personal events and emotions into a gender-based “experience”’.79 Despite offering a useful tool for unpicking the everyday experiences of the gendered experience of work, consciousness-raising universalised a certain experience and ‘abstracted a common womanness or class membership’.80 This ‘commonality’ flattens out the specificity of the ‘concrete experiences’ feminist phenomenology seeks to describe. But this problem can be addressed by employing it in combination with rigorous cultural materialist analysis of the socio-historical context and material environment of these “experiences”, as suggested throughout Section One.

Methods demonstrated by Murphy were adopted and applied with a creative licence by Manual Labours, a research project exploring physical and emotional relationships to work, 78 Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham: London: Duke University Press, 2006), 63.

79 Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome. 62.

80 Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome, 63–64.

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initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope in their residency project Building As Body at Nottingham Contemporary.81 Although they don’t explicitly invoke feminist phenomenology, several of their research questions demonstrate an affinity with the method: ‘How do aspects of the building (storage, lighting, air, access routes) make staff feel?’, ‘What are the gendered, female, reproductive aspects of the building and (why) are they taken for granted/forgotten/ exploited? What affects does this have on people’s experience of work?’82 In 2016–18, Manual Labours investigated the workplace of the gallery in collaboration with staff to ‘[look] into the ways in which buildings and bodies are fluid ecosystems which affect each other, mapping how the circulatory, digestive and social reproductive systems operate in the cultural institution.’83 Throughout the project, the metaphor of building as body provided a ‘productive poetry’ to ‘generate a critique of the building as body at all levels’.84 But, as they clarify in the introduction to their manual published alongside the project, the use of the metaphor of the building body: does not mean I [the building body] conform to the normative idea of a human body […] rather my body is assembled and contingent upon which parts of the body which are under investigation, and who is helping my exploration. This also means my gender can shift as my spaces are producing their own sexuality and gender.85 This differentiation from ‘the normative idea of a human body’ is not only crucial to developing a more nuanced application of notions of gender for the purpose of applying feminist phenomenology to institutional critique. It also moves beyond Young’s ableist approach to the human body and her universalism in considering normative notions of gender and sexuality.

Central to Manual Labours’ examination of the building as body was the process of identifying and mapping the organs of the building as a way to formulate an assessment of its operations and identify problematic areas of blockage or ailment. Utilising the complaining body of staff, Manual Labours conducted a ‘collective health assessment’ on the gallery’s building body, based on interviews and workshops with employees and workers. Staff members’ experiences were central to developing a diagnosis put up to highlight ‘the power relations that flow between the structure of the organisation and the job roles people work within’.86 The diagnosis also elaborated on the material and physical environment of the workplace, identifying highly problematic areas like the open plan office and storage areas that caused discomfort in the workers 81 Their approach has been ‘underpinned by feminist architectural theory, social reproduction theory and sick building theory, which have informed the collective methods’ they developed for the project.

Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards, Manual Labours Manual #4: Building As Body (London: Cultural Democracy Editions, 2018), 7.

82 Manual Labours, ‘About’ <http://www.manuallabours.co.uk/about/> [accessed 22 July 2020] 83 The Building As Body <http://www.manuallabours.co.uk/labour/commissions/the-building-as-a-body/> [accessed 22 July 2020] 84 Hope and Richards, Building As Body, 9.

85 Note that the handbook published alongside the project is written from the first-person perspective of the building body. See: Building As Body, 9.

86 Hope and Richards, Building As Body, 79. Such differentiation between employees and workers is important as many of the gallery’s employees, mostly Gallery Assistants are on casualised zero-hour contracts while other employees work under less precarious contracts.

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subjected to working in relation to them. As demonstrated through these examples, Manual Labours applied a combination of research methodologies including elements of feminist phenomenology to formulate nuanced institutional critique of the inner dynamics and structures of cultural institutions, although their findings and collective tools developed in the process are not limited to workplaces within the cultural industry. Building As Body provides a blueprint for examining the gendered structures of work form the starting point of experiences and as such lends itself as valuable resource to conducting a similar study in the context of female art technicians.

The findings of Building As Body were formulated by and from the experiences of non-managerial staff, ‘offer[ing] a perspective of an organisation from those looking up the hierarchy.’87 In Document 0, a publication concluding an 18-month partnership with The Showroom, curator Teresa Cisneros took a more authoritative approach to inflect her institutional critique to the context of her work with several UK arts organisations.88 As a ‘Latinx, a Chicana, a Mexican-American, a Woman of Colour, a Border Woman, an Ethnic Minority’, Cisneros is constantly instrumentalised as a source of ‘diversification’ by her work environment. In a series of fictionalised ‘scripts’, she reflects on the repeated patterns, conversations, and situations where structural racism is constantly reinforced and perpetuated, knowingly or unknowingly, by ‘the employees of the institution and the institutional habits.’ Illustrating her approach to her research, Cisneros explains: To gather information from curators, artists, administrators, colleagues and directors; I have conducted interviews and sat through meetings, I have bought coffees in exchange for conversations, and sometimes I have exchanged my skills in return for sharing personal experiences.89 These series of conversations and first-person accounts form the library of ‘experiences’ that inform Cisneros’ fictionalised Scripts, which ‘provide a vehicle to experience a situation somewhat objectively.’ In describing ‘conscious experiences’ in a ‘concrete’, albeit fictionalised context, Cisneros draws on elements of phenomenology. She explains her use of fictionalised scripts as a tool ‘to take others through a series of scripts to slowly unwrap the workings of the institution and how it performs in relation to bodies or subjects that don’t hold positions of power or find themselves as part of a majority.’90 In the particular context of her position as a ‘Woman of Colour’, Cisneros develops feminist phenomenology not only as a tool to articulate normative constructs of gender and sexuality but as a tool suitable to express complexities of intersectionality.

Through these two examples of research projects in the context of art institutions, I 87 Hope and Richards, Building As Body, 5.

88 Teresa Cisneros, Document 0 (London: The Show Room, 2018), 56. Cisneros deliberately doesn’t include names of institutions in her fictionalized Scripts as a way to demonstrate institutional racism on a structural level.

The document contains ‘A list of Places I have known’ with names of all cultural institutions Cisneros had worked with during the 18-months partnership with The Showroom.

Cisneros, Document 0, 56.

89 Cisneros, Document 0, 1–4.

90 Cisneros, Document 0, 5.

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have demonstrated progressive ways of developing feminist phenomenology, fine tuning it as a method suitable to express complex social and institutional behaviours and practices. Both of these projects provide research strategies, tools and approaches to study the ways in which the workplace of art institutions perpetuate normative gender roles and values in general and in the context of the experience of female art technicians in particular.

Conclusion This thesis has highlighted how cultural institutions recreate and reinforce normative gender roles and values through the gendered division of labour in the specific context of female art technicians working in the male-dominated field of exhibition production. My aim has been twofold: firstly to analyse the elements of the workplace and workplace activities that contribute to recreating normative gender roles and secondly examining and developing methods most suitable for further study on the subject. I achieved these goals by drawing on a number of theorists, particularly building on Kathi Weeks and Iris Marion Young to develop and refine a theory of the gendered division of labour, a concept which unifies seemingly separate fields of struggle against patriarchal and capitalist oppression. Weeks’ The Problem With Work provided the framework to my dissertation and the fulcrum to my argument was Weeks’ observation that ‘To say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated.’91 I defined the form of this gendering by applying Butler’s notion of gender performativity, whereby gender and gendered meanings are continually reinforced and ‘naturalized’ through ’repetition and ritual’.92 I have observed ‘naturalized’ notions of normative gender roles in the context of the prevalent practice of the gendered division of labour within contemporary art institutions. I have unpicked the overlapping categories of work and labour by looking at the opposing hierarchies of Ardent’s animal laborens and homo faber and Marx’s expanded category of living labour. I once again tuned to Weeks to undo this conceptual conundrum in her forward-thinking ‘refusal to distinguish between work and labor’ as a way to consider a world outside life as work.93

I used the concept of the gendered division of labour to re-read, that is, to gender Marxist theories of abstract labour to consider the value of gendered labour in the context of art production within the construct of wage labour. I used a similar approach to re-read Sennett’s notion of craftsmanship to highlight the gendered aspects of the relationship between specialization and the division of labour. I have formulated ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ as new terms to rethink the relationship between elements of fixed and circulating capital through the framework of Winner’s analysis of technology. Throughout this discussion I highlighted workers’ interactions with and relationship to and through technology as a way the gendered experience is contextualised within the work environment. The tension between skilled labourer and technology is one of crucial importance which needs further study to determine its gendered dimensions.94 I offer 91 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 9.

92 Butler, Gender Trouble, 163.

93 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 15.

94 See: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, ‘Post-work Imaginaries’ in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a

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a number of tools and methods to further examine the particular context of female art technicians, including a survey which I drafted for the purposes of collecting quantitative evidence to supplement a cultural materialist analysis of the gendered dimensions of the structures and objects of the workplace.

Finally, I demonstrated new ways to apply the feminist phenomenological methodology to consider workplace dynamics and institutional habits through the examples of two recent research projects; Manual Labours’ Building As Body and Teresa Cisneros’ Document 0, both operating in the contemporary art institutional context. Through these examples, I have offered a blueprint for further investigations about the lived experiences of female art technicians. In applying a combination of methodologies, I have demonstrated ways to develop a cultural materialist analysis of the structures and artefacts of the workplace in tandem with constructing an experience-based understanding through the application of feminist phenomenology.

World Without Work (London, New York: Verso, 2015) 107–127; and Sennett, ‘Machines’ in The Craftsman, 81–118.

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