If unpaid labor was a character would it be a worm?

If unpaid labor was a character would it be a worm?
By Caoife Power

1. I initially met with Chris at Preston Markets in the northern suburbs of Narrm (Melbourne) to discuss his ideas for the show. We talked about what work we were doing to finance our art careers, how many casual jobs/contracts we were holding up, and the essential elements that suck our bodies up into the centrifugal pull of art, class, and labor.

2. As we are talking I visualize this invisible labor as an earthworm. Working underground and often unnoticed, it is wonderfully disinterested by its higher operators who supposedly create a sense of aesthetic order above them. {insert worm}

3. As low-paid workers with honours degrees, our conversation becomes an abstracted interchange of struggle, anarchy, humour and a recognition of our collective solidarity. Ultimately, we both live in a circumstance that binds us to the material joy of making art. Chris then introduces this exhibition and its title, ‘No hard feelings’.

4.‘No hard feelings’ feels like an all too familiar kindness framework used to maintain an acceptable power dynamic over our repressed feelings.

‘No hard feelings’ is also a formalized layman term of rejection; a turn of phrase often received in the form of an email delivering sorry news. The rejection email then becomes a greater archive of persistence despite the odds: sorry on this occasion/there was a high number of applicants/we hope to see you in the future. Turning the words on their heads, Chris’ own vision allows this exhibition to find a sense of humour, to escape this f*cked classism, and create a method of navigating a collective underground art—one that sticks itself together with duct tape despite it all.

5. ‘No hard feelings’ is an exhibition curated by Christopher Doyle (Chris) that features the artists and arts workers ​​Sarah Murphy, Maddy Barker, Micheal McCafferty and Christopher Doyle.

The works by the artists conjoin in multifunctioning layers of holding- sticking-molding etc., to obtain a collaborative artwork that holds itself up. Or in more direct terms: ‘holding our shit together’ (or everything else will fall apart).
 

6. Ben Davis talks about the collective in his 9.5. Theses on Art and Class:
“On the other hand, because being working class involves being treated as an abstract, interchangeable source of labor, the working class’ ability to achieve its objectives much more depends on its ability to organize collectively. This is a form of resistance that is difficult to achieve within the sphere of the arts (all talk of an “artists strike” is satirical…).”

7. Resistance and resilience are real problems in the arts. Financial insecurity, paired with dogmatism and irreverent ideologies, generally perpetuates this feeling of subservience. For this reason, I think artists who actually make art with their hands are part of a working class that doesn’t exactly fit into a standardised system: capitol time + material = wealth gain.

8. My distracted vision continues to revisit the earthworm. Perhaps the worms are trying to remind us to see things differently? Or realising that the answer to our problems is somewhere beneath our feet…Or somewhere off the gallery walls and awkwardly collapsed.

9. At this market cafe drinking my iced latte, I asked Chris if he had anything else to add about the show. He mentioned reading a text he really liked that talked about class being more about time than money. And the benefit of writing a list because of its efficiency and ease to read.

10. Perhaps there is another kind of ‘artworld form’ that means we are able to make art (time + labor = skill). And despite its class dysfunctionality, at least there’s persistence.
I think there's some kind of courage in that.